Chapter Text
The familiar growl of an old engine carried up the sharp slopes of the preserve to where Derek was shoveling loose soil and uprooted weeds to the downhill side of a tree. He stood up, stuck the shovel in the ground, and slapped dusty earth from where it had settled on his jeans and worn tee. He frowned at the new angle and shallow dip he’d cut above the struggling hackberry, not sure it would catch enough rainfall to make a difference—but the sound was distinctive. A slow inhale brought him the smell of the woods; mostly pine, but the hiking trail blocking water from the hackberry intruded with the smell of new gravel and people and dogs. He let out a sigh, picked up the shovel, and headed back toward the house at an easy run.
The early spring had been too dry, and though the preserve was always cooler than the town, it was unseasonably warm. More dust rose from the litter of moldering leaves to catch the sunlight in his wake, and some of the new green growth held a brittle edge. Derek’s feet fell lightly enough not to spook the squirrels, like he'd learned in his mother's footsteps. He loped past familiar trees and bounced off worn rocks, the way open and clear as a marked trail, until he made it to the line of unruly bushes overgrown where the trees used to meet the lawn.
The shovel had a hole in the handle that fit over a hook in the weathered tool shed. Derek hung it up and went for a bottle of water from the case on his dad’s potting bench. The plastic stretched tight over the back half of the case split easily under a claw, and he pulled a bottle free, drained it, put back the empty. After securing the shed’s outside latch, he turned toward the burned out, shot up, desolate ruin of his family’s home. Unshakeable habit pulled him across the yard and up the back steps, and he focused on the crunch of tires, creak of brakes, and poppy music out front as he ghosted around the charred hanging rafters and holes in the floor. He surfaced from the shadows in time to cross his arms at Stiles from the decaying front porch.
The lanky teenager was humming to himself and bobbing his head as he spilled out of his ancient Jeep, though not the song that had just been playing, or anything particularly recognizable as music. He looked up from straightening his twisted shirt and flannel and startled in the slightly spastic way that Derek always found a little gratifying. “Hey, Creeperwolf,” he said, waving.
Derek scowled, the only possible response.
Stiles grinned back, taking that as the friendly welcome it basically was. He ambled toward the house. “Why are you always here, dude? It’s depressing.”
Derek raised his eyebrows. “How else would you know where to find me?”
“Oh, good question, hmm, let’s see,” Stiles made a show of thinking about it, and Derek could almost hear his brain whir as he re-evaluated whether Derek could have figured out he’d been tracking his phone GPS for months. “How about the same way I find anybody else: with strings of text and emojis transmitted via cellular network to your portable phone,” he covered. Derek hid a smirk as Stiles bounded up the steps. His cell phone was in the back of the car, next to where Stiles had parked, but he always brought it at least that far.
“Plausible,” Derek said, “but I hate emoji.” He stepped back to make sure Stiles would follow into the shade of the porch, since he didn’t smell like sunscreen.
Stiles snorted. “Of course you do, you’re allergic to fun.” He turned and draped himself against one of the more stable posts, stretched to rest his head in a way that couldn’t be comfortable. Long fingers reached up to scratch behind his ear and smooth down his nape, an aggravating habit Stiles had developed as he let the rest of his hair get longer and started to spike it. The buzz cut growing out was—it was fine. It was longer. Stiles wasn’t going to stop messing with it. He was scanning the trees, so he didn’t notice Derek’s eyes dart away. “I’ll wear you down with exposure therapy,” he was saying. “It worked for getting you to at least reply to texts with texts like a normal person, instead of jumping in through a window five minutes later.”
Derek didn’t bother trying not to roll his eyes. It wasn’t just a pathological drive to make sure everyone was safe, if half the time they needed something anyway. And maybe it took him a while to get used to typing on a phone. So what. “As if you know anything about what normal people do,” he said.
“Expertise hard-won through observation as an outsider,” Stiles countered. The corners of his mouth were teasing toward another smile. “What are you doing today?”
“Upkeep.”
Stiles turned and gave him a disbelieving squint, followed by a deliberate look around the wreck of the house and abandoned yard. “Fine, whatever, top secret, I see how it is.”
Derek looked to the sky for patience, frowned when he was thwarted by the smoky beadboard of the porch roof. “What do you want, Stiles?”
Now he might have been embarrassed. “Uh.” He started to pick at his nail beds.
Derek waited him out. It seemed like Stiles was doing well, today, bright-eyed and not too jumpy.
“So you know I have this… spark.” Stiles intently examined his hands, snuck a look at Derek’s. Derek used one to gesture to get on with it.
“And I guess a lot of magic stuff depends on like, belief. Or whatever. The power of positive thinking.” His eyes were very fixed on his cuticles.
“Sure.” Derek waited more.
“But then some things also have to be really actually real to carry power, like, mountain ash barriers against supernatural people can’t be made with any random pile of dust.” His eyes met Derek’s. “Right?” His leg started to bounce, the toe of his shoe catching between the slats of the porch.
This was actually something Derek had thought about a lot, running at night, when he couldn’t sleep. Twelve people had died in the five-fold knot, and the darach had been following a well-worn path. “As far as you know, anyway,” he pointed out.
Stiles’s leg stopped like a switch had been hit. “What do you mean?”
“Where did that mountain ash come from?”
“Deaton.”
“Right,” Derek said. “Deaton had a jar with a label on it, and he said, ‘The stuff with this label can be used for these things.’” Derek watched Stiles’s eyes flash absurdly wide. “And you believed.”
Stiles’s mouth dropped open. “You paranoid bastard.” He sounded a little bit in awe.
Derek shrugged, looking away. “Maybe that’s what it is. Maybe that’s all it is. Maybe that’s what Deaton believes it is.”
“Maybe Deaton gets it from a guy who…” His arm flailed in a new direction. “Maybe a whole bunch of guys all believe the same things about the same stuff and that’s what makes it work!” He was turned toward Derek completely now, bouncing on his toes.
“Sure. Maybe at some point, enough cumulative belief makes anything true.” Derek’s brows drew together and his gaze drifted out to the trees. “Maybe someone out there can pick up any pile of dust and believe really hard that it’s mountain ash, and it will be.” His lips pressed together, twisted grimly. “Maybe that person could decide what mountain ash could do.”
“That would be cool as hell!” Stiles beamed, but his smile twisted as he thought it through. “And unbelievably terrifying, in the wrong hands. As if I don’t already have enough trouble telling what’s real.”
Derek flicked his eyes up at him and back down, evaluating stealthily. He rolled his shoulders and raised his head. “Well, we don’t know anything. Some stuff seems to work. Who can say why? There has to be a balance. That has to matter. Or one entitled asshole really good at lying to themselves could do anything.”
Stiles shot him a wry look. “I would say thanks for your vote of confidence, but I’m not sure that’s what that was,” he said. “Ugh. I need like, a whole pile of books.”
Derek sighed. “Just be careful about who’s telling you what. And why.”
Stiles nodded absently and leaned against the side of the house, where he started peeling off splinters of dry rot. “So uh. Good segue.” He took a deep breath, head bent toward where his fingers worried at the wood, and let out his next words in a rush of breath. “Do you think I could maybe practice magic on you?” He flinched hard at his own words, and Derek took a shocked step back, his hands out defensively. “WITH you, I mean with you. I just want to mess around with—oh my god. No.” His hands flew up to scrape through his hair. He screwed his eyes shut. “Would you help me. Practice. Using mountain ash.” He looked up, wincing, waiting to be thrown off the property. “Please?”
Derek’s arms eased down by increments. He kept his voice carefully free of inflection. “You want to train your spark.”
Stiles nodded frantically. “Yes! It’s like the one thing I can do in a fight, besides crash my Jeep or swing a bat. Barriers! Useful!” He gestured between them. “I can be useful.”
“CPR,” Derek said, but he caught Stiles’s quick grimace, still unreasonably guilty about breaking a few of Cora’s ribs while keeping her alive. He thought Stiles was underselling his usefulness, but he understood the need to know he’d done all he could. Still, he hesitated. “You want to train with me.”
“Well, Scott’s got,” Isaac, he didn’t say. “He’s busy.” That probably came out more bitter than Stiles had meant it to be. He and Derek avoided looking at each other. “Which is fine. In fact, it’s great. Other people are finally realizing how great Scott is and that is… great.” He glared into the trees. “He's being weird about it, anyway, he keeps telling me I don’t need to. Which, obviously I don't have to, I know that. But I can. So. I should.” He glanced back at Derek’s shoes. “But if I bug Deaton any more, I think he’s going to calmly murder me. Which means…” he aimed a finger-gun at Derek and clicked his tongue to fire.
Derek wondered how many of the other wolves he would have asked first, if Cora and Erica and Boyd had been closer than South America, if Jackson wasn’t in London. His hand came up to rub the center of his chest with his fingertips, where strong pack bonds should have felt like a warm hum beside his heart.
“Ah. I see how it is,” Derek almost joked. “Bottom of the barrel.” He inhaled the smells of ruin and char and musky burrows under the verandah, of creeping shoots and strangers, of gunpowder and old blood, mold and sick rot.
“I mean, you—”
“Okay,” he said, as if it was any choice. “Fine. But not here.” He turned abruptly and dropped off the end of the porch, striding toward the tree cover without waiting to see if Stiles followed.
“What, really?” After a moment of surprise or indecision, Stiles scrambled after him. “Wait!” he called. “Let me get the—” he leaned into the Jeep and dug a beat-up olive messenger bag out of the back. He threw it over his shoulder as he ran, tangled himself in the strap, unbalanced mid-step, almost fell, recovered with no grace whatsoever, and arrived panting to where Derek had stopped to let him catch up.
Derek’s eyebrows had climbed steadily through the performance, and he couldn’t hold back a smirk. “Whenever you’re ready.”
“Shut up,” Stiles groused, pulling the bag to hang more comfortably as they set out into the woods.
As soon as they were under even a sparse cover of oak and pines, Derek felt himself ease. He had been crossing through the area often enough since he got back that it was starting to feel like his own again. There was always an ache for what he should be able to smell and hear, the other hands and voices and heartbeats that had made up his home, but sometimes he’d get caught on a memory and look up to see Laura sneaking up on him or Josh turning back patiently, and it was something to almost smile at instead of salt in an open wound. Even when he’d walked the woods with his little pack of three it had been too raw, a punishment for himself as much as a responsibility. A territory this big was never meant to be a job for one person, and him not even an alpha, but he had his ghosts for company.
“Oh, fuck you, I gotta stop,” Stiles gasped as he collapsed halfway up the incline Derek had scaled on autopilot. Derek absolutely did not startle.
“Almost there,” he replied, a little guilty. They should probably circle around, actually. He jumped back down the steep slope landed on his feet in the loose scree next to where Stiles was panting on the ground.
“What, no flip?” Stiles taunted.
“I wouldn’t want to show off,” Derek said, flashing some teeth.
Stiles snorted. “That’s just unfair,” he said to his shoes.
Derek offered him a hand up, and he took it. He’d shed his outer shirt at some point and stuffed it in the bag, leaving him in a plain red tee that—with the way he usually dressed, you couldn’t see the shape of his shoulders, the wiry strength of his arms, so Derek was always unprepared for it. “Isn’t it lacrosse season? I feel like you should be better at this.”
That got Stiles moving, powered by indignation. “Hey, lay off, fragile human here,” he protested. “Besides, I’m built for speed, not stamina.” Derek’s eyebrow barely twitched. Stiles flushed a little and shoved him, but he was smiling. “Asshole.”
“C’mon, there’s a better way up this canyon,” Derek said. He picked his path more carefully this time and stayed aware of Stiles at his back, even though the slower pace meant he had some extra breath to complain with. It wasn’t too far; up the canyon ridge, where Stiles only slipped once, and through a dense knot of pines. Derek may have held some green branches aside to let them whip back at Stiles behind him, between casually ducking thrown pinecones without looking, until they broke out of the tree cover onto a grassy field that banked into a still pond, distant peaks rising behind it. Two roughhewn picnic tables were just around the curve of the shore, by an open-sided boathouse big enough for a few canoes.
“Hey, this is nice!” Stiles seemed surprised, as he swiveled in place to take in the site and the view. “I had no idea this was up here.” Derek watched him poke around and tried not to overlay bright memories over the weathered, lonely present.
“We’re pretty far from the trails,” he told Stiles. “It’s private property, you know.” He turned away to hide his smile and heard Stiles almost choke on a laugh. There was a sizeable boulder sitting in the open grass, and Derek pressed his hand to it before coming back to where Stiles had plopped on the ground and was rooting through his satchel. He wasn’t sure why Stiles hadn’t headed for the tables, but he didn’t mind. It was easier not to look at them.
“Okay. I’ve got… mountain ash, of course,” Stiles set a sturdy wide-mouthed plastic bottle on the ground next to him that was mostly full of dark powder, “and some stuff for testing.” Next on the grass was what looked like a sheet of tin flashing and a pane of plexiglass. A notebook was tossed out like an afterthought. Derek’s eyebrows inched up. “And sandwiches!” Stiles held two aloft triumphantly and grinned up at him.
“You’ve got a plan,” Derek observed.
“Of course,” Stiles said haughtily, waving a sandwich at Derek’s direction. “Turkey-bacon-avocado, on that bread with seeds and stuff.” Derek intercepted it and took a seat next to him, facing the lake. A little water bird was paddling around out on the lake, small, with black feathers.
He took a bite, after unwrapping and inspecting it. “This is good.”
“It’s a thank you sandwich,” Stiles said with his mouth full. “My dad got one with no bacon.”
“What are you thanking your dad for?”
“Not eating a hamburger,” Stiles said, joking and not-joking. “Also, we were talking about some of the cases in the kanima pile last night, and I might be groveling a little more for making him think I was a serial killer instead of telling him about werewolves.”
The little bird out there was lost, maybe, Derek thought; there used to be huge, noisy shoals of them, with calls echoing across the water. “It’s good that your dad knows. It’s better,” he told Stiles. Safer for everyone in the sheriff’s department, certainly, and his trust in Scott and Stiles was evidently enough to keep him from shooting the rest of them out of hand. Derek pointed at his own sandwich. “What if I had said no? Then this wouldn’t be a thank you sandwich.”
“A thanks-for-nothing sandwich,” Stiles snarked, “Or a consolation sandwich. For me.”
There was a distant splash, but he didn’t see any fish jumping when he looked up, just one set of quietly expanding ripples on the placid lake. The bird was gone, too, half a squawk barely echoing off the trees. Stiles reached into his bag and handed him a bottle of water just as Derek thought of the pallet in the shed. He drank, gave it back, and glanced over at the bag. “What else have you got in that thing?”
“First aid kit, lock picks, zip ties, Leatherman, little flashlight,” Stiles rattled off the list. It was like sometimes he waited until his mouth was full to talk.
“Perfect criminal starter kit.”
“It isn’t the tools that make you a criminal,” Stiles said with a smirk.
“Let me guess, is it using them to break the law?”
“Wrong again!” The smirk grew into a grin. “It’s getting caught. That’s why your criminal career was doomed, see, you got hauled in for things you don’t even do.”
“My dreams are dashed,” he said dryly. “You should add a lighter.”
“Oh! Yeah.” Stiles grabbed his notebook and opened it to the last page, dug around in the bag for a pen, and scribbled an addition to a list there, paused to chew on his pen, added another. “Whistle.”
“Put it on your keys.” Derek made a face. “Two. Make one a dog whistle.”
Stiles was delighted. “Really.”
“Not another word,” he warned, and balled up his trash.
Stiles kept smiling as he stuffed the rest of his sandwich in his mouth and stood up.
They set up the first circle just on the grass. “The control,” Stiles declared. He took a small handful of powder, closed his eyes in concentration, and dropped it around himself, arm outstretched. The slight breeze that picked up when he started didn’t seem to disturb its fall. Stiles opened his eyes and found Derek watching him. “Okay, try it.”
Derek reached out to touch the back of his hand to the air above the wobbly line of ash. There was resistance, with a little bit of give, and a faint oily shimmer. “Feels like jello,” he decided.
“Fuck you, buddy! I do not make jello barriers. Try to get through it.”
He increased the pressure gradually. A slight humming became audible, like distant static, and harsh streaks of light shot from the iridescence around his hands, at the points of contact. The jello feeling stayed, but he couldn’t push any further. It hurt, too, like the jello was hot and caustic. His eyes flared blue and he backed off. “Hmm.”
Stiles watched avidly. “Is that all you got? Pull me out or something,” he challenged. Derek let a slow, predatory smile show his fangs drop. Stiles took a step back. “Uh, keeping in mind—” Derek lunged, Stiles flinched, the barrier flashed, and Derek was thrown back across the clearing, though he landed on his feet.
“That went over the line a few inches,” he noted. Stiles’s heart rate was still all over the place, so he grinned again. “It seemed to solidify when you were afraid.”
“I wasn’t afraid!”
Derek quirked an eyebrow.
“I may have had a perfectly healthy involuntary startle response.”
Derek gave him both eyebrows.
“Yeah, yeah, big bad wolf,” Stiles grumbled. As they were talking, Derek had nonchalantly wandered next to Stiles on the circle. His arm snapped out. He grabbed Stiles by the shirt, tossed him easily from the ring, and Stiles sprawled ungracefully on the grass.
“You lost your focus,” he admonished. Stiles rolled onto his back and put his hands over his face, groaning. His shirt may have ridden up a little bit, but Derek looked away.
They spent a while repeating their results so far with Stiles outside the circle, and they determined that even when the barrier was weak, Derek could wave an arm over the line but not step over it. Stiles made notes. “It’s not science unless you write it down, right,” he said.
“It’s literally magic, Stiles.”
“Sure. Magic science.”
Stiles spilled another careful circle closer to the lake so that the line of ash lay across grass, sand, a flat rock, a sheet of notebook paper, and the metal and plastic squares Stiles had carried up in his bag. Derek walked around it, poking for weaknesses. As far as they could tell, the barrier was uniform no matter what it crossed, but that gave them the idea to try to find the top of the wall.
“I think it’s softer up here,” Derek said, probing the barrier as high as he could reach. He crouched and leaped in one smooth motion to get another couple meters, and his hand waved over the line almost freely. He landed and looked at Stiles reproachfully; his mouth had fallen open as he stared blankly from inside the circle. “Stiles.”
Stiles shook himself. “What? Yes. Okay. Um.” He remembered what they were doing. “Let’s try like, high, medium, low, see if there’s any difference. I’ll uh. I’m just gonna shut my eyes.”
Derek glanced to the sky and sighed. “Okay.” He tested at shoulder height first, jumped up, crouched down, checked the first spot again. “It’s stronger near the mountain ash.”
Stiles hummed. “That’s probably good, or werewolves on planes might like, smack into barriers on the ground,” he said.
Derek winced. “Wait. What if there were a circle on the plane?”
“Oh!” Stiles lit up. “Try to move it!”
Derek took the edge of the one-foot square of tin sheet, and carefully pulled it towards him, flat on the grass. They both watched in fascination as the line slid easily across the material to keep its place in the circle. Lifting the square met the same resistance as though he was trying to push through. He finally slid the tin all the way out from underneath the ash, only a few flecks of powder out of place as the line settled in the grass. Derek poked the barrier again; it held. They looked at each other. “Write that down,” Derek said.
Stiles grinned, dove for the notebook, and scribbled for a bit, only stopping to chew on his pen thoughtfully and look out into the trees. He squinted, looked down at his hands, back into the branches at the edge of the field. “Hey Derek,” he said, too calmly. “Do you see a bunch of birds over there?”
Derek was immediately on edge from his tone, so he shot a sharp glance at Stiles before following his line of sight. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “Crows. Looks like seven.”
Stiles released a controlled breath. “Crows. Totally normal? Not like—” Derek nodded. “Great. Okay. Cool.”
Derek watched them as they sat calmly, occasionally ruffling their feathers, until he dug some of their trash out of Stiles’s bag and lobbed the heel of his sandwich toward their tree. The crows blinked and cocked their heads at him, considered carefully, squawked at each other, and fluttered down to investigate the offering. Stiles made no move to get up again, instead staring at his notebook and his hands. “Hey,” Derek ventured, and touched his sleeve. “It’s been a good day, hasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Stiles said, sounding tired. “It was.”
Derek sat with him for a minute, then knocked their shoulders together. “C’mon. Let’s clean up. Isn’t your dad home soon?”
Stiles shook his head. “Nah, he’s got a double.” He stood, broke both ash lines with a sharp separation of his hands, considered his now half-empty bottle of mountain ash unhappily, and started carefully picking up powder and pouring it back in. Derek went to help, holding the bottle while Stiles poured, but he flinched away at the inevitable spill, shaking out his fingers. “Wait, did that hurt?” Stiles asked, reaching to grab it.
Derek grimaced and held it out. The skin was already deep red, and as they watched, a blister formed, swelled, and popped messily. Stiles gagged. “Ugh, so gross.”
“You asked to see it,” Derek grumbled, smoothing over the healing skin with his thumb. It stayed pink and shiny, nerves raw under the surface, and he got a little lost in the contrast between the sensitive new growth and the deadened tan skin around it. “I felt like I had sores in my mouth for a week, after Gerard,” he said without meaning to.
Stiles nudged the toes of their shoes together. “That might not have been the mountain ash. Maybe naturally toxic blood, because he was a festering cesspit of a person. Or like. If the shape you take reflects the person that you are, he was a sludge monster.”
Derek made a fist, flexed into claws, relaxed to blunt fingernails, and let his hand drop. “We should be more careful. Don’t spread it around the whole field.”
“I’ll bring a tarp or something to keep up here, next time,” Stiles said, head cocked to the side as he studied Derek’s face.
Derek nodded, looked away, couldn’t help the corner of his mouth turning up. Next time.
They took a different way back to the cars, longer, walking slow, and went for burgers after, since Stiles was hungry again when Derek asked, and neither of them had anywhere more important to be.
That night Derek was at home in bed, showered, comfortable, stretched out next to a book in front of a bank of dark windows, texting with Cora, when a message from Stiles came in.
After school Wednesday? Followed by a pine tree, pine tree, circle, pine tree, hamburger. Derek figured Stiles must have a busy week, if he was trying to plan ahead, for once, instead of just showing up when he was bored.
He didn’t let himself think about it too much; he sent back a thumbs-up emoji.