Chapter Text
I'm waiting for the day when this gets easier.
Lydia is ready to go again the next morning. It maybe wouldn’t bother Derek so much if he didn’t run into Stiles later that same day, with her words echoing in his head and something insistent and annoying buzzing in his skin.
But that’s later. Hours later. We need to go back to now.
It’s morning. Late, by the angle of the sun and the fact Derek’s clock shows closer to midday than midnight. Derek groans and rubs at his eyes. His body hurts. Physically, that is, not—
“Stop it,” he tells himself, leaving bed and grabbing for a comfortable hoodie from his chest of drawers. His arm muscles ping as he stretches the material over his head and he rubs at them and shakes them out. He overdid it yesterday. He knew it at the time, and the knowledge is getting reinforced now.
Stupid. No wonder Lydia said the things she did. He’d gone beyond his routine. Again. She noticed even though this time he didn’t come out and confide it in her. He’d be angry at her for that if he didn’t value their relationship so much. She’s his closest friend, his closest anything.
Lydia is sitting at the dining table when Derek moves his aching body out of his room.
“Morning,” she greets, though it doesn’t sound like a greeting.
There’s a pot of coffee waiting on the table. Derek’s favourite mug and a jug of milk.
“Hey,” he says, cautious but not trying to reveal it. It’s too early for masks and wordplay, especially with Lydia.
Derek pours himself coffee.
“Breakfast,” Lydia asks, but again, she’s not really asking.
Derek nods and drinks some coffee.
Lydia brings out two plates kept warm in the oven. Toast, tomato, mushroom, egg. Derek can’t believe he didn’t hear her making it all this morning, though looking around the kitchen now he can see a stack of used dishes waiting in the sink. He’ll get around to those later. After whatever this is.
Derek reaches for cutlery. If he stretches, he can reach the drawer from his seat. Normally. This morning, a muscle in his shoulder twinges and he grimaces. He stands instead.
“You went too hard at the gym yesterday,” Lydia comments, though it’s really not a comment in the traditional sense of an observation.
“No need to reprimand me,” Derek says, sitting down and passing her a knife and fork. “I know.”
“Someone on your mind?” It must be the morning of Lydia asking questions she already knows the answer too.
Derek nods, mouth full of food. He can’t deny it.
“I’ve programmed Stiles’ number into your phone,” Lydia tells Derek, spearing mushrooms onto her fork in a neat stack. Derek doesn’t know how she’ll fit them into her mouth at once.
“You what?” he asks, after swallowing.
“His number’s in your phone. You need to call him.”
“I don’t need to do anything.”
“But you want to, don’t you?”
“No,” Derek refutes immediately, but his eyes are already on his phone. Lydia’s left it on the table. He wonders what the string of numbers could be, whether Stiles would even pick up if he called.
Lydia sighs and slides the mushrooms off her fork and into her mouth. Derek knows this is his time to speak without interruption.
“I don’t want to call him. I don’t want to call anyone. You know that’s not how things work with me. Relationships are one night maximum. I can’t…” He struggles to find a way to explain it. It’s frustrating. Lydia should already know.
The words don’t come. He huffs. “I can’t.”
Lydia is still chewing when Derek finishes, but he can tell by her expression already that she’s not buying what he’s selling.
He tries again. “Stiles was… different, yes. But I’m still the same. I like the way we do things now. I don’t need anything more. I prefer-”
“I’m dating someone.”
Derek blinks at Lydia. He hadn’t realised he’d been grappling to find an explanation for so long. She’s finished eating.
“You’re…” He can’t reconcile it in his mind. Dating. That’s off the table for them both. That’s how it is and has been for years. Because they’re too… whatever, to invest in someone like that (again).
“Almost four months now,” Lydia adds, eyes fixed on Derek to gage a reaction.
Derek tries to control his expression, but it’s another unexpected revelation, these words from Lydia. Like with Stiles the other night.
Derek shakes his head. It’s too much happening at once for him. There’s a sting inside him, a little pulse that makes him fidget in his seat. Something about this is not right.
“How can I not know this already?” Derek asks of Lydia. They’re meant to be best friends.
Lydia folds her hands one over the other on the table top and tilts her head to the side. “I didn’t know if you were ready to hear it,” she tells him.
The pulse inside Derek gets hot and sharp for a beat, then recedes.
“That’s—Of course I want to—Don’t you trust-” His mangled sentence makes him realise the truth in Lydia’s confession. “I’m sorry you felt you couldn’t confide in me.”
Lydia’s lips lift at the corners. “It’s fine. I’m telling you now. You’re ready, I think.”
“What changed?”
“Stiles,” Lydia says simply, though it’s not simple, is it, not at all, that one person that Derek spends one night with—who Lydia happened to know from her old life—can shift something in Derek that he and Lydia can both notice.
Derek’s pulse grows hotter and hotter and it’s like anger—no, it is anger.
“What the hell, Lydia.”
“I’m just telling the truth.”
Derek stands abruptly from the table. “Stiles isn’t-”
“Derek. It’s time. For me and for you.” Lydia speaks with patience, seated still. She’s looking up to Derek but they both know she has the upper hand. “You told me yourself, two nights ago, you told me he was different. And you know what? I was so relieved to hear you say that. Because different? That’s good. That’s what going to make it work for you. He’s… waking you up, Derek.”
All Derek can think to say is, “I’ve been awake the whole time.”
“There’s a difference between awake and alive.”
Derek scoffs. “And you think Stiles has shown me what that is?”
“I think he’s starting to.”
Lydia stands and picks Derek’s phone up from the table. She holds it out to him.
Derek almost doesn’t want to take it from her. It means accepting what she says, on some level at least.
-
It was getting a little cold trying to act like I never need no-one.
Derek leaves the apartment after washing the dishes with brutal force and changing into the same outfit from yesterday. He knows Lydia is done. Said her spiel, guilted him just the right amount that she knows his skin will be sticky with it for most of the day.
There’s no plan as he walks around, feeling the wrong side of cool with no scarf or gloves because he cared more about getting out of the apartment. He walks slowly down the sidewalk, scrolling down down down his contacts until, there. Stiles. She’s put a last name in as well. Stiles Stilinski.
Derek holds down until the pop up box appears.
Delete Contact? Yes. No.
Something stops him. Lydia’s words. His gut. Stiles’ face on the back of his eyelids when he blinks.
He hits ‘no’ then shoves the phone away in his jean pocket. Fine. He’ll keep it in there. Doesn’t have to—won’t—call. It’ll just… be there. To appease Lydia if she breaks into his phone again.
That decided, Derek expected to feel tension drain from his body, but it lingers, replacing the guilt Lydia dropped on him with an equally unpleasant sensation. Maybe that’s just the cold finally getting to him. Probably. Yes, must be.
He walks past the bar where he met Stiles two nights ago. It’s doing its lunch trade now, families sit around tables. Couples. Groups of kids. There’s spare tables and Derek fights the urge to sit down with ferocity because he knows what he’s really fighting is the notion of fate and memory. He won’t call Stiles but maybe if he sits at the place where they met, Stiles will find him again.
He’s lingered too long and knows it when one of the waiters asks if he wants to speak to the owner. They all know their history. He shakes his head and moves on.
There’s a library nearby that Derek heads toward, the cold finally edging too far on unbareable. The warmth it offers wraps around him immediately, and Derek follows a well-worn path to the non-fiction section, checking for his own book on the shelf. It’s there. He pulls it out and flips to the back page where ages ago he scribbled a mark by his name. Still there. He grips the book tight in his hands, relieved that something at least is unchanged. It’s just the way he made it.
He isn’t sure how long he’s been out, but it’s not been long enough yet for Lydia to text him. She normally does after an exchange like that between them. Something that starts them on the path of apology. Maybe it won’t come this time. Maybe it won’t until Derek talks to Stiles. Does he really believe that? Or is he crafting an excuse to allow himself to talk to Stiles without guilt. And why is their guilt there anyway.
Because it goes against his rules, his strict outline for relationships.
The pages of his book have crumpled beneath his fingers. He tries to smooth them out but you can tell something has happened. He places the book back on the shelf in the same spot.
He makes his way home, slow and meandering, and that’s when it happens. A detour that he normally wouldn’t take, a pause in a coffee shop to get something to warm him up, crossing over the street to look closer at the artwork graffitied on the door of a garage. Fate.
Derek is so in his head, it takes the brush of a hand on his bicep to draw his attention.
“Hey.”
Derek wouldn’t know how to begin to describe how he feels as he turns and sees the person standing next to him is Stiles.
Relieved. Surprised. Disappointed. Happy. Confused.
He wonders whether Lydia arranged this. He believes she could have but doesn’t believe she would have. No, he’s on his own in this.
“Hey,” Stiles says again, less loud now that he has Derek’s attention.
“Hi,” Derek replies.
“What are you doing down here?” Stiles gestures about to the street, thoroughly un-noteworthy.
Derek has no answer for that. He shrugs.
“Get lost?” Stiles asks, lips lifting in a way Derek knows he’s teasing. (How can he know that? They only met two days ago.)
“Maybe a little” Derek concedes. He tries to take stock of himself. Trembling fingers he grips tight around his takeaway coffee cup and fluttering heart that brings the blood to his cheeks.
He’d like to pause time so he can sit down on the sidewalk and take a few deeps breaths and ask himself or someone (anyone) why things are happening like this. Do they know where his control went? Do they know if Stiles will be worth surrendering that to? Can they tell him what to do? Please? Anyone?
No answers come to him, just a recollection of Lydia’s voice, saying “there’s a different between awake and alive”.
Derek inhales, exhales. Between one breath and the other he chooses for himself.
-
Derek would have called himself reserved and not known he was lying, but as Derek sits with Stiles, on a bench at a bus stop, he opens up. Stiles asks him questions and he answers—they’re real questions, not light like flirting, but deep like 3am worries about the future and the past. Derek tells Stiles why he does what he does, all about the game and his rules and his scale and his habits and he should stop but he ends up confessing, inelegant and haltingly, that he’s afraid already by what he feels. He’ll probably feel that way for a while but it’s…he wants to push through it.
Derek would have called Stiles a talker and assumed he’d be poor at listening, and not known that it was a lie. Stiles sits there and follows along with everything Derek says. He can almost see it getting written into some part of Stiles, his words inking themselves into Stiles’ memory, colouring his feelings for Derek in deeper.
EPILOGUE
I have broken that heart so many times
You have a hold of it now
“—and then, then, he decides that we were going the wrong way—like I’d been saying all along—and executes a stunningly illegal u-turn on the highway.”
“There was no-one around,” Derek mumbles from under his hand, which is covering his face and hopefully his embarrassment from the eyes of Lydia.
Stiles’ hand lands comfortingly on his knee while Lydia laughs at him.
“I can’t believe you told her that story,” Derek complains, leaning to whisper in Stiles’ ear. “Her boyfriend is a deputy.”
“Relax, Derek,” Stiles whispers back. Like every time, he finds himself doing what Stiles says.
He entwines his fingers with Stiles’, clasping their hands on his knee. He remembers when they first met. The feeling of losing control, of Stiles slipping through the cracks in his scale and freaking him out, making him feel lost and not himself. Scared. Exhilarated. Now it’s less intense but much deeper, because he’s chosen to let go with Stiles, and he’s grateful.
Lydia wipes at her eyes, then asks, “But apart from that the trip was good?”
“Yes,” Derek says.
“Fantastic,” Stiles agrees, and pulls out his phone to show Lydia their photos.
-
Somewhere close to dawn, Derek slips out into the kitchen. Lydia is there, face lit softly as she looks at something on her phone.
“Couldn’t sleep?” Derek asks, filling a glass of water.
“Had to get up for a conference call.”
“Right,” Derek says noticing she’s wearing make-up.
Derek drinks the water while Lydia continues typing something into her phone.
“Stiles still asleep?” Lydia asks eventually, putting her phone down on the kitchen bench.
Derek nods.
Stiles has been staying over a lot, even though it means travelling an extra twenty minutes to get to his work in the mornings. Derek has tried convincing Stiles it’s not worth it, that he can do his work anywhere so they should stay at Stiles’ more often. Stiles says Derek has the better bed, which Derek agrees with, but he thinks Stiles is also enjoying reconnecting with Lydia. He can’t fault Stiles for it.
Lydia has been absent with increasing frequency too, spending days at a time at her boyfriend’s place. Several of Lydia’s possessions have migrated there. If Lydia were anyone but Lydia, Derek would assume it was unintentional. As it is, he’s sure it’s a purposeful act, like she’s gently encouraging Jordan to invite her to move in. Some nights, he catches Lydia and Stiles talking softly together and wonders whether it's some grand plan they’re in on together. A few months ago, he would have despised them for it, for trying to make something happen behind his back where he had no control over it. Now, he’s happy to see them together, conspiring for his happiness.
He hasn’t explicitly thanked Lydia for pushing him to try something with Stiles, but he edges around it this morning, as best he can, hoping she can read the true message in his words.
“Thanks for suggesting the trip.”
Lydia nods graciously, stepping in to wrap her arms around Derek, cheek pressing firm against his chest. “I’m glad you had a good time.”
“I did,” Derek says, smiling, remembering how it felt to say ‘I love you’ to Stiles. How gratifying it was to hear it said back.