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Honestly, it’s a clusterfuck. The whole thing is a clusterfuck. Stiles’ leg jiggles uncontrollably as he sits in Deaton’s surgery and watches Isaac breathe, recovering slowly from the wolfsbane-laced Mace Lydia had hit him with. Scott and Lydia and Derek are still all shouting at each other about everyone else’s plan being terrible, even though Scott wasn’t even at the school and they hadn’t known Derek was alive to plan anything until he showed up red-eyed in the dark.
Isaac stirs, then sits up and pulls his knees in, comatose to alertly defensive in no time flat.
“Chill, dude,” Stiles says, watching him but not making any move to approach. He has totally learned his lesson about being within arms reach of freaked-out werewolves. “You’re at Deaton’s, the shouting is all people who like us, and Gerard is long gone. Again.”
Lydia slams open the door to the surgery. “Come on, Stiles, we’re going. They don’t think they need brains or magic to catch the septuagenarian psychopath, so we won’t force it on them.”
She stalks out, and Stiles is kind of torn - he wants to see what they concluded, and make a new plan, and kind of shout at them collectively for not talking and then at Derek specifically for faking his own death. But he also wants to not be murdered by Lydia for making her wait by his Jeep in an alley in the middle of the night. He rolls his eyes hard and lopes after her. She glares at him from the passenger side. “I thought you were taking care of the werewolf side of things.”
He shrugs helplessly. “I told Scott to stay away from the school, and I figured he’d tell the Halettes or Allison and she’d have told her dad and her dad would have grocery shopped menacingly at them or something and told them to stay away.”
“Grocery shopped menacingly,” she says incredulously.
Stiles holds the wheel religiously at ten and two and stares at the road. “When you have been threatened weirdly by an Argent, you’ll understand. Gerard and I had a nice chat about art before he beat me up, and I heard Chris once got dessert at Scott. Why am I supposed to wrangle all the werewolves, anyway? You have a phone.”
Lydia smiles sharply and crosses her ankles. “Because, Stiles, I refuse to speak to any of them until they kill Peter again.”
“Ugh, fine.” He parks in his own driveway, because Lydia had parked on the street when she came to grab him earlier in the evening. She’d been a glorious goddess, toting magic supplies and magic Mace and an actual coherent plan. He’d fallen a bit more in love with her because of it, not least because the plan had included backups and was supposed to preclude anyone but Gerard getting hurt, unlike Derek’s plan which mostly revolved around people hitting him until they stopped from fatigue or boredom.
She doesn’t say anything to him as she slips out of the Jeep and slams the door and drives away, and that’s really the whole problem, isn’t it? No one talks to each other.
The cruiser isn’t in the driveway, so he gets the extra magic crap out of the Jeep and lugs it up to his room. It’s just a bag of mountain ash and a couple oak branches and some dark red paste that smells like cinnamon and copper and he didn’t dare ask Lydia the contents of, but still nothing he’d really want to parade past his dad. He stashes all of it in the bottom of his dresser, and digs out one of the books there. It’s not that old, but it looks older than it is because of all the smoke damage. It’s mostly super-dry Cold War era stuff about supernatural experiments, but in the back is an index of the spells used, and, yeah, here’s the one he was thinking of. ‘To Promote Communication Between Two Or More Humanoid Parties By Way Of A Mediator,’ with notes to check pages 167-169 and 254.
The instructions are pretty simple, and really straightforward: they hadn’t fucked around with their lab write-ups, even though Stiles knows that everyone who participated had to be a shaman or medium, which had always seemed kind of antithetical to organized applied science.
He gets the table salt and one of the candles they keep around for power outages and sets up in the kitchen because it’ll be easier to clean the floor and his dad won’t be home until the morning. He wants it done as soon as possible, and if it makes everyone call each other up and babble absolutely everything in their heads for hours so no one gets any sleep, well, he’s okay with that. They deserve it.
Obviously he’s going to be the mediator, because he always is, so he rings himself in salt and lights the candle and chants the words three times, concentrating on how much he believes it’ll work. The flame flickers green on the last recitation, but that’s about it. Stiles waits a minute, two minutes, for his phone to go off, but it doesn’t. It’s getting on towards two, so he packs up and sweeps the floor and stashes the candle back where it’s supposed to be and hides the book again and goes to sleep.
“How on Earth is he still asleep?” wakes him up at half past the crack of dawn.
“G’way,” he mumbles, flailing in the direction of the window, because Cora shares her brother’s allergy to doors.
“Shit, I can’t be this out of practice. If a human can hear me coming, I’ll get killed. I’ll get us all killed. I should have stayed in Wisconsin.”
Stiles levers himself up and looks over at Cora, still only half in his window. “If you weren’t talking, I’m sure you’d be very stealthy. Now what do you want?”
“What? No - oh, shit, probably not good.” It hits Stiles about the same time she actually opens her mouth and says, “Stiles, I wasn’t speaking.”
Stiles flops back facedown on his bed, because what is even his life. Cora continues unabated, because apparently she can’t stop, and her brain sounds way less tough and angry than her voice does. “If he’s a telepath, does that mean - oh, no, can’t think about that, he’ll - shoot shoot shoot. Um. Hi. Yes. I’m going to think a conversation at you, so just, like, wave if you can hear me and it makes sense/is clear/isn’t full of whoopsIsaacnope. Um.”
Stiles waves half-heartedly at her just to make it stop, or derail her. This is the worst.
“Okay okay okay, so what did you do? You did it on purpose, right? Was it magic or a creature - there aren’t any creatures - so magic, right? Had to be magic. Oh - he(don’t think about it) told me that last night didn’t go well because you didn’t tell us your plans. You can’t let anyone know.”
“Why not?” he demands, and rolls over to look at her. It’s still weird, seeing Derek’s impossible eyes in someone else’s face.
“Because,” she starts to say out loud, and Stiles hears, “Idiot,” at the same time. Cora stops. “Hate this privacy want my head everyone else Derek you can’t.” She frowns, and then pushes herself back out the window.
Her voice fades as she falls to the ground, and she shouts up, “What’s your phone number?”
He says it at a normal volume to his ceiling, and a moment later his phone is ringing. “So why can’t I tell anyone? Accidental telepathy seems like the kind of thing everyone should hear about.”
“Do you have a reversal spell?”
He hadn’t looked for one, because it wasn’t actually supposed to do this. “Uh.”
Cora sighs impatiently. “I swear to God this town is like a sucking void of competence. So you’ll need to tell them eventually when you can’t figure out how to fix it on your own -”
“Hey! Need I remind you who masterminded your rescue?”
“No,” she snaps back, “I’m perfectly aware of your role in loosing me on the town when I was half-feral. Now shut up. But you did this because among everyone’s many failures is complete inability to communicate, right?”
He kind of wants her back in the room, where she sounds kind of unsure and way less mean. He sighs dramatically. “Yeah. Wait, you actually think I should use it against them on purpose?”
It’s a little sociopathic and violates everyone’s consent, but wow, it’d be so, so effective at making sure they’re all on the same page plan-wise. Stiles knew there was a reason he liked Cora. “Why were you in my room at six in the morning, anyway?”
“Oh. Derek says to stop by the loft before school to work out better lines of communication.”
“Great,” Stiles says flatly, and hangs up. He hauls himself out of bed and dry-swallows his meds and makes his way down the hall to shower. There’s no weird noises from his dad’s room, but maybe it doesn’t work on sleeping people, or he has to actually be in the same room. Either way, Derek’s will be a good practice run for school, and he’ll finally get his chance to yell at them for planning failure.
He showers quickly and throws on the first clean clothes he can lay hands on, because in the three weeks Cora’s been back from the dead, she’s shown herself kind of vicious when she thinks her patience is being pushed on purpose, and he doesn’t want his poor Jeep on the other end of yet another Hale pack incident. When he gets downstairs, she isn’t even lurking menacingly by his Jeep, which is different. He stops at Starbucks for a black coffee and a muffin, because they’re going to think he took too long anyway, and ‘ten minutes late with Starbucks’ is his favorite meme right now.
Scott’s running just as late, just getting off his motorcycle as Stiles pulls up right next to him. “I should totally get Allison out for a ride. I bet if I drove really fast the adrenaline and vibration from the engine would really turn her on, and I love the way she smells when she’s wet. I wonder if we could have sex on the bike, if we ever get together again?”
Stiles thumps his head down on the steering wheel. He’s used to TMI, but wow Scott has not been oversharing nearly as much as he could have been. Scott’s planning logistics now, with a little extra rhapsodizing about how flexible Allison is. “Stiles. He called you, too?”
Stiles nods, even though it wasn’t so much ‘called’ as ‘sicced sibling on.’ It feels weird to be talking over Scott’s monologue, even though it’s all internal. What’s more shocking than the thoughts of Allison are how protectively Scott is thinking about Isaac, whose injury last night he blames Derek for. Which, yeah - Isaac’s more Scott’s pack than Derek’s, and Scott doesn’t understand why Isaac’s still loyal enough to Derek to follow him into danger. “He looked so sad after Derek chased him out, and wet and alone and wouldn’t it be hot if he and Allison had a wet T-shirt contest and then came up to my room and peeled each other out of their soaking wet clothes real slowly and let me watch and they’d both have really hard nipples and then Allison licked away a drop of water on Isaac’s chest and I wonder if Isaac’s done anything before? It’d be really hot if we could be his first - I could just watch them (I love them) through the first time and then when they were done and happy and sleepy Allison gets cold after and we could warm her up by getting her going again, touch all the places Isaac touched and have her smell like both of us and get her off together, both of us with fingers in her, stretching her that way that makes her lose her mind, and Stiles is being really quiet. Is he mad? He’s usually mad when he’s quiet, but he can’t be mad at me because I wasn’t even there, it wasn’t me who fucked up, it was Derek, Derek who got Isaac involved, I wonder if Isaac would let me jerk him off?”
Stiles wants to kill himself. Or go isolate himself while he looks for a reversal, at least. This was not a good plan. They let themselves in through the side door that doesn’t close right and take the elevator up - it sets off an alarm that Scott bitches about internally and Stiles can’t hear at all. Stiles doesn’t hear anything except Scott’s variously pornographic and Derek-hating thoughts even after the huge door rolls open to reveal Derek posing outlined against the window.
They walk in tandem, which makes it feel kind of like a Western except for - well, everything. It still feels like a showdown, though (even if it is tragically lacking in Derek in chaps). That feeling only goes away when Isaac’s voice pops up on his left, “Stiles won’t be able to sense me, and maybe if I freak him out everyone will stop being so idiotically serious. We’re alive, and I didn’t actually stay hurt, and this is completely ridiculous. I want to be asleep, but making him jump is going to be an okay substitute - other people should suffer for it being morning, too.”
Which is, okay, the first perk of this whole thing. “Isaac, I know you’re there,” Stiles says out loud.
Isaac’s face is priceless. Derek just raises one eyebrow. “Look, so you guys suck, and you should actually tell me when you have plans to do stuff.”
Derek stalks closer. “Oh, you want us to answer to you, now? Let you know when we’re planning to get gas, go grocery shopping?”
Scott growls, having various outraged thoughts.
“Scott, go sit by Peter.” The chaos in his own head is starting to be reined in by the meds, and he doesn’t need Scott making it hard to think.
Derek prowls closer, and Stiles holds his ground. Partly because backing down will mean Derek won’t listen to him, partly to test his range, partly because, well, honestly, when else is he going to be able to find out what Derek thinks? “No, see, I want everyone to not die. That’s the important part. Unless you regularly go grocery shopping in the middle of carefully planned traps Lydia and I set up, we’re probably good. Lydia and I had a way to contain and kill Gerard, and you being there meant that not only did Gerard get away, but we could have died. Isaac was hurt! You were hurt! It’s a miracle it wasn’t worse, and we can’t keep taking that chance. You need to start actually sharing when you have a plan.”
“I have to start sharing? What stopped you from telling me you were going to be there?” Derek takes another step closer, and suddenly it’s hard to breathe, because Stiles can hear his thoughts now, and the weight of them is crushing. “I’m probably going to get them all killed. I get everyone killed, eventually. This is what I get for not hanging on, for thinking I could build something out of the ashes. It wasn’t just Kate, I’m rot, I’m poison, but I need to protect them. If I can just die protecting them, it’ll almost make up for getting them involved in the first place.”
Stiles swallows hard. “I thought you were dead, asshole. And I didn’t think any of the other werewolves would even care about Gerard, given that the alpha pack had, oh, you know, just killed you, making them a slightly bigger problem.”
Derek’s eyebrows draw down, and his face goes stormy. “Why -?” He stops, and glares, and it’s only the telepathic cheat code that finishes his sentence. “Why would anyone care that I’m dead? Why wouldn’t I care about Gerard? I bit him, he’s my responsibility. Everyone he kills, every wolf, it’s like I killed them myself, because I’m the one who extended his life and changed him. I let my body be used by an Argent again, and those are more deaths on my head. I have to make it safe, have to erase the evil that I caused so that they can really live, so that my presence doesn’t destroy even more lives.”
Stiles swallows again, convulsively, because he knows he’s let the pause stretch too long. And he opens his mouth to say something, anything, but Derek’s eyes have dropped to his Adam’s apple and he’s thinking about what Stiles’ throat would look like swallowing around his cock and Stiles’ brain just stutters to a stop. Stiles gapes at him, because what. What. And Derek’s thinking about his mouth and how it looks dropped open, and then he sinks straight back into self-loathing, this time about wanting a teenager, and this was a horrible idea.
“Unlike you and Lydia, we can actually handle ourselves in a fight,” Isaac says from where he’s lurking by the window with Cora now.
“Bring it, Fluffy,” Stiles snaps, because Isaac knows damn well that Stiles can handle himself. He tries to tune Derek out, because he had things to say and he can’t back down now, because that’d be a sure sign that something is wrong. “Look, you can’t just dismiss us. We’ve helped you before, and we’re trying to save lives, just like you. There are too many different evil things lurking around Beacon Hills for tripping over each other to be an option. So can we all agree to text each other when we have a plan that doesn’t include each other but actually does need the other to be gone?”
“I can set up a Skype group chat,” Scott volunteers. “That way we only need to say something once and then everyone will know. It’ll be an easy way to call for backup, too.”
“Scott would be a better alpha than me,” Derek thinks. “He already is, in everything but the powers. I wish Isaac and Boyd and Cora could go to him, he’s so much less likely to get them killed, but I don’t want to be alone, I can’t, I’ll die. I don’t want to die, even if it’s what I deserve, and he’s still such a kid, I need to make sure he doesn’t make the same mistakes I did, even if no one could ever be as stupid as I was, as stupid as I am, Jennifer deserves so much better. She deserves more than just seeking comfort in the dark, she deserves someone who can be about her completely and isn’t so broken that they keep thinking about a teenager, fuck.”
“I need to go,” Stiles manages to get out. “Like, right now. Text or call if you need something, I won’t be at school, please for the love of God don’t show up at my house.”
He flees, and no one follows him. Of course no one follows him. He bangs his head against the elevator as it descends far too slowly. His thing for Derek - it’s a thing, okay, definitely a thing, he’s not going to deny it - has mostly been easily dismissed, something to pursue once things calmed down, maybe, and he was legal and so wouldn’t actually be trying to get Derek to commit a felony in the Sheriff’s house. He hadn’t - reciprocation isn’t something he’s used to. And the inside of Derek’s head is such a fucking mess. Stiles hadn’t thought it was even possible for someone to hate themselves that much. It makes him want to wrap Derek up in a blanket and give him cookies, which Derek might even let him do, because he’s hot for Stiles. So far telepathy is batting zero for useful information about plans and over nine thousand for causes for a complete meltdown. He needs the reversal now: there’s no way he’s doing school. With the proximity thing, he’ll be in range of at least nine kids at all times and he will definitely snap and kill them all.
When he gets home, he’s quiet as he can be, because his dad is sleeping, or should be after working all night. He digs the book out frantically and flips to the back and goes to the cross-referenced pages. The first reference is about the development of it and the fact that the radius was found to be about five feet, that they didn’t repeat it and wasn’t considered a success, or viable for repeated trials. The reference on page 254 is an experiment that had to be scrapped because the person conducting it was the telepath and she went home from her first day as a mind-reader and had dinner with her husband and stabbed herself through the heart with a carving knife.
Stiles feels sick. He looks for a reversal in the back, for some kind of general reversal, anything. There’s a spell to reverse curses, but the pages for that indicate that they tried that, they tried it to reverse the telepathy and it didn’t work. He can feel panic rising up, the sort of all-over uncontrollable trembling he used to get, hasn’t gotten in years, and he throws the book away so it lands somewhere near the desk.
He drops his head between his knees and breathes, just breathes, but it just gets worse, and the nausea gets worse, and his stomach is roiling. Racing to the bathroom is harder than it should be, all his limbs in rebellion, but he makes it in time to heave over the toilet, heave up his coffee and muffin and then just keep heaving and heaving when there’s nothing left. He’s still dry heaving when he hears his dad, sleep-slow and fuzzy and wondering, “What’s wrong? Is it drugs? Is that why he’s looked so wrecked?” “Stiles?” is all he says out loud.
He waves his dad off, and focusing on trying to talk calms some of the heaving. “Just a stomach thing. I think I’m gonna take a - ugh, a sick day. Can you call me in?”
He knows there are tears on his face, but he doesn’t care, he can’t care right now. It’s not the probably-inevitable death, it’s the loss of control, it’s his mind not being his own, being flooded with other people instead. His dad hesitates, then nods, thinking despairing thoughts about Stiles just skipping anyway if he doesn’t. He walks back to his room, presumably to get his cell, and Stiles sits curled around the toilet and shaking.
He’s pretty sure he’s done throwing up, and everything feels a little dissociated, so he avoids looking in the mirror when he stands and rinses out his mouth and brushes his teeth. Mirrors are always kind of gross after panic attacks.
Okay, no more thinking about consequences. He’s going to find a way, he’s going to fix this. So only thinking about the next step and the next, and nothing else but looking for solutions. He opens his computer next, checks magical herb databases for stuff to make the voices stop. It’s really not useful, since most of it’s either for talking to the spirit world or how to synthesize anti-psychotics.
It’s useless. He looks up general reversal spells, instead, discarding all of the ones that trigger his hokey bullshit sense right off the bat. He organizes the tabs starting from least effort to most, and starts mumbling rhyming verse to himself. When his dad comes back by his room five minutes later, he pauses outside the door and thinks about sleep and about getting Stiles something for his stomach and doesn’t actually expect Stiles to be in his room, but out doing something illegal, and then he just hopes that he won’t be called in to a crime scene before his shift because of his kid and moves away.
Stiles swallows hard and closes the first six tabs. They were not a success. Twenty minutes later he’s hit the stuff that actually requires supplies, and he wants a test subject before he starts, to verify that nothing else has worked. He pads down to his dad’s room and presses up next to the door, and he’s not hearing anything, but that might be because his dad’s asleep, or because the bed’s too far away. He’d call Scott, but, well, Scott’s in school. Cora would be a good option, maybe, since she already knows and can kind of control her head, but she has no reason to help him.
He runs both hands through his hair and contemplates calling her anyway as he walks back to his room, and then nearly dies of a heart attack because Derek is right there. “Holy crap, Derek.”
“What’s wrong,” Derek says. He’s not very good at questions, and he’s not even interested in the answer, having already concluded, “I’ve poisoned him even without the bite. He’s been driven farther than anyone should be, and too many people he cares about have been put in danger. Mother/Alpha didn’t fuck up like this, her human associates didn’t end up twitchy and smelling like prey.”
“I’m a telepath,” Stiles says, overloud.
“What?” “What?”
“Yeah,” Stiles says, talking over Derek’s renewed litany of self-hate. “Last night I tried a spell to make everyone communicate. It didn’t work as expected, and now you are officially commandeered as my test subject to see if any of these reversal spells work.”
“What the fuck, Stiles?”
An hour later they are both kind of wild-eyed and mostly depressed, and Stiles has vowed to never run his hands through his hair or do anything with his mouth ever again. Because Derek having a thing for his hands, and his mouth? Awesome. Derek knowing Stiles is hearing it and having a really rapid downward spiral of self-loathing every time he has sexy thoughts? Possibly the worst thing ever, and also the awkwardest. The next spell calls for the caster’s blood. “Hey, Derek, can you ninja your way downstairs and get like a steak knife or something?”
Derek’s first thought is that Stiles will stab him, and none of his subsequent thoughts are about preventing Stiles from doing so. He stands and leaves, and is back quickly with a knife. He hands it to Stiles and stands there, uncomfortable close. Stiles waves him off. “Go sit back down, I don’t need your blood at all.”
He holds his hand over the bare patch he’d cleared on his desk and starts to swipe the knife down his palm.
Derek’s physical reaction is almost faster than his mental one, and he wrenches the knife away. “What are you doing?”
“Magic?” Stiles puts as much condescension into the question as he can: he knows it’s obvious, and knows Derek knows because nothing has worked and he can still hear his thoughts.
“Fuck this, we’re going to see Deaton. You’re not hurting yourself for this.”
“Fuck you. My dad’s still here - what if he wakes up while I’m gone and finds out? And I did this, I can undo it.”
“Use mine, then.” All Derek’s thoughts are about bearing pain, bearing blame, about atoning through blood. Absolutely none of them are about bettering his communication skills, which was the entire point. The lack makes Stiles seriously consider stabbing him, just because.
“It has to be the caster.” He’d follow it up with an insult, but Derek always thinks he deserves all of them, or feels somehow endeared that Stiles thinks about him enough to think up werewolf- or Alpha-specific insults, and it makes Stiles hurt too much to have to bear witness to it. “Look, whatever, I’ll go to Deaton’s as soon as my dad leaves for work. I swear I won’t try any more. Just please, for the love of God, leave.”
Derek pauses, thinking dark thoughts and then filthy ones when Stiles cracks his knuckles - “I bet I’d be able to feel his knuckles clearly if he fingered me” - and then disappears out the window.
Stiles immediately flops down on the bed and pulls a pillow over his face. He briefly considers smothering himself. Instead, he ends up sleeping, hard and purposeless and long, and wakes up when his dad checks on him before he leaves for work.
When the house is clear and he’s waited the time he knows it takes for the cruiser to turn the corner, Stiles jumps out of bed and grabs his phone and texts Deaton. magic emergency, can u clear clinic in 15?
More quickly than almost anyone else Stiles knows (Scott), Deaton replies, I’m closed for lunch until 1pm.
It’s not an invitation, not even close, but Stiles races there in his Jeep. He makes it in ten minutes, and leaves the Jeep over two and a half parking spaces. He uses the front door, because Deaton likes when people use the front door and he can test them with the rowan gate instead of having them bypass the barrier with a magic key. “I’m a telepath and I can’t turn it off,” he blurts as soon as the door has closed.
Deaton thinks, “Incompetent braindead footfucking dumbshit.” Deaton says, “I see.”
Stiles gapes, and then jumps right in. “I did a spell that was supposed to promote communication - there’s no counterspell in the book, and the only other person they recorded as using it killed herself. I’ve tried counterspells but they haven’t worked. It’s driving me kind of crazy, and I really don’t want to listen to people anymore.”
“You’re going to fucking get yourself shamefully killed, you vapid barfpuppet, fucking around with magic without any ball-fondling idea what you’re doing.” He puts down his sandwich and says, “Come on back to the surgery, Stiles.”
Stiles follows him back, keeping five feet between them because he likes Deaton way better when he’s an inscrutable badass than when he’s a jerk. He makes sure to close the gate behind him to annoy any werewolves who stop by before they’re done. In the surgery, Deaton rifles through his jars of miscellaneous weird shit, and comes up with small dark balls of something. “Have you tried a sedative? They can be useful in putting inconvenient aspects of ourselves to sleep.”
For the first time since this morning, there’s hope. “I didn’t even think of that. Sign me up.”
“This is belladonna. It’s poisonous, and causes unpleasant hallucinations. It’s primary function is to either kill you or block neurotransmitters and act as an anticholinergic.”
Stiles shakes out his arms and bounces on the balls of his feet, readying himself physically for a fight he knows won’t actually be physical. “Sounds great. How is that going to help?”
Deaton watches him steadily. “Anticholinergics are peripherally sedative, and belladonna has been used for a long time by witches. The association makes lighting a spark easier.”
“Right, poison, awesome. What do I need to believe to not die?”
Deaton sets the jar on the operating table and steps back several feet, mirroring Stiles’ distance. “Take three and hold them in your left palm and believe that they will stop your ability to read people’s thoughts. Then swallow them - don’t chew.”
“One at a time, or all at once?” Stiles takes a hesitant step forward, reminds himself that the plants won’t actually bite, and makes himself move quickly to grab the jar.
“All at once, if you can.”
Stiles nods, and shakes out three. He puts the lid back on the jar and closes his hand on the belladonna. This feels like the kind of thing he should close his eyes for, like the first time with the mountain ash when all he could do was hope, like when he was a little kid and prayed real hard at night for his mom to get better.
He keeps his eyes on the jar. He knows what he’s doing, now, and wants to make sure Deaton doesn’t come close enough to throw off his concentration. There’s no room for doubt, so as soon as he’s felt the moment of unfounded and absolute certainty, he throws back the belladonna and dry-swallows them all. They kind of tingle on the way down. “How long until it kicks in?”
“The effect should be instantaneous,” Deaton says, and steps towards the table. He comes to stand opposite Stiles, and the room is still blessedly silent.
Stiles grins. “It worked!”
“Good,” Deaton says, and puts the jar away. “I trust you’ll be more careful in future?”
“Yeah, definitely, thanks.” Stiles gestures with both thumbs towards the door. “I’m just gonna . . . go.” He has an alpha to beard in his den.
Deaton smiles, just a little, and he’s probably thinking really insulting things, but Stiles can’t hear them and it’s awesome. “Goodbye, Stiles.”
Stiles jumps over the gate and scrambles into his Jeep and drives too quickly to Derek’s - it’s only been afternoon shift for twenty minutes and none of the deputies will be on the road yet. He parks where the Jeep won’t be visible from the street and breaks in the side door again. They’ll know he’s coming, but not why, which is all he needs.
When he hauls the door open, Cora’s sitting on the couch and smirking like she’s going for the gold. “He’s in the kitchen.”
“Fuck you,” Stiles says, and makes a beeline for the kitchen.
Derek’s . . . Derek’s cooking, which is super anticlimactic and not in character at all. Stiles had been pretty sure that Derek subsisted on a diet of his own pain. Derek stops prodding at his grilled cheese and scowls at Stiles. “Don’t swear at Cora.”
“Really? No, she deserved it.” Stiles lifts a hand to shove it through his hair, because it’s habitual when he’s irritated, but he catches himself halfway and scowls at his hand, then at Derek. “She knew what I’d hear from you. Jesus, every time you look - fuck, Derek. I’m not a mind-reader anymore, but I don’t have to be, because I know what you’re thinking.”
Derek looks back at the stove and curls in on himself, defensive and ashamed. It makes Stiles want to punch him in the stupid perfect face. “You self-loathing douchebag, why didn’t you ever say anything?” His voice goes up, and Stiles knows he’s nearly yelling. The whole thing is so frustrating that it itches under his skin, because Derek’s stupidity and self-loathing aren’t actually something he can shout away. Impulse takes him, and he reaches out to flick off the burner, then grabs Derek’s shoulder.
The only reason he can manhandle Derek at all is because Derek lets him, but Derek lets him do a lot, moving when Stiles turns him and shoves him against the counter, not backing away when Stiles gets up in his space. “You could have just straight-up done something, too, instead of fucking wallowing in your misery. It’s not that complicated.” Stiles’ heart thunders in his ears, but he follows his own advice anyway.
The kiss is more like mashing their mouths together, because he misjudged the force needed to bring their lips together, but Derek kisses him back anyway. Derek’s hands close convulsively on his hips, and Stiles worries for a moment that Derek will push him away, but he pulls him closer so their hips are flush.
That, of course, is when he tilts his face away abruptly and rests his forehead on Stiles’ clavicle. “I don’t want your pity.”
Stiles ghosts a hand up to rest on the side of Derek’s neck, just lightly. He keeps his voice soft and quiet, because it feels like a closed and intimate moment, and he knows what it’s like when people speak at a normal volume right in your ear. “I could never want you because I pitied you. We’re doing this today because, right now, you’re alive and I’m alive and for just a little while I got to be a lie detector, too, so I know we both want each other. That’s all that matters. Is that okay?”
Derek’s hand flex on his hips, then he lightens the touch. Stiles worries for a minute that Derek’s going to pull away, but then Derek’s kissing him. It’s open-mouthed and urgent, and Stiles’ dick starts to get interested in the proceedings when Derek bites his lower lip.
He slides his tongue into Derek’s mouth, licks at his tongue and the roof of his mouth to get as much of the taste of him as possible. Derek makes this kind of choked noise and fists a hand in Stiles’ shirt. Stiles runs his hand up Derek’s neck into his hair and grabs, holding Derek’s head still as he licks into his mouth.
“We’re leaving!” shouts Isaac from the other room, and great, that’s awesome, that means they’re alone.
Derek breaks away again, and if it weren’t for the fact that he can feel Derek’s hardening cock, he’d be feeling a little rejected. “This is wrong.”
Stiles uses his hold on Derek’s hair to hold him so that he can make eye contact. “Look at me. No, it’s not wrong. I know what I’m doing, you know what you’re doing, there’s a whole lot of mutual respect and understanding here, and I really, really like you. Okay?”
Derek takes his hand off Stiles’ hip and grips the counter instead. He seems to have forgotten that he’s still holding Stiles’ shirt. “It’s still illegal.”
“Yeah. And that’s your call, dude. But I’m not going to pretend it didn’t happen and I’m not going to pretend I don’t want you. I won’t be a dick about it if you want to wait thirteen months, but your other option here” - he leans in and kisses Derek’s jaw and says it right in his ear - “is for me to drop to my knees right here and suck you off.”
Derek actually whimpers, and then he kisses Stiles like he’ll die if he doesn’t.
Stiles rolls his hips against Derek, and the friction is kind of a thing of beauty. He’s - he’s gonna take this whole thing as consent, yeah, and not just because Derek is kind of chronically bad at words. He wants Derek’s cock in his mouth right freaking now. He drops, just lets his legs go boneless until his knees hit the tile, and scrabbles at Derek’s fly. “This is okay, right?”
“Stiles,” Derek chokes out and slides a hand to rest tentatively on the side of his head. “Yeah - I -”
“Awesome.” Stiles manages to get Derek’s stupid tight pants undone, and starts to pull them down. He slides his hands around back to palm Derek’s ass and pull the jeans down by the pockets, and Derek’s hips twitch forward.
Stiles mouths at the hard line of his cock, because it’s right there, and he really kind of needs to. It just tastes like denim and warm, but Derek’s breath hitches, and he shoves his own pants and underwear down together, getting them out of the way. He’s uncut, and hard enough to be an excellent mathematical diagram of perpendicularity. Stiles smiles at his own pun and licks a stripe up the underside of Derek’s dick.
He takes the head in, then, as far as he can. He’s not expecting to be able to deep throat Derek, not on the first try, but he wants to see how far he can go. Derek tastes like skin and a little like cotton and when he presses to the back of Stiles’ mouth Stiles backs off, sucking hard. When he pulls off completely, Derek’s dick makes an obscene popping noise, and Stiles dives back in. He licks around the head and tastes precome, and it makes him so hard it hurts. He races to undo his own pants, because he needs a hand on himself, like, now.
Stiles sticks his tongue just between Derek’s foreskin and the head of his cock, just to see what happens. Derek groans, and the taste of precome is stronger in Stiles’ mouth, so he runs his tongue as far around the inside of Derek’s foreskin as he can get it. Derek’s hand wraps around the base of Stiles’ skull, not exerting any pressure, just there, a warm weight, and Stiles squeezes himself tightly.
He tries taking Derek deeper again, getting him wetter, setting up the kind of fast rhythm he likes with his hand. Derek thrusts forward to meet him, just once, and it goes farther than he was expecting and Stiles can feel his eyes start to water. He looks up at Derek, just to try to communicate that hey, not cool, novice on his knees, and Derek looks contrite but also blissed out.
His face should always look like this. Stiles tries sucking harder, sucking slower, more tongue, and he keeps his eyes on Derek’s face as he does. Derek shudders all over and looks down at Stiles, his eyes unearthly green. “I’m close.”
Stiles hums acknowledgement, and that’s it, it’s over, bitter salty liquid on his tongue. Stiles swallows once, twice, and then Derek’s sliding down the counter, his dick slipping out of Stiles’ mouth in a long slow collapse that leaves Derek practically sitting on Stiles’ knees.
Derek draws Stiles in for a sloppy kiss, then rests his forehead on Stiles’. “Let’s go upstairs before I take care of you.”
“Yeah.” Stiles smiles as they both climb to their feet, utterly happy with the fact that he’s about to get off for the first time with another person and pretty content with life in general.
He ends up spending at least an hour that evening yelling at Derek for not sharing the fact that he’d had a spell to find the darach sitting on his laptop for months, but on the whole everything’s pretty awesome.