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"Maybe I could have made the swim team after all," panted Stiles, conversationally. "I mean, I may not be winning any races, but clearly I can tread water with the best of them." All those morning swims across the lake at summer camp for half his childhood were only now revealed not to be tools of Satan. Go figure.
"Do you want a trophy?" It was actually comforting that Derek could still be sarcastic.
"For saving your ass again? Yeah, maybe."
It had already been an interminable amount of time. Stiles shifted his hold on Derek and tried to sink back into the zen sort of state he'd been in, where the mild burn in his lungs was distant and unimportant. He'd long ago given up trying to track the lizard person as it prowled around the pool area and sometimes up the walls. Instead he’d started thinking about how long he could keep Derek above water, and the answer was: not much longer, but even less if he focused on it.
"This isn't going to work forever," said Derek.
"Uh, no duh," said Stiles. "But I haven't gotten any better ideas yet, have you?"
"If I can just fight off the venom enough..."
"Yeah, and how long do you think that's going to take?" When there was no reply, Stiles said, "Yeah, that's what I thought."
"Shouldn't you be conserving your breath?"
Stiles felt like head-butting him in annoyance for that, since it was the only part of Derek’s body he'd feel at this point, but Derek's head was almost certainly harder than Stiles’, so it would probably backfire.
"Well, what else are we supposed to do while you regain feeling in your limbs? You should really be distracting me from the fact that I only exercise at practice, and even then only enough to make Coach stay off my case, so my ability to keep this up is contingent on not thinking too hard about it, do you feel me?"
Derek gave him a disapproving expression. Well, a more disapproving expression, which involved some next-level eyebrow furrowing.
"Okay, poor choice of words. My point still stands. Tell me a story or something. Tell me how you even know about monsters and shit."
"Werewolf," said Derek.
"Is what you are, yes. Which is clearly not a lizard thing. Is there ancient lore passed down through song or something? Do you belong to a supernatural email list? What? I want to know the things you know if this sort of shit is going to keep happening in this arguably no-longer-boring town."
"We had books," said Derek shortly. “And my mother knew how to deal with most stuff.”
"Did she ever have to deal with something like this before?" Stiles was intrigued and also felt a strange loss at the idea of all those books burned. The idea of the people burning alongside them was almost too much for him to think about, but the books were a handleable sort of sadness.
"I don't think so, but I was young, it's not like they would have told me. Mostly we had other werewolves visit or come for advice. Sometimes people came to ask Deaton questions."
"That must have been as frustrating then as it is now. Unless he's gotten more unforthcoming in his old age."
"Probably not possible," said Derek.
Stiles snorted, realized he'd snorted right next to Derek's ear and said, "Sorry dude." Then he continued, his brain still chugging along as he tried to ignore his body, “I wonder how come my dad never clued in. Or the last sheriff. How did you guys keep such a huge thing a secret in a town as small as this.”
“Everybody in the pack was family,” said Derek. Stiles was not going to dig in that direction.
“But did all the strange stuff happen in the woods, or what? Why was nothing attacking people at the high school?”
“An alpha with a big pack and a marked territory can defend it,” said Derek.
“That’s handy. How many people does it take to make a big pack?”
“I don’t know,” said Derek flatly. “I’ve never been an alpha before.”
“I never would have guessed!”
“Shut up.”
“How’s the paralysis coming along?”
“Still paralyzed.”
Stiles made a wordless noise of frustration that he quickly regretted because it took more breath than he really had.
"Maybe Scott will come looking for us?" Derek said.
Stiles scoffed and then immediately swallowed a bitter mouthful of pool water, leaving him sputtering and even more out of breath.
"Yeah, right," he said when he'd recovered. "I love the guy, but he’s probably making out with Allison right now and hasn't thought of us or our possible peril even once."
There was a heavy silence from Derek as he obviously considered the wisdom of Stiles' words.
“Okay,” gasped Stiles, “I don’t think I can do this much longer.” He eyed his cellphone over on the ledge, and didn’t see a lizard anywhere near it.
“No-no-no-no! Don’t even think about it!” said Derek.
“Could you just trust me this once? I’m the one keeping you alive, okay, have you noticed that?”
“And when the paralysis wears off,” Derek panted, “Who’s going to be able to fight that thing, you or me?”
That pissed Stiles off so much he almost Mike Tyson-ed Derek’s ear, which was the only thing he’d be able to reach at this proximity.
“Oh, so that’s why I’ve been holding you up for the last two hours?”
“You don’t trust me; I don’t trust you, but you need me to survive which is why you’re not letting me go.”
Stiles shoved him away and didn’t even feel a little bad about it, before swimming for his phone. If he had any energy to spare, he’d try to kick off his shoes and clothes, but he thought he might drown for real if he tried it.
He dialed, wondering if they had rice at home for his phone, if he lived, and it started to ring—thank you, Jesus!—
“Scott!”
—and Scott motherfucking hung up on him. And then, well, it was his phone or Derek, and though he might honestly like his phone a little better, he hadn’t spent two hours holding that heavy jerk up just for him to drown now.
Stiles was very relieved when Derek immediately started breathing as soon as his head was above water, because he was not at all sure of his ability to do chest compressions in a pool.
Then, thankfully, fifteen minutes later, Scott finally showed up and saved the day, which was typical—Stiles did the grunt work, Scott the heroics, and Derek was ungrateful to both of them. Stiles should get a trophy.
-
It was three days later that Stiles saw Derek again, this time at Stiles’ window. He had been thinking about Derek’s little rant about trust for that entire time, trying to pinpoint why Derek’s posturing and Scott’s stubbornness made him so mad.
He had no idea how long Derek had been crouched there, clinging to the outside of the window sill before Stiles caught a glimpse of a figure and spun in his chair, every muscle primed for flight despite how sore he was. Then he recognized the profile, just beyond the light from the window.
“This isn’t a drive-thru,” Stiles hissed. “Get in here before the neighbors see!” And then Derek was in his bedroom again, but at least he hadn’t been creepily laying in wait this time.
“I want the bestiary,” said Derek, no preamble, the second his feet were solidly on the floor. Stiles had half-expected something like this, mostly because it was what he would do.
“Okay,” said Stiles. “I can make you a copy. I probably have an extra usb drive somewhere around here.”
Derek looked taken aback at the easy way Stiles agreed, but he recovered quickly.
“Or you could just email it to me.”
It was Stiles’ turn to be shocked. “I didn’t even know you had an email address.”
“Everybody has an email address, Stiles,” said Derek.
“I didn’t know you had a computer.”
Derek rolled his eyes and strode toward Stiles, who was sitting at his desk actually getting homework done for once. He snatched up a pen and dragged Stiles’ open math notebook toward him to write [email protected]. His handwriting was surprisingly nice. The whole performance caused a little cognitive dissonance, not just at the existence of a gmail account, but the way Derek’s hand looked writing it, fine-boned fingers, forming neat letters, no hint of claw.
Stiles had had his arm wrapped around Derek for two hours, and looking at Derek’s hand brought the tactile experience back to him with a sudden and embarrassing force. He’d had been too distracted and scared to think about it much at the time, but apparently his brain had stored all the information for this later moment: the warmth and solidity of him; the faint smell of him, even mostly covered by the chlorine; the feel of his heart beat against Stiles’ chest, slow but there.
Stiles needed to restack all his textbooks immediately.
“Okay,” said Derek, setting down the pen and taking a step back.
“Okay.” Stiles stopped stacking his textbooks. “I’ll send it right now.”
They stared at each other and neither of them moved for a moment, until Derek gave him an unreadable look and turned to leave.
“Wait!” said Stiles. Derek turned back around.
“I do trust you,” he said. “Not a lot, because I mean, your beta hit me in the head with a piece of car, and your other betas keep acting like jerks who are hopped up on a power trip, but—I trust you to...help me, I guess.” Stiles ran a hand over his head. “I just wanted to say that. Because, you know, I didn’t hold you up in a pool for two hours so you would stand between me and the kanima.”
Derek didn’t appear to know what to say. He looked surprised.
“And I guess what I want to say is, you should trust me, too. We don’t have to be best friends forever, you don’t even have to like me. But you should trust me to help you—like I did even before the pool and like I’m doing now.” He hesitated. “And, just so you know, I don’t trust the Argents.”
The look was less surprised now and more...wondering, like Derek had never seen someone as strange as Stiles—but maybe, Stiles hoped—in a good way?
“I don’t trust people, in general,” said Derek, quiet and short. Then, “But I’ll try. With you.” And with that, he climbed, quick and agile, back out of Stiles’ window.
Stiles stared after him for a minute then shook himself. He typed in Derek’s email, compressed the Bestiary, and hit send. Then he went back to his homework, feeling unaccountably optimistic.