Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Stiles used to be completely obsessed with dessert. He’s got a sweet tooth the size of a Buick. He could eat an entire box of Girl Scout cookies in one sitting, polish off huge bags of Halloween candy in less than a week, and would only drink coffees that had more sugar than actual caffeine in them. He loved cookies probably more than most things in this life, maybe even more than he loved music. He used to make cookies with his mother for Christmas and his birthday, and then after she died he’d just do it by himself to keep the tradition alive. He got pretty good at it. It was just a silly side hobby that he had.

Stiles’ love language has always been acts of service. He used to think that if he wanted Matt to really love him, to not want to hurt him, then he’d just have to try harder. He would do the dishes, scrub the bathroom so clean it would sparkle and shine, make sure the bed was always made, folded Matt’s clothes, cleaned his shoes, and he would make cookies. He sincerely believed that if he made cookies good enough, Matt would love him more. It was an obsession of his, because Matt’s stomach was like a never ending dump truck, to shove as much food at him as possible. He never really learned how to cook actual meals, but he could bake, so that’s what he did.

Matt didn’t really appreciate anything Stiles ever did for him. Stiles would spend an entire day cleaning and organizing and setting things up the way Matt liked, in anticipation of affection in return. Stiles never got any affection. He’d sweep the floors and then Matt would throw a glass against the wall, so he’d have to sweep them again. He’d go out and find the oddly specific and expensive brand of liquor Matt liked, and then Matt would get too drunk and hurt him. He’d bake cookies, and Matt would throw them out, just to make Stiles upset. It was never, ever, enough.

It’s been a long time, because Stiles lost touch or taste for things he enjoyed for a very very good chunk of time during Matt and in the aftermath of him, but he decides to make cookies again. He doesn’t even need to consult the recipe – it’s all muscle memory, anyway. It used to be therapeutic, rolling balls of cookies together and then dipping them in sugar, over and over. He used to make things just to give himself time to think. As a matter of fact, the entire concept of his fourth album came to him while he was making cinnamon rolls for himself one night.

He has to dig deep into the recesses of his cabinets to find a tin for them, but he finds one, buried in the back, leftover from Valentine’s Day at least five years ago. He tucks them all in, one by one, and seals them up tight. He sits and stares at them for a while. Then, he does the dishes, just for something else to do. When he’s done with that, he stares out the window for a long time.

In the corner of the room, his piano sits and calls to him. He’s been doing his best to ignore it, because he only really has one thing to write about anymore, and he doesn’t want to write about that. He’s got this learned aversion to writing songs, because Matt hated it so much, and then when Stiles finally broke out of that and wrote all those songs for his newest one, they were taken from him before he even had the time to process their contents.

He’s scared if he writes about Derek, it’ll fuck everything up. It’ll change them. It’ll freak Derek out. It will make Derek not like him anymore. It’ll turn whatever it is they have into a fucking circus, a clickbait article, something for everyone to hyper-analyze and pick apart.

But he just cannot stop thinking about it. They’re already there, in his head, he just hasn’t written them down, he just hasn’t settled on melodies, he just hasn’t gotten the chord progressions right. He runs his hands through his hair and shakes his head.

Fuck it, he thinks.

He goes and opens up his piano bench – he hasn’t opened this fucking thing in so long, he almost forgets what’s inside of it. He’s got tons of old pieces of paper, half finished songs, ones that he finished but didn’t turn out very good, some of them dating back to high school. He saves all of them, even the particularly bad ones, in case he can pull something out of them for a different piece of work, like taking organs out and putting them into someone else.

He finds an old notebook at the bottom, and a pen. Then, he sits at his piano, opens it up, and stares at the keys. It has been so long, Stiles almost half thinks he won’t know how to do it anymore. Creating. He puts his hand on his mouth and looks out the window, at the New York skyline, and he wonders where he should even begin. So much has happened, since he met Derek Hale. He thinks about that night, when Derek first came to this apartment and smiled at him and drank Stiles’ wine and told him that Josh Perry thinks you and I would get along. He thinks about when he went to Derek’s place and saw the giant mirror and laughed so hard he cried, when Derek took him to the pretty restaurant with the plants and how nice he had been, when Derek was here again and fucked him on the couch after getting tacos.

He thinks about Vancouver. The way the moon looked on the water outside Derek’s back doors, the wine, the food, the sex, when Derek took him out and showed him all his favorite spots and he put his hand on the small of Stiles’ back like he was soft, or small, when Stiles is neither of those things. Summer time. The tour. Paris. Most of all, Paris. His pink carpet. Lemon trees.

Stiles sits up straight and digs his phone out of his pocket, setting it up to record so he won’t forget anything he comes up with, and then he clicks his pen. The songs really are all already there in his head, because even when he didn’t realize it, even when he tried to stop it from happening, he always was writing about Derek. In the bedroom in Vancouver, he wrote one. And in the hotel room in Paris when Derek set up all the pillows on the floor and pulled him in close, he wrote one. And then in Boston, which turned out to be a terrible night, a horrible fucking night, Stiles still wrote one.

It’s ironic, how when he wrote Nashville, he was thinking of a blue bedroom, an ocean, the place where he goes every night to drown. When he writes Vancouver, he thinks of another body of water – but it isn’t bright blue, it’s dark, it’s deep, and when it pulls him under, it doesn’t drown him. It just takes him in, cradles him, keeps him safe from the rest of the world. The back patio, the green green grass, and Derek, then the water.

When Derek comes over the next day, it’s mid-morning, and he’s got a bag with him. He slumps it down onto the ground and says, “it’s fucking freezing out there,” with a smile on his face. It is fucking freezing out there, as a matter of fact – it doesn’t typically snow in New York until at least December, but they got a doozy of a storm last night, so when Stiles looked out his window when he got up, all he saw was white, far as the eye could see.

“I got you something,” Derek says, handing a coffee cup to Stiles once he’s within reach. “It’s a dirty chai latte.”

“Of course you remember my coffee order,” Stiles rolls his eyes but he takes it all the same, gleefully, immediately taking a drink. Jesus, Derek even remembered that Stiles prefers oat milk. Derek is unfurling himself from his coat and his scarf, hanging both up on the hook beside where Stiles’ hoodies and coats are all lined up on the wall. Stiles turns and heads to the kitchen island where he had left his cookies the night before, gathers the tin in his arm, moves back to Derek. He thrusts them in Derek’s direction and says, “I made these for you.”

Derek is surprised. “You made me something?”

More than one thing, actually.

He takes the tin and holds it in both of his hands. “It’s got a big heart on it,” he comments, like he finds this completely out of Stiles’ character, to own anything with a great big red heart on it.

“It’s from Valentine’s Day,” he waves his hand, like it doesn’t really matter. “It’s all I had to put them in.” Stiles could have just put them on a plate with some Saran Wrap, really, but he’s not about to admit that the heart tin was, kinda sorta, intentional.

Derek pulls the lid off and stares inside. He’s baffled. His eyebrows go all the way up into his hairline, when he looks at Stiles. “You can bake?”

Stiles shrugs. “It’s a hobby.”

“You bake?”

“Not so much anymore, but, yes.”

Derek picks a cookie up and holds it, like he half expects that it’s a hologram or something. It’s a sugar cookie, with light green icing on top because green is Derek’s favorite color, and some white sprinkles. “You went out and bought these.”

“No,” Stiles smiles. “I made them. Try it.”

Derek does not have to be asked twice. He shoves the entire thing into his mouth and chews it, chews, swallows. “That’s good,” he says, and this, too, is said like he’s surprised by it. Like he thought that Stiles would feed him bad cookies as a joke, or something. He picks up another one and stuffs it into his mouth, all at once, swallows it. “Why didn’t I know that you baked?”

“It’s not that interesting,” he shrugs his shoulders, drinks his coffee. “I just wanted to say, you know. Thanks. For coming. To Nashville. I know it’s not…you know.” It’s not going to be all that much fun, Stiles is certain of it. He’s not going to want to go out to a restaurant, because he’s been to all the good restaurants with Matt, and it was horrible. He’s not going to want to go get a drink somewhere, because he went to all the good bars with Matt, and that was horrible, too. He’s going to want to sit in his hotel room with the curtains shut so he can pretend he’s not actually in Nashville, until they force him to get up there and sing.

Derek has got another cookie in his hand, his fourth one, and he’s biting into it. He says, mouth full, “if there’s more cookies, I’ll go anywhere. These are insanely good. How come you’ve never made cookies before? You’ve been holding out on me.”

Stiles reaches out and takes the tin out of Derek’s hands before he eats the entire fucking thing in one go. “Save some for later,” he says, clicking the lid back into the place and then setting it aside, on the coffee table. “You wanna put your stuff in the bedroom?”

“Oh, yeah,” he smiles, as he bends down to pick up the bag he had dropped once he got inside. “I’ve never seen your bedroom in this apartment before.”

Right. Stiles has never let Derek in there, even though they’ve had sex about a dozen times, here. Always in the living room or the kitchen, never the bedroom, where it actually makes sense. Stiles has been tense all day, thinking about having Derek in there, because no other man has slept in that bed with Stiles aside from Matt. No one else. Just Matt.

Stiles leads the way, padding on the carpet with Derek hot on his heels. He flicks the bedroom light on and gestures his hands out like ta-da, as Derek steps inside and takes in the sight of it. It’s just a bedroom. Misplaced closet door, big bed, Stiles’ side table with some notebooks and a glass of water and a lamp, a window with the blinds shut up tight. It’s nothing. Just a room.

“This is your side, I take it,” Derek smiles, gesturing to where Stiles’ notebooks and his special pillows are. Stiles nods. Derek moves to the other side, the one that’s always empty and cold, and sets his bag down on the ground. Then, he sits down on the edge of the bed and starts to take his shoes off, one by one.

Stiles had thought that seeing Derek sitting there on the bed would freak him out, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t give him Matt flashbacks at all. It’s just Derek.

“Can I talk to you for a second?” He says, moving over to sit down right next to Derek. Derek nods, turning his neck to look Stiles right in the face. “Um. We haven’t really gotten a chance to talk since Boston.”

After what happened, Stiles went directly to bed and barely said goodnight to Derek. He just got out of the car and waved and went off with Boyd, leaving Derek alone to drive through the night to get back home to New York. Sleeping together just wasn’t an option, especially not having sex, and Derek definitely took that hint. He hadn’t mentioned it in their subsequent texting, planning for this trip and wishing each other good mornings and good nights, but Stiles knows that it hurt Derek’s feelings, to just…be left, like that. He understood, but understanding something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt, still.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and he means it, because he is. “I just took off. I couldn’t – I’m no good, when it comes to…”

“You don’t have to explain or anything,” Derek insists, putting his hand on Stiles back. “There’s no right way to react in that sort of a situation.”

Sometimes, Stiles gets irritated, by how patient and kind and understanding that Derek can be, because Stiles really doesn’t deserve it. He wants to grab Derek by his shoulders and shake him and ask him to hit Stiles, or yell at him, or call him some terrible name, or say he’s talentless, nothing, uses people for his own gains, just treat him like Stiles is used to being treated. It’s almost easier, that way. Familiar. He looks at his hands and he frowns. Normal people don’t think getting beaten and screamed at is familiar.

“I’m not good,” he repeats. “You came all the way to see me and I just left like that, it wasn’t right.”

“I’m not upset with you,” he insists, shaking his head. “Why are you upset?”

“I’m feeling anxious, like – like maybe you’re starting to see how I really am, and it’s not all just…sex and music and fun stuff all the time. I have problems. That’s not sexy.” People think it’s sexy, in the abstract. Like drinking and partying so much you can’t remember what day is which is fun, smoking cigarettes to quell the overwhelming anxiety is hot, dressing grungy because it’s easier than putting himself together is attractive. “And now you’re coming with me to fucking Nashville, and it’s going to get worse there. Trust me. It’s not going to be a fun trip. It’s going to be miserable.”

Derek thinks for a moment. He looks at Stiles’ closet door and he probably has noticed that it doesn’t match the rest of the room, sticks out like a sore thumb, and he probably wonders why the hell that could be. “What is it about that place? You’ve gotta give me something to work with, here.”

Oh, Derek probably does deserve an explanation. He’s going, against his better judgment, and he deserves to know why it’s going to be like a fucking death march. Stiles takes in a deep breath and shrugs his shoulders, as though it doesn’t really matter, even though it does. It fucking matters. This chapter of his relationship with Matt is the most important one. It’s the one where the hole Stiles had been digging himself into got filled over with concrete, with him still inside of it.

“Things were getting bad,” he starts, voice low, and Derek listens. “Like, really bad. I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. And it would be this entire cycle, where I couldn’t physically get up I was so fucking miserable, and that would make Matt angry because he hates laziness, so he’d yell at me and hit me and just – it was bad. I was in this dark place. I thought I was going to die. Couldn’t write anything, and even if I wanted to, Matt would go ballistic on me if I tried.”

“He didn’t like you making music?” Derek furrows his brow, like that makes no sense. “That’s your entire thing. If he didn’t like you doing that, why was he interested in the first place?”

“He didn’t like that it was something I had that he couldn’t control,” he says, and Derek seems quietly stunned by that information. Like he thinks that’s insane. Derek has likely, and thankfully, never met someone like Matt, who’s sick in the head like that, so to imagine someone being that way is almost impossible. “But, Nashville was my safe space. I figured, we’ll go there and things will get better. It was just before spring training was going to start. It was the dead of winter, and we went to the Nashville place. And it got…worse.”

“Worse,” Derek repeats. He can’t imagine it being any worse than what Stiles just described.

“It just. He just. It was like he knew there was something wrong with me, but he didn’t really care? Like, he could tell I wasn’t doing okay, and it made him mad. I’d just want to sit on the couch and cry and he’d go apeshit on me for that,” he laughs, like it’s funny, because it almost is – all Stiles had done was sit and cry, and that made Matt so angry he’d flipped the coffee table over. “He’d force me to go out to restaurants with him and then I wasn’t allowed to say anything to anyone else, because he was so paranoid and jealous all the fucking time. I was barely allowed to talk to Boyd, for Christ’s sake. There was nothing I could do right.”

Derek rubs at his face and he’s quiet, absorbing all of this information, piece by piece.

“It just got so, so bad. Every second of every day was like…hell. My entire life was just being miserable, and being miserable lead to me getting hurt, and getting hurt lead to me crying, and crying lead to me getting yelled at for being a little bitch. Over and over. Every single god damn day. I just kinda knew, like…he was going to kill me, eventually. For a bit there, I didn’t even really give a shit about that.”

Yeah. For a week or so there, at the end, Stiles even fantasized about it. He was so, so deep down in the pit, it was hard to imagine a life where he wasn’t being tormented, so then it was hard to imagine life really being worth living.

“Then, you know, he actually did try to kill me and it woke me up. I was like, holy shit. You know? Holy shit. What am I doing? I’m just gonna let this asshole – you know? No way. I locked him out and, well, you know the rest. But now, that whole city is just sort of tainted, by the memories of what happened during that month. Part of it is that I up and left like a bat out of hell, because I had to go, and then I turned the entire city into this haunted house in my head. But then part of it is that…I had to fucking crawl my way back to being a human being again. And step one was getting the hell out of that fucking place. Going back feels like I might get trapped as that person again.”

That person, who was barely really even alive. Who bowed and scraped for Matt’s approval and never received it, not once. Who would go quiet and still instead of ever fighting back.

Stiles had really expected Derek to be silent, or to just put his arm around Stiles and hold him, or…nothing, really. What the hell is someone supposed to say to all that shit? If someone said all that to Stiles, he’d have no fucking clue where to begin, how to help, what to do.

Derek says, “you gotta go to fucking therapy,” point blank.

“Music is my therapy,” he argues, and in much of his life, that has been the truth.

“No. Music is an outlet. Baby,” he takes one of Stiles’ hands in both of his own, and sandwiches it there, pressing it, cradling it. “What you went through, I cannot fucking imagine it. I’m worried about you. I worry about you every god damn day. You need to get professional help.”

“What are they going to do? Tell me to cry it out?”

“Where are you getting all this bullshit from?” He furrows his brow and shakes his head. “Who has been telling you all this shit about therapy?”

Stiles shrugs. “My dad.”

“Oh, right. The guy who can’t have even the beginning of a conversation with his son about this. Go figure.”

“He’s not so bad,” Stiles defends instantly. “He loves me, he just….”

“…has no fucking clue how to care for one’s mental health, yeah. I know you’re stubborn and you’re going to do whatever the hell you want, and therapy isn’t a magic band-aid you can put on these things to make them better. But you need to talk to someone. I’m a good start and you can tell me anything, but you need someone who can…who can help. Really help.”

Stiles stares at Derek’s socked feet, where they rest on the carpeted floor down below. He knows that Derek is probably right. He knows that he can’t expect to go through life, drinking and writing music and touring it and fucking Derek, thinking all that is going to help him.

He went through something. He can admit it. He had his life taken away from him, his agency, his everything, and he watched it all get smashed, over and over. That’s not something that liquor can cure. It is not something sex can fix. But it’s hard for him to imagine, that going into some little room in LA and crying and telling some stranger what happened, is the answer. It seems ridiculous.

“C’mere,” Derek says, pulling Stiles in close against his body. He wraps his arms around Stiles and holds him, tight and sure. Stiles grabs onto Derek’s middle and holds on for dear life, because he’s finally found something in his life that doesn’t make him feel shitty, doesn’t demand anything from him, doesn’t tell him where to be or how to be, and he’s petrified, completely, of losing it.

“I just get so fucking angry sometimes,” he says to Derek’s stomach, and Derek huffs a quiet laugh.

“I know that feeling pretty well.”

“It used to be I’d just be scared, or sad, or lonely. But now when I think about him, I get so fucking mad. He took... Everything. Every god damn thing.”

Derek hugs him tighter.

“I hate him so god damn much.”

“Good,” Derek tells him.

“I hope he loses every game he ever plays for all eternity. I hope he fucks everything up and loses his contract. I hope he winds up totally poor.”

“I hope he gets tofu every time he orders chicken,” Derek tacks on – it’s silly and stupid, so Stiles laugh. He pulls away from Derek’s arms and smiles a bit, trying to think up his own.

“I hope he gets coal for Christmas.”

“I hope his Christmas tree catches on fire and it burns his house down.”

“I hope…that if the aliens come, they take him and do, like, experiments on him.”

Derek laughs. “Like, what kind of experiments?”

“I don’t know. It’s alien stuff, our human minds couldn’t comprehend. Like, he’s their guinea pig for their human chromosome experiments. They shave all his hair off and make him eat dog food.”

“Jesus Christ,” Derek’s eyes go big and he laughs. “What possible gain is there, making a human eat dog food?”

“Because it satisfies me up here,” he points to his temple. “It’s what he deserves.”

What Matt really deserves isn’t necessarily revenge, and it’s not necessarily mean or cruel or any of the above to do it to him. What he really deserves is justice. What he did to Stiles, what he spent two years doing to Stiles, it wasn’t right. It cannot be forgiven. Even if he went off and got better and they fixed his head somehow, it wouldn’t matter. A lifetime of atonement for what he did – that’s what he deserves. He could never in ten lifetimes ever make it up, what he did. Never.

Stiles thinks of that video, and the power it holds, sitting in a flash drive somewhere safe in Lydia Martin’s LA house. In a safe, probably, locked up where no one will be able to get to it. She did, after all, pay millions of dollars for it. Most of her fortune, most likely. Stiles knows it’s unfair to her, his friends, to sit on it like it’s nothing – and most of all, it is unfair to those who will come after Stiles. If there is someone out there who’s being charmed by Matt right now, it is unfortunately Stiles’ job to stop it from happening. It isn’t fair, Stiles has said as much before, that his entire life needs to be sacrificed up to the greater good of getting Matt put where he belongs, but life isn’t fair.

He knows he has to. He just wants more time. Is that selfish? Yes. But he’s doing his god damn best.

Stiles fiddles with his fingers. He remembers his coffee, sitting forgotten on the bed side table, so he reaches over and grabs it, taking a big old sip since it’s cool enough now to be chugged. It is so god damn good. Stiles is lucky, to have a friend who will bring him his favorite coffee without needing to be asked or prompted.

Friend. Stiles could honestly laugh at that. Derek is not his friend, not even fucking close.

“So, anyway. All that was to say I’m really sorry I’m dragging you along on this trip,” he takes another big sip of his coffee. “It’s selfish of me, but I need you there.”

“Anywhere you need me, I’ll be,” he promises, smiling so his eyes crinkle at the corners. Stiles likes this smile the best, so he smiles back before he can help himself. “Have they got you put up in a hotel?”

“Yup,” he sighs. Since it’s the finale, it’s all got a bit more fan fare around it than normal. He’s not getting put on the tour bus, they are flying him out and putting him in a hotel for two nights, while everyone else has to set up the stage and get it all ready for the big show. They had suggested that Stiles do something different, on account of it being the big last show, but he doesn’t want to do something different.

He wants to do the same show he has been playing for months. The one he has memorized. The one where he doesn’t even need to think about what he’s doing or singing. That one.

“You are really chugging that coffee,” Derek comments, watching Stiles glug down another big sip.

“I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, so I need the caffeine.”

“What were you up to? Baking cookies all night?”

Stiles hesitates. In the past, when he has written about people, there have been various different reactions. For people who weren’t in his life anymore, he’d not even send a fucking email to warn them. He’d just send it out into the world and everyone would figure out exactly who it was, and then occasionally one of these guys would get rip roaring angry and send him a ranting letter about what a piece of shit he is, how dare he. Stiles always found that funny. For people who were still in his life, people he wrote love songs about while he was still dating them, they’d think it was great. The ones who weren’t complete jackasses would, at least.

To be immortalized in Stiles’ work, to have been a muse to him, he always thought would be a compliment. Then Matt came along. He said it was a violation. Even the one lone love song Stiles had written about him, offered up to him as another one of his acts of service, Matt fucking hated. He said it was trash. What Stiles does is garbage. Stiles always thought Matt just didn’t get it – what he did. If he came to the shows, if he saw how his work moves people, if he could just get it…but, that was never the issue. It was never the issue.

Now, Stiles has got this weird feeling, about having written songs about Derek. He doesn’t know what Derek will think. He really is afraid of losing him, more than he could ever admit out loud, and he’s scared that he’s going to send everything to hell, just by doing what he does.

He clears his throat and sits up. He’s told Derek some lies recently, some big ones, and Derek does not fucking deserve that – so he won’t lie, again. “I was actually, um – well, I’ve been writing.”

Derek is, thankfully, happy to hear this. He says, “no way,” with his eyebrows up, a smile crawling across his face. “You haven’t written in so long.”

“Yeah, no, it’s – I’m –“ he struggles to find the words. “I’m just. Writing really is helpful to me, I know it’s not, like, that much of a – you know. But it’s like self-care,” there’s that word again. “Making things, it really makes me feel…like a person. I can’t explain it.”

He shoves his face into his coffee and doesn’t watch Derek’s reaction. “I would love to hear some,” Derek says.

“Oh, that’s okay,” Stiles waves his hand.

“Don’t be shy,” Derek prods – he presses his index finger into Stiles’ stomach, a ticklish spot, so Stiles yelps and pulls away with a laugh. “Play some for me, come on.”

Stiles sighs and looks away, at the floor, feeling the blush creeping up on his face. God, he hasn’t felt like this since he was in fucking high school. Back when everyone thought he was a big loser for wanting to be a songwriter, back when no one thought he was going to be able to make it, in his stupid shitty little hometown. “Well, the thing is,” he starts, and then clears his throat. “They’re kinda about…you. And me. You and me.”

Derek stares at the side of his face, and then Stiles finally plucks up the courage to look directly at him, right in the eyes. He seems…shocked. “Me?” He points to himself, like he can’t believe it. “You wrote about me?”

“Just a couple,” he waves his hand again. “A few. A handful. Six, seven.”

“Seven?”

“They were just buzzing around in my head, you know?” He gets nervous. When he gets nervous, he talks too much – it’s one of his more embarrassing character traits. “I had been thinking of it for a long time, most of them. Like, for me, I’m always imagining writing something, even when I don’t mean to, because it’s just how my brain works. I can’t just…I don’t know. I just didn’t want to write them because I was nervous you’d think it was shitty, and we’re not even really together, so –“

“You wrote seven god damn songs in a single night?”

“Mostly,” he mumbles, and then starts nervously chewing on his thumbnail. “It just kinda…spilled out. Once I start it’s hard to stop.”

“And they’re all about me.”

“Well. Yeah.”

“I will get down on my knees and beg you to play one for me, I mean it,” and he does. He is dead serious. He would prostrate himself before Stiles to get him to play for him. It is flattering. It’s been so long since someone has felt this way, about being in Stiles’ work.

“Um, okay,” he laughs, high, tight. Nervous. He gets up and they go sit at the piano, where he grabs his notebook from the night before and starts pulling it open, finding the page he’s looking for. His hands are shaking, he notices.

Derek sits right down next to him on the bench, watching as Stiles finds the page and then sets it up in his music stand. “Um,” he says, and then he nervously fiddles with a couple of keys. “This is the one that’s almost all the way there. The rest are sort of half baked. Um. This one I pretty much finished.”

“What’s it called?”

Stiles bites his lip. “Uh, well. Working title is Vancouver, but I may change it.”

Derek blinks. He’s surprised. What’s there to be surprised about? That trip to Vancouver was everything to Stiles, at the time, and when he thinks back on it…it still is, everything. “You liked it there?”

“Oh, loved it,” he says, tinkering around with random chords for a second.

“Play it,” Derek gestures, and Stiles hesitates a bit. He fumbles around on the keys and then just takes in a deep breath, and he plays it. The chorus, only, because it’s fully fleshed out and locked in. Stiles couldn’t imagine editing it anymore than this.

He delves a bit into the bridge he’s still noodling with, and then sort of trails off and hits some random keys, shrugging his shoulders. “That’s the part I’m still working on, but you get the idea. Um. Do you hate it?”

“I do not hate it,” Derek says, and his voice is low. Stiles turns to look him in the face for the first time since this whole ordeal started, and he finds Derek looking very pensive. Serious, almost. Like he was listening intently, the way one listens to a book on tape or something.

“Because if you hate it, I do not have to put out anything about you. I can come up with other shit. I just write what I know, and these days, what I know is you, so…and I can edit stuff out. Like, whatever you don’t want in there, whatever embarrasses you. Just don’t feel like –“

Derek grabs him. He puts both of his hands on Stiles, on his arms, and pulls him closer, smashing their lips together. Stiles is surprised, he makes a noise into Derek’s mouth and flails his arms a bit, one of his hands landing on the piano with a loud bang of the keys. Then, Derek pulls away, just for a second, and looks him right in the eye.

Derek is not a liar. So, Stiles knows that he means it when he says, “there is no greater compliment to get from you, Stiles. You should know that.”

“Oh,” he murmurs. He doesn’t really know what to say. He doesn’t need to say much of anything, it would turn out, because Derek is kissing him again. Open mouthed, hurried, frantic, kissing. Derek touches him and Stiles leans into the touch, lets Derek kiss him on the neck, kiss his jaw, his cheek, then his lips again. The angle is a bit awkward, because they’re on a tiny piano bench that really was not made to house two fully grown men at any time, but they make it work, force it to work, because Derek apparently can’t keep his hands to himself.

Derek pulls away and tears his shirt off, over his head, and then tugs on the hem of Stiles’, for him to do the same. “Off,” he says, commands more like, so Stiles hurries to rip it off and tosses it to the side. They kiss some more. Stiles feels Derek’s bare chest, because it’s firm and hard and he likes it, and Derek paws at Stiles’ belt buckle, undoes it, undoes the button, tears away from the kiss and stands.

He picks Stiles up by his hips and tries to bend him over the piano. It really does not work. There’s no elbow space, barely any room for him to put himself – plus, this is Stiles’ most prized possession. He does not want to do something stupid like fuck on it and break it, somehow. So Stiles laughs and shoves Derek’s hands away, gestures to the bench.

“Fine, yeah,” Derek agrees, breathless. He’s got this crazed look in his eye, like he’s going to absolutely lose his fucking mind if he can’t get inside Stiles in the next fifteen seconds. Stiles feels good, being wanted so god damn badly, especially after playing his music.

No matter how many times he writes, how many times he plays for people, there is still something so vulnerable about it. To expose yourself and then be fucking wanted like that…it’s more than flattering. He takes his jeans off, then his underwear, and Derek hastily does the same, without taking his eyes off of Stiles for a single second. He’s got lube in his jeans pocket, because he seems to never travel anywhere without it, which is funny when they’re not fucking but incredibly helpful when they are.

Stiles climbs up onto the bench, on his knees. He closes the keyboard lid, so he can rest his arms there without a really bad soundtrack in the background of their fucking, and Derek pushes him over, puts his hand on the back of Stiles’ neck, starts prodding at Stiles with the other. “I want you so fucking bad,” Derek tells him, sliding two wet fingers in. Stiles nods his head, because he wants Derek, too. “Anyone would be insane, to not want you to write about them.”

“You liked it?” Stiles asks. He looks over his shoulder, while Derek pushes a third finger in. Derek meets his eyes, direct, and honest.

“Yes,” he says. “You are the most talented person I’ve ever met.”

“Whatever,” Stiles rolls his eyes. But Derek shakes his head – he will not allow Stiles to not believe it.

“I mean it. Every day I wake up and can’t believe you want anything to do with me.”

Stiles doesn’t know what to do with that. Because sometimes, that’s how Stiles feels about Derek; that Derek must be nuts, totally off his rocker, to want anything to do with Stiles.

Derek lines himself up and pushes in. Stiles is uncomfortable up here – his knees hurt, he’s bent at an awkward angle, and Derek doesn’t seem to be loving it too much, either. He moves a few times, but he curses under his breath after only thirty seconds and pulls out. “This isn’t…” he starts, and then he takes Stiles by the hips again and tugs him down, off the bench. “Fuck it,” he says, “get on the floor.”

“You’re kidding,” Stiles says, even as he slowly starts to do as he’s asked. He gets down on the floor, on his hands and knees, where he’s likely to get carpet burn from allowing this to happen, and Derek gets down right behind him.

They’re really going to do it. They’re going to fuck on the floor.

Derek slides in again, and this time, it’s better. He grips Stiles’ hips, and he pauses for a moment, just letting himself be inside of Stiles’ body. He moves only a bit, just enough that it rubs against Stiles’ g-spot, makes his dick twitch against his stomach. “You can write whatever you want about me, baby,” he says, and he means it, like he means every god damn thing he says. “Just make sure to include how good I am at making you come.”

“Like the world didn’t take one look at you and know you were a sex god, already.”

“I just wanna hear you sing it, is all.” He thrusts, hard, then keeps going, so Stiles bears down on his upper arms and closes his eyes. He’s definitely going to get carpet burn. His arms are gonna be red for a day, at least, but he does not care. He arches his back and bites his lip and tells Derek he wants it harder, more, don’t stop, and Derek does anything that Stiles asks of him.

Stiles comes on his fancy, expensive carpeting. It takes him by surprise. Derek fucks it out of him like it’s his job to do so, and Stiles keens, shakes, shudders as he ruins his floor. He says, “oh fuck,” and goes lax. Hs body keeps moving, more carpet burn, as Derek fucks his own orgasm into Stiles’ body. “My maid is going to be like, are you fucking kidding me?”

“I’ll clean it up,” Derek grunts after he finishes. “I’ll clean it. Jesus.”

Derek slides out, and Stiles immediately falls down onto the ground, turning over onto his back. Derek gets down right next to him, so they’re lying next to each other, completely naked, staring at Stiles’ ceiling. “That was good,” Stiles tells him, and Derek nods like he agrees. “You like me writing about you, I take it.”

Derek turns his head, so then Stiles turns his, too. They’re only inches apart, staring at one another, blinking. Derek says, “I never dared to hope that you would. But I fantasized.”

“About me writing songs about you?”

“Big time. Even if it was just, like, I fuck this guy as a joke. I wouldn’t care.”

Stiles laughs out loud. “Oh, that old banger. I fuck this guy as a joke, la la la.”

“But I’m serious. You could write anything you wanted about me. I’d lick the floor you walk on, Stiles, I can’t believe you don’t know that.”

Stiles turns away and looks back up at the ceiling. It’s weird to think about. Stiles has gotten so used to having to work, and work, and work, at keeping people around him, so they won’t abandon him. He forgot what it was like to have someone be willing to do that for him, too. And what’s really great, is that Stiles doesn’t ask. Derek does these things and says these things because he wants to, because he means them.

It has been eons, since the last time that a man made Stiles feel this way. Even at the height of his obsession with Matt, Stiles never felt this way. “Derek, I’m gonna say something, and it’s kinda a bit much, but it’s the truth.”

“Okay.”

“You are important to me. You make me really happy. No one else…you know.” There really is no one else in his life who can make Stiles happy this way, anymore. There’s no one else Stiles trusts enough to let them try to make him happy this way.

Derek leans over and kisses Stiles on the cheek, the forehead, the lips. He pulls away and says, “I feel the same about you.”

Stiles drums his fingers on his bare chest. He stares at the ceiling and he feels silly, beyond silly, even asking this question, but Derek has been so kind and patient, he deserves to know that Stiles really isn’t just fucking him, at this point. That Stiles does not consider Derek to be just some guy he knows who he happens to fuck. “Do you maybe wanna…” he hesitates. Then he clears his throat and starts over. “Do you maybe wanna date? Not, like, really be in a relationship. But. Date. You know.”

“Date,” Derek repeats. “Like we’re in high school.”

“Yes,” he snaps his fingers. “That’s exactly what I mean. Like high school. That’s where I wanna start. Like we are in homeroom together. That’s a safe space for me, right now. I can’t be – I just can’t be –“

“You really don’t have to explain, it’s all right. Whatever works for you,” he’s smiling. He stares up at the ceiling and smiles, all teeth, and Stiles blushes. “I’ll take you to prom.”

“I’d like that,” he says. “At my real prom, I went with a guy who tried to get me to have sex with him in the bathroom.”

“Yikes,” Derek whistles. “At mine, I went with this girl who got too drunk and puked on my rental suit. My mom went insane. She had to pay for the thing.”

“Yikes,” Stiles repeats back to him. They should probably get up, and they should probably clean the come out of the carpet before it really sets in, but neither of them move. For the first time since they met each other, Stiles reaches down and grabs at Derek’s hand. He laces their fingers together, sure and tight, and Derek smiles at him.

Nashville lights up at night like Christmas morning – it was what he liked the absolute most about it. The neon signs for bars and music halls, the glimmering lights off the bridge shimmering on the Cumberland River. It reminded him of waking up and going downstairs in the morning to see his living room lit by Christmas lights from the tree, presents scattered across the floor underneath it. It’s so silly when he thinks about it now, but to him, Nashville was the embodiment of everything he spent his childhood and adolescence dreaming about. Music. Lights.

On the plane as they start to make their descent, Stiles gets a brief look at the river and its crossings, before he shuts the blind on his window. He grits his teeth and goes a bit stiff, staring dead ahead at the back of the seat in front of him.

Most of the things that he has leftover from Matt are the kind that he cannot touch. Memories and traumas and scars inside of his head. Phantom hurts and phantom touches. The fear. The paranoia. The inability to fully commit to someone else.

But Nashville is the thing he can touch. It’s a tangible nightmare. The water is real, the bridges are real, the street and the apartment that sits on it are real, the restaurants, bars, and even the lights. Those are real. He can’t make them go away by ignoring them or drowning them in liquor.

Derek shifts next to him. It reminds Stiles that he’s there. He turns and looks at him – he’s got on dark jeans and a black t-shirt, so he could be anybody else on planet earth, really, but he’s not just anybody else on planet earth. He’s playing solitaire on his phone. Stiles watches his fingers move on his screen, watches him think about what moves to make, watches him win and then immediately start a new game.

“You’re staring,” Derek says.

“Watching you play cards is a lot more enjoyable than looking outside.”

“You know,” he turns his phone off and places it face down on his knee, while overhead the fasten seatbelt signs come back on. They’re almost there. “…I have never been here before.”

“It’s a really cool place,” he frowns. “It’s a real shame you’re coming with me, the head case who can’t bear to look out the window. Because it’s one of the greatest places on earth.”

Derek looks away for a moment, as though he’s trying to decide what the best way to respond to that would be. When he looks back, he’s smiling. “I bet it’s a shithole.”

Stiles’ lips quirk at the corners.

“I bet it makes Jersey look like the Roman Empire. No good food, no good bars, and especially no good music. Just a scourge on American society as a whole. I don’t really care. I’d rather sit in the hotel all day.”

“Yeah?” Stiles smiles, cocking his head to the side. He knows Derek is just being nice, but he appreciates the gesture for what it is. Derek doesn’t really care about Nashville. And if he does, he can come back and see it another time. “We’ll order Thai food and watch movies.”

“Thai food,” Derek is surprised. “I didn’t know you liked Thai food.”

“Well. The best Thai place in America is in Nashville. In spite of how much I despise this place and have detested the mere idea of returning here, I have, on occasion, fantasized about the food from this restaurant.”

“Whoa. The craving for this food is stronger than your hatred of Nashville?”

“Oh, fuck yeah. It’s gonna blow your mind.”

“I’m starving,” Derek is always fucking starving, so this is not news, not in the least bit. Stiles has it on good authority that in a survival situation where food was scarce, Derek would flat out die at the prospect of having to ration or even just fucking skip breakfast.

They land. Stiles had spent time looking at himself in the mirror back in New York, pointing at himself and repeating, over and over, you will not fuck this up. You will not have a mental collapse over being in Nashville. You will be normal. You will show Derek a good time even if it kills you to do so. You will survive this, god dammit. He had psyched himself up, done mental exercises, prepared himself, and did his best to not ever let the anxiety get to him.

Ultimately, whether or not he has a full blown mental breakdown is out of his control. But he can avoid liquor and focus his full attention on Derek and putting on a decent finale for this FUCKING shitstorm of a tour, and maybe that will help him keep it together.

They exit the plane. He’s in that weird tunnel that connects the airport to the plane, where it feels weird to walk, because they’re suspended up in the air a ways, and he panics. It’s not a full blown panic attack, and it isn’t like he’s shaking and crying, but he is definitely panicking. What if he can’t even leave the airport? What if he starts screaming and crying in front of all of these people and TMZ prints it and everyone films it? What if he can’t get out of bed tomorrow just like it used to be the last time he was here? What if he gets stuck? What if he can’t get on stage? What if he disappoints everyone again? What if Matt is here? What if?

He sucks in a deep breath and shoves his sunglasses onto his face and is moving to put his hood up onto his head, to hide, his only defense against the outside world, but then Derek is taking his hand. He laces the fingers together. Stiles grips onto it way harder than is necessary, like a lifeline, like his emotional support dog or something – and it grounds him.

Derek is here. Derek wouldn’t let any of that happen. And if any of it did happen, Derek would be there to help him. Derek could pull Stiles out of any hole that he tried to dig himself into, even the deepest ones. Even the hole here, in this city, that’s as wide as the ocean and as deep as the Marianas Trench.

Out in the actual airport, Stiles remembers that the last time he was here, he was alone. Well, with Boyd. He remembers that he was this sullen, sunken person who hid from any and all eyes, who was half drunk and snapped at the airline attendant who told him she was a fan. That person seems lightyears away, now. It’s hard to imagine being him. That was his lowest point. Crawling back to New York like a burned out husk of a person – a dead tree, left behind, in the wake of a nightmarish devastation.

It’s crowded. Stiles feels claustrophobic even though the space is huge. Derek holds his hand hard and pulls him this way and that, so Stiles doesn’t wind up wandering off and making a scene somewhere, most likely.

By the baggage claim, out of the airport proper, down where the rental car places are and the shuttles and the bus information, there are people waiting for him. They knew he was coming, and they’re all gaggled up, anticipating his illustrious return to his former home. Stiles wonders what would happen if he walked right up to them, took his sunglasses off, and said that he wishes he could be anyplace else on planet earth aside from in this city.

When they see him coming, they don’t scream or cause a scene. They wave and sort of titter a bit, but no screaming. Stiles keeps his sunglasses on, but he tugs on Derek’s hand to go over in their direction. Derek is surprised. He blinks and looks at Stiles as if for confirmation – like he would’ve expected Stiles to want to get out of here immediately, to nose dive into the cab and then barrel into the hotel room to lock the door the draw the shades. This is true. But Stiles can’t just ignore them. They came to meet him. He can stand to be nice to them for five fucking minutes.

As he approaches, they greet him in a bit of a cacophony. Boyd hangs back and does that thing where he sighs and rolls his eyes, because he hates the fans and always has – they irritate him. Stiles gets it. They can sort of be irritating, at times. But they’re always nice to him, if a bit excessively enthusiastic.

He signs copies of The Standing Dead, again and again – and a poster of himself from the Rolling Stone photo shoot with his dead eyes and permanent frown and far away look which he can barely look at. They tell him it’s so good to see him he looks well it’s great he’s back in Nashville they can’t wait for the show tomorrow night is he excited does he ever miss it here, and Stiles nods and smiles and says as little as he can possibly can, while Derek stands there and observes. One girl thrusts a bouquet of roses in his direction, and Stiles delicately takes them from her with a bemused smile.

“I got these for you,” she says, in this panicked tone like she’s terrified he’s going to hate them or throw them to the ground or stomp on them. “Coming back must be hard for you.”

Sometimes, Stiles doesn’t have to say anything. They don’t know him, he’s not their friend, he’s not their brother, he’s nothing like what they think of him as – but sometimes, they’re perceptive. It is hard for him to come back. She went out and got these just for him, to make him feel better.

Stiles accepts them with a nod of his head. “I love them. They’re great. Thank you.”

Her eyes flick to Derek Hale, standing right next to him. She says, “hi.” She sort of looks at him like she cannot believe he exists or that he’s here, even more so than Stiles, whose t-shirt she’s wearing. Every time Stiles has ever met fans with any of his boyfriends present, they’ve all regarded them much the same. Sort of like they don’t know what to do about them. Should they say hi or ignore them? Isn’t this just the jackass who’s inspiring the next record? Shouldn’t we hate him?

Derek says, “hi. I like your shirt.”

She looks down at herself as if forgetting what she had on - it’s a tour shirt, Stiles’ silhouette on it, his name in big red letters. She goes red. Beet red. She does not know what to do with this statement; Derek is joking around, and she is paralyzed by him.

Stiles laughs and hands Derek the flowers to hold, which he does without question, so their wrapping crinkles in his hands. He signs some more and takes a handful of pictures, but then he has to go and he says as much to their dismay. They bid him goodbye and good luck, waving at him and then going back to giggling the second his back is turned.

As they’re walking away, Stiles takes his flowers back and sniffs them, cradling them against his chest. He really does like them. It was thoughtful.

Outside, it’s cold, and dark. Night time, the lights all bright from cars and buildings. Stiles keeps his head low and he vows to look at as little as possible, because he doesn’t know what he’s going to see that’s going to jog a memory, always a bad one, and send him spiraling.

In the car, Derek sits with him in the back, in the middle, so he’s pressed right up against Stiles’ side. “Your fans are insane,” he says.

Stiles keeps his eyes on the back of the front seat, not out the window. He says, “they’re not so bad.”

“They all looked at me like they either hated me or didn’t know what to do about me.”

A smile spreads across his face before he can help it. “That’s precisely how they all feel, yes.”

“Don’t they know I’m the guy from Dead By Sunrise?” He points to his chest with his thumbs, as the car starts moving, as they’re pulling away into the city. “I’m a big deal. They looked at me like I was chopped liver.”

“You’re the dick who’s going to make me cry and inspire their next favorite song,” he says with a lift of his eyebrow.

Derek says, “no I’m not,” so immediately, it’s automatic. Like, of course I’m not going to make you fucking cry, I’d never do that, over my dead body.

“That’s how they see you. You know, Matt was my longest relationship. Most of the time, I’d date a guy for 6 months before he wound up being a dick. They’re sorta just waiting for you to not be around anymore.”

Derek blinks at him, and he’s got this look on his face, like he thinks that’s bizarre. That people just sit around and wait for Stiles’ relationships to crash and burn, because of course, they all will. It’s like when Lydia had told Derek that she didn’t need to actually meet him. Because he would just be gone in a few weeks, anyway.

Then he wasn’t. And he still is here, even now, even in this place.

“You know what I think would be hilarious?” He leans his head back against the seat and turns to Derek with a big, shit eating grin on his face. “If you came to the meet and greets.”

Derek snorts. “That would be hilarious.”

“Like, they walk in, and you’re there. The zombie killer. The pictures would be so god damn funny.”

Derek laughs. Stiles expects him to say oh, that’s funny, but I wouldn’t actually do that – but instead, he shrugs. “Okay. Sounds fun.”

God. If Stiles had asked Matt to come and spend an hour talking to fans, he’d have laughed right in Stiles’ face and then viciously refused. Matt hated the fans. Stiles always wondered if he hated the way they regarded him or left comments on his Instagram about how they hate him and wish him dead, or if he hated that they worshipped the ground that Stiles walked on. If he hated that someone out there actually did really love Stiles, no matter how misguided it may have been.

Derek just shrugs and goes along with everything. It is once again impossible to imagine him with a serious anger issue. The guy exudes give-a-fuck energy.

At the hotel, he gets out and is greeted with cameras flashing and people yelling at him. Derek takes his hand again and walks with him, quickly, over the sound of people asking him what it’s like to be back in Nashville, how’s it feel, how is he, on and on and on. They get to the elevator, and then it’s just the two of them and Boyd tucked away inside, so Stiles finally gets to let his guard down.

He pulls his sunglasses off and he frowns and runs his hands through his hair. How’s it feel to be back in Nashville? How does it feel? The question makes him want to fucking scream.

He glances, out of the corner of his eye, at the security camera in the corner of this fucking box. He thinks about how Derek still has no clue, none whatsoever, that there’s a video, from an elevator just like this one. It doesn’t matter at the same time that it does. It doesn’t feel good to lie to someone who’s been nothing but kind to him, but he has no choice.

The room is nice. It’s a great big suite with incredible views that overlook the entire city, the glistening sparkling neon sea of night life laid out before them to marvel at. But Stiles goes right over and draws the curtains up tight, no light seeping inside, so he can pretend he’s still in the Tribeca place with Derek, with the piano, and the bedroom with the mismatched closet door. It’s preferable to here. Anywhere is. He gets his flowers set up in a vase he digs out of the cabinets.

He sits on the couch and then puts his hands in his lap. He doesn’t know what to do with himself. There’s this strange part of him that thinks that sitting still and being quiet is likely his best bet – then he remembers where he got that from, and it makes him angry.

Derek squats down in front of him and gives him a small smile. He says, “you doing okay?”

Stiles does not know how to answer that question. What’s ‘okay?’ He doesn’t know what it means to even be okay, at this point. “No,” he says honestly, throat tightening up. “I just ….”

“You don’t have to explain,” Derek says, for what feels like the ten thousandth time since Stiles met him. It’s nice in a way, to act however he wants, however his mind and body demand him to act, and to not have to offer up any explanations. But on the other side of the coin, he thinks that Derek is trapped here with him, and that he deserves to know why this trip feels more like a tomb than it does some romantic getaway they’re going on.

Stiles cries. He buries his face in his hands and bursts into immediate tears, just thinking about having to say out loud everything that has been going through his head since the second he got on that plane back at JFK. Big, big crying, overwhelmed crying, can’t even speak or barely even breathe crying.

The city outside asks him if he remembers what a bad idea it is for him to cry. That crying is weak and crying is going to get him in trouble, that someone is going to come over and hurt him for acting this way.

No one does. Derek moves closer and pulls Stiles’ hands away from his face, pulls him down into a big hug. Hugging Derek feels like hugging a great big cuddly stuffed animal, like from when he was a kid. He’s warm and strong, and he smells like comfort and safe, and Stiles cries harder.

This is all he ever really wanted from anyone. A god damn hug that makes him feel safe. Like the city outside doesn’t exist. No cameras. No one watching him.

A throat clears from somewhere to their left. Stiles stays pressed deep into Derek’s body, refuses to move even as Derek shifts and turns his head. “You guys want me to order the food?” It’s Boyd. He’s hungry, apparently.

Derek rubs a circle on Stiles’ back. “You hungry?”

“No,” Stiles cries into Derek’s neck, holding him tighter.

“He should really eat something,” Boyd insists, and Derek nods his head in agreement.

“It’s the best Thai food in America, remember? You’ve fantasized about it?”

Stiles sucks in a deep breath and closes his eyes. Oh, yes. Back when food was enjoyable, he does remember how obsessed he was with that Thai place. He’s tried everything on the menu, multiple times. The owner has got a Polaroid picture of himself with Stiles framed on the wall aside a menu with Stiles’ signature on it.

And, Matt hated Thai food. They never went there together. It is a wholesome, safe memory of Nashville that doesn’t make him want to cry or scream or projective vomit.

“I want spring rolls,” he says. “And noodles. I don’t care what kind. Any kind.”

“Okay,” Derek agrees. He somehow manages to unfurl himself from Stiles’ vicious death grip on him, pulls away enough so that they can look one another in the face. Derek smiles at him. This thin, encouraging smile. “It’s okay, you know? You can cry all you want.”

It’s insane Derek even has to say that to him, but he really really does. Stiles needed the reassurance. “I’m sorry I’m not much fun.”

Derek shakes his head. “I didn’t come here to have fun. I came to see it through.”

In some cosmic sense, Stiles coming back to Nashville at all is seeing it through. When he packed his bags and sold his apartment and left, he was just running away. Nothing was solved. Nothing was finished. He had abandoned any hope of closure long ago – but now, here he is again. Seeing it through. He knew the chapter on Nashville wasn’t closed, has known it this entire time, has known he was still trapped in that bedroom in that apartment downtown.

And he’s known the chapter on Matt wasn’t closed, either. He left it open by running away from him, instead of handling it. It’s getting close to the time where Stiles is going to have to finish it. He knows.

He just isn’t sure if he can actually do it.

@nashvillinski : I MET STILES
@nashvillinski : HE JUST WALKED RIGHT UP AND SAID HELLO IT WAS ANAKSKSKS
@nashvillinski : Derek Hale was with him they were holding hands they are 138383% together
@nashvillinski : some girl gave him flowers and Derek held them for him 🥺🥺
@nashvillinski : Derek didn’t say much, mostly he just stood there lmfao. Stiles was soooo nice he signed everything and smiled at me 😭😭😭
@nashvillinski : he and Derek look cute together in person like I can’t explain it maybe he’s not so bad
@nashvillinski : he was carrying Stiles’ pillow too maybe we have to stan???

Stiles wakes up. He hadn’t dreamed last night which is a miracle in and of itself, but he knows it’s only because he took those crazy sleeping pills Lydia gets for him that knock him out like he literally dies for 9 straight hours. He knew if he didn’t, he’d be up all night in a fit of anxiety, panicking, and not just about the show. But about Nashville in general.

It’s pathetic. But he’s completely resigned to this place dragging him under. Or, almost.

The first thing he sees when he opens his eyes is the little crack of the outside world between the two curtains on the wide window in his bedroom. It’s just a sliver. But he sees grey skies and dead trees and the city, and it reminds him of last time. It’s just like last time. And just like last time, he gets this feeling, like there’s a big monster in the bed with tentacles that holds him down and won’t let him leave, like he’s trapped here, like he couldn’t get up even if he wanted to.

Derek is snoring next to him, which, bizarrely, brings him back to reality. He’s almost never awake before Derek – because Derek typically arises early to go run around somewhere or do any number of other weird workouts (Stiles honestly has no idea). Today, he’s dead asleep still. Stiles pushes the covers off and forces himself up out of the bed.

He sits on the edge for a moment, just staring at the carpet. Nashville is just a city. The show is the same, the same as it’s always been, even if it’s here. It’s good for him to be here. Facing the monster. He doesn’t know if he genuinely believes any of this, but it feels good to think it all the same.

He gets up and brushes his teeth. He almost gets in the shower, but then he thinks he should wait for Derek to get up so they can shower together. In the living room of his suite, he hovers. He can hear that Boyd is up and digging around in his suitcase in the adjoining room, can hear the distant sounds of the busy city street down below.

With a huff, he goes to the window and pushes the curtains open. He stands there and stares out at the sun rising over this city he’s been so afraid of for so long, and in this moment, he feels silly. He can see the river from here, and the famous bridge and all its lights, and the sunrise is all orange and red. It looks like a scene from a postcard – not some nightmare memory of his. He stands and looks for a long time. He tries to file this memory away, as if to overwrite some other memory, some shitty one, like taping over an old school recital from the bottom of a bin in the basement of his childhood house.

He’s so absorbed in it he doesn’t hear Boyd come in the room, until Boyd is putting his hand on his shoulder, startling him. “Hey,” he starts, “I’ve gotta go talk to Erica on the third floor. Are you okay if I…?”

Stiles thinks about how typically he’d go into panic mode, at the idea of being without his security for even ten minutes. But now, he waves his hand and nods. “Derek’s here. Go ahead.”

“Are you sure? Because –“

“It’s fine. Uh, is she pissed or something?”

“She usually is,” he says with a wry smile, “I’ll be back in an hour. Don’t go wandering off.”

Stiles rolls his eyes. Back in the day, he was indeed known to wander away. Or, more accurately, he would dip his security to do any number of stupid things. As a matter of fact, he once fled from Boyd so he would be free and alone to go drink at a bar with Josh Perry and then had sex with him in the bathroom. Which was funny, but Boyd went ballistic on him.

That sort of thing hasn’t been a problem in years. Stiles really hasn’t been the unruly, crafty person he used to be in so long.

Boyd leaves with a click of the hotel door, and Stiles takes one last long look at the rising sun and the city, before he digs out the room service menu. He orders enough food for ten people, because Derek eats like ten people, and then he busies himself with picking up the mess from last night.

The takeout containers are all still sitting on the coffee table in front of the television, where they had watched Scooby Doo because it was the only half decent thing on. He sweeps them all into the trash and then ties it up and sets it to the side to make cleanup easier on housekeeping.

The food comes quick. Likely because everyone on staff knows who’s staying in this room, and they all scattered like mice the second the order came in, to get it done as fast as possible. This only becomes even more apparent when he pulls open the door and the girl who’s delivering the food cart nearly knocks over the orange juice pitcher at the sheer sight of him.

He beckons her inside with all the food and as she comes in, she looks around with big eyes, as though she’s looking for something to go report back to the kitchen with. Something juicy, like Stiles is shacked up in here with five different guys, or there are empty liquor bottles, or just something. But there’s nothing. They had eaten and gone right to bed last night; no crazy party, no wild orgies, nothing of the sort.

“Give me a second, I’ll grab you a tip,” he tells her, turning on his heel to find his wallet. She stands there stuck frozen on the spot, and still has not spoken a single word. Stiles absently wonders if maybe she rallied for the opportunity to be the one to take the food up, because she’s a fan, and now that she’s actually here in Stiles’ presence she can’t even come up with anything to say to him.

It gets worse for her when Derek groggily emerges from the bedroom, wearing nothing but his underwear, hair mussed, rubbing at his eyes like he literally just woke up not ten seconds ago.

She says, “oh my god,” in this quiet, panicked whisper.

“I smelled the food,” he says. Of course he did. He’s a great big golden retriever masquerading as a human being.

Stiles can’t stop himself – he grins from ear to ear, shaking his head. As he hands the hotel girl a wad of crumpled 20’s, he flicks his head in Derek’s direction, because he can’t help messing with her. “Though, that’s enough of a tip in and of itself, huh?”

She goes so red she may as well explode. Then, she accepts the money and clears her throat, plucking up the courage to finally speak to him. “Thank you,” she says, shaky. Then, she turns and leaves, stiff, like she’s just been through hell and back.

As soon as she’s gone, Derek says, “I didn’t expect you to be up before me. You fucking went catatonic after you took those pills.”

“Oh, it’s the good shit,” he starts grabbing food off the tray and setting it out on the coffee table, “it’s like dying but, like, softly. If you take too many I think you go into a coma.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.” Derek sits down in front of the food, still undressed, and grabs a handful of bacon. He crunches on it by the mouthful, watching Stiles try to pick between pancakes or the omelet. “No nightmares last night?”

Stiles shakes his head.

Derek eats some more, quiet. He seems to be thinking pretty hard about something, staring down at the food and eating robotically. He’s gotta be wondering what the right thing to say or do would be. He’s wondering if he should be addressing the elephant in the room, or ignoring it, or maybe dressing it up so it’s not so bad.

Having to take care of someone else’s feelings, all the fucking time, must be exhausting. Stiles can’t imagine what he would be saying or doing if he were in Derek’s position, so he sits up and says, “you know, you don’t have to act like I’m fine China, or something.”

Derek is swallowing a gigantic triangle of pancake. He shakes his head, quickly forcing the food down his gullet so he can hurry up and respond to that. “I’m not…that’s not what I’m doing.”

“Kind of,” Stiles smiles at him, thin. “I mean, it’s cool. I’m just saying, you know. I’m good.”

“You’re good,” he repeats, like this is a ridiculous thing to say. “You cried your eyes out for an entire hour last night. You only stopped crying because I put noodles in front of you.”

Stiles waves his hand, like that’s nothing. It’s certainly not the record, that’s for sure.

“I guess I just don’t want to say or do the wrong thing,” he admits this a bit cautiously, like he thinks Stiles will be offended. “I want to be helpful. Not just….some asshole who eats all the room service.”

“You know what’s helpful? Distractions,” he takes a sip of orange juice, watching Derek’s reaction. He seems a bit clueless, because he generally is. Stiles explains further. “I’m talking about having sex and all that.”

“All that?”

“Yes,” he averts his eyes to his omelet, cutting a chunk off with his fork just to play with it a bit, “you know. Derek stuff.”

“Derek stuff?”

“I mean, just how you normally are.”

“How I normally am?”

“Do you need a translator?” Stiles asks him with a huff, so Derek blinks at him – he’s lost, is still lost, even though Stiles feels he’s being clear. “Like, how you would act if you didn’t know I was… if you didn’t know about all that stuff.”

Derek puts his fork down and wipes at his mouth with his napkin. So, Stiles knows he’s about to say something really serious. “You think I’m treating you like a wounded animal.”

“You are.”

“Well, first off, you are one. Second off, this kind of stuff doesn’t come with a guide book. I have never in my life dated someone who has been through what you have. I’m just fucking treading water.”

“I want to be normal,” he insists. “I want to – I want. I want to forget. Like, hit the reset. So I can have a normal healthy relationship and you don’t have to walk on eggshells.”

Derek puts his hand on Stiles’ back, and he smiles. It’s kind of a sad smile. “That is not the situation that we are in, baby.”

It isn’t. Derek doesn’t lie, and he doesn’t sugar coat the truth, because doing so is always ultimately worse in the long run. Stiles needs to face these things head on, instead of pretending they do not exist, burying them, digging as deep as he can.

They will come back up. In worse ways. In ways so bad Stiles can’t even imagine them. He’s right. They can’t pretend this is all normal. It isn’t.

Stiles is still just playing with his food, instead of actually eating it. Christ, he thinks. Jesus Christ. There’s not much to say. “Well,” he starts.

“You have this idea in your head that behaving in any way that suggests you’ve been through what you’ve been through would be the worst possible thing. I don’t mind,” he shrugs. “You could lock us both in here with the lights off just to cry some more, and I wouldn’t mind. You don’t have to pretend.”

He takes a bite, just for something to do, to give him an excuse to not immediately say something. When he swallows, he keeps his eyes down. “Then I’m not the boy from the posters,” he confesses, and Derek sighs, because he immediately knows what Stiles means.

Derek had told him, in Vancouver, at the dinner table, that Stiles was always the unattainable fantasy he had. He thought Stiles was this attractive, talented, smart, funny, worldly person who was good in bed because he’s slept with so many men, who would know the best restaurants and would go on vacations to Greece and Ibiza and write songs and just be…perfect. In the glossy pages of a magazine hanging on a bedroom wall, Stiles can look pretty perfect.

But he’s not. He’s this fuck up with problems that drinks too much and has complete breakdowns over going to certain cities.

“I don’t want the boy from the posters,” Derek tells him, tone even and direct. “I want you. You are better than any idealized bullshit.”

“You’re being nice,” Stiles accuses, but Derek shakes his head.

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

Yes, he is. He’s here. He had held Stiles as he cried, and he got into bed and let Stiles cling to him like a stuffed animal, like a comfort object, because that’s what Derek is to Stiles, anymore. A security blanket. He had done all of these things without complaint. Nobody does shit like that just to be fucking nice.

But Stiles has never had a boyfriend like Derek Hale before. This is unchartered territory. This is unfamiliar terrain. And it isn’t just because this is his first boyfriend after the worst three years of his entire life, his first boyfriend after his life completely changed.

It’s because Derek Hale isn’t like anyone else Stiles has ever met. He’s singular. He’s not just another guy.

“Well,” Stiles says again, shrugging. He isn’t sure what else there is to say. “Can we still have sex in the shower?”

“Obviously, yes.” Derek smirks at him. “That’s a healthy distraction.”

“Your huge dick.”

“Apparently, not as big as Matt Harding’s.”

Stiles is surprised that anything involving Matt’s name or even just a reminder of him could possibly make him laugh. But this does.

“Still jealous, are we?”

Derek shrugs. He’s still undressed, sat on the couch, eating breakfast, casual as all get out. This exact thing is the wet dream of thousands upon thousands of people, and yet, it’s happening in real time to Stiles Stilinski, of all fucking people. There have been a lot of pinch-me moments since Stiles met Derek, and this is just another to add to the list. Derek is such a fucking man.

And this moment is just another song to write, in all honesty.

It’s only a week and a half until Thanksgiving, and that coinciding with the final show of the tour makes the crew all chummy and nostalgic. Of course they throw together a Friendsgiving event the afternoon before the show, that Stiles only finds out about a mere couple of hours before it’s meant to happen. Apparently, most of the crew figured he’d be too drunk or too useless to attend. Which is fair, at the same time it makes Stiles feel like absolute shit.

While he may be useless, he’s not too drunk to go eat with the people who have been working their asses off to keep this tour going, even when Stiles was actively trying to sabotage it, at times. And truth be told, he really wants to go with Derek, so everyone he works with can actually meet him. There have been hundreds of articles, thousands of pictures, likely millions of tweets and general public opinions – all about Stiles and Derek – but most of these people have not even seen him in person, let alone actually met him. Stiles has sort of been hoarding him to himself.

As such, it’s not a surprise that the sight of him walking in alongside Stiles draws more than a few double takes and a whole bunch of whispering. Stiles does his best to ignore it, and Derek seems completely oblivious. There’s a buffet table full of food that’s absorbing all of his attention, after all.

Derek is not shy about taking food. He fills a paper plate to the point of it nearly groaning in protest, where it’s almost ripping clean in half as he holds it in his hands.

“I shudder to think of the amount of time you’re going to have to spend in the gym after this trip,” Stiles tells him as they sit at an empty table, a bit away from everyone else. “You’ve done nothing but eat since we left.”

Derek sops cranberry sauce all over a turkey slice, so it’s like looking at a bloody carcass. “Don’t worry about it,” he says with a lift of his eyebrow. Which means he’s going to have to practically live at the gym the second he gets back from Nashville. He’s got a movie to promote coming up right after the holidays, after all – it wouldn’t do if he got even an iota less hot, over his break. “I don’t mean to bug you, but I need clarification on how serious you were about coming to my mother’s house for Christmas. I need to let her know at Thanksgiving if you’ll be coming. She would never forgive me if I didn’t give her time to prepare.”

“Prepare?”

“Oh, it’s a big deal,” he laughs, as though it’s funny. “If she finds out company is coming, she’ll spend three straight weeks scrubbing the walls and adjusting the furniture. Especially because you’re…” he gestures around the room with his fork, to the crew who builds his stage he comes up with, the band who plays the music he writes. As if to say, you know, because you’re famous.

“Um,” Stiles starts, poking at his mashed potatoes. Really, he should say he isn’t going, because he’s not exactly the type of person people bring home to their mothers. The trouble is, he wants to fucking go. Even knowing his sisters and his mother and his aunts are going to harangue Stiles to within an inch of his life. He just… wants to. “You can tell her to start scrubbing. I’ll be there.”

Derek has got a mouthful of food, but he smiles, pleased. Stiles would have expected everything in their relationship to change the second they agreed to officially be together; but really, it’s been the exact fucking same. Which really only speaks to the fact that they never really were anything but together, even when they were denying it.

Scott sets his plate down at their table and immediately sticks his hand out to Derek, for him to shake. “I’m Scott,” he says.

Derek shakes his hand. “I remember. You told me you hated me at the album release party.”

Like this is irrelevant, Scott waves his hand, water under the bridge, not even worth mentioning. “I hate everyone Stiles dates. It’s my job. Men are pigs. Plus, after what happened last time, I don’t really pull any punches.”

Stiles looks at his food and he feels shitty, because Scott has no idea what really happened last time. He thinks that Matt was shit, yes, and controlling, yes, and manipulative, yes, but he does not know the full extent of it. Stiles still has it locked away, in the same safe Lydia keeps the incriminating flash drive.

Erica never sits and eats with them. She has hardly looked in Stiles’ direction in weeks, as a matter of fact – likely too wrapped up in her new relationship with Boyd to really give much of an effort to give a fuck about what’s going on with Stiles any longer – but now here she is, setting her plate down right next to Scott, and sitting down. She doesn’t say anything, just gives Stiles a bit of an odd look, and then starts eating.

“Uh, this is my bass player,” he says to Derek with a nudge in his side. “Also, Boyd’s girlfriend.”

Erica snorts. “I’m surprised you even knew that,” she snaps at him. Stiles blinks. This is exactly what he expects from her lately, anyway, so he doesn’t have much of a reaction. What does surprise him is the way that she seems to immediately regret having said that. She clears her throat and shakes her head, reaching for her water glass to take a great big sip, like she’s taking a moment to compose herself. When she’s done, she sets her glass down and says, “I mean, you haven’t said anything about it.”

Right here, in front of Derek and Scott and who knows whoever else is listening, is not really the best time for any kind of heart to heart with Erica. But Scott is simple in the head and Derek is preoccupied with seeing how much stuffing he can fit in his stomach, so he decides, fuck it. “It’s not as though you and I really talk.”

Her face pinches together. She wants to get mad and yell at him and say shitty things to him – Stiles can see it all over her face. But, for whatever reason, she stamps down this desire. She says, matching Stiles’ energy “it’s not as though you’ve made any effort to talk to me.”

There are a lot of different ways to take that statement. Erica has been known to talk in code before, and she is particularly partial to passive aggression, and this is just such an occasion. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Derek is listening. He’s eating, bite by bite, but he is looking between Erica and Stiles, again and again, like he’s watching Wimbledon.

“It means,” she says, through grit teeth, “I don’t know a whole bunch about your life anymore. Not like I used to.”

“What’s there to know?”

She stares at him. And it’s like her eyes are seeing clean through to his very fucking center. “Apparently, quite a bit.”

Scott says, “you’re being a dick,” to her, but neither of them acknowledge that. They stare at one another. Something occurs to Stiles in this moment, and it comes organically, so Stiles is almost certain that it’s the truth, even if he has no evidence of it. It’s why Erica is holding back from getting in his face and screaming at him or being shitty, which she never had any problems with on a normal day. It’s why she’s sitting here at all, in spite of the fact that she’s barely cared to speak to him for months. It’s why she’s looking at him like that.

Stiles stands. He says, “you don’t know what you’re talking about,” and picks up his plate. He walks the ten steps to the trash can and dumps his half eaten food into it. Behind him, he hears the distinct sound of a chair being pushed out.

“Excuse me,” Derek says, and then there’s footsteps following behind Stiles, because wherever Stiles goes, Derek has to follow. Stiles barely notices. He has to get out of this room, and he has to go and find Boyd, right fucking now.

He pushes out the double doors and finds himself face to face with a long hallway, the bowels of the venue, and then Derek is right behind him. “What was all that?” He asks, but Stiles can hear Boyd’s voice down the hall to the right, so he follows it without a word. He’s got tunnel vision. His heart rate spiked. All he can think about is the way that Erica had fucking looked at him, back there.

Like she felt fucking sorry for him.

He rounds the corner, and Boyd is there. He’s got his arms crossed, and he’s talking to Frank, nodding his head, looking very serious. The two of them nearly always look serious, so this is nothing out of the ordinary – Stiles charges forward with Derek hot on his heels and he says, “I need to talk to you alone,” looking right at Boyd.

Boyd blinks. He says, “we’re kind of in the middle of –“

“I don’t give a fuck,” he barks, and Boyd blinks again. Derek is hovering to the side with no expression on his face except maybe moderate confusion, while Frank just fucking stands there like a tree. “Did you tell Erica?”

There’s a pause. Frank leans back against the wall, like he’s settling in instead of making any moves to walk away. After all, he’s not totally clueless on this particular subject. He’s been given the strict instructions to keep Matt Harding away from Stiles at all costs. And he heard some of the fights. It’s not a mystery to him.

Boyd’s jaw works. “Tell her what?”

This evasion is really all the answer that Stiles needs. Yes. Boyd told Erica. He told her, and now she knows, and then the game of fucking telephone is going to start, where everyone is going to hear some twisted account of what really happened, and they’re all going to look at him the same fucking way that Erica just had.

Pity. Stiles can’t stand the fucking thought of being pitied.

He raises his hand like he’s going to slap the living daylights out of him, says, “you son of a bitch –“ and jerks forward to do just that. Frank catches his wrist and Derek moves at the same time, reaching his hands out towards Stiles and then hovering them in the air, waiting for Stiles to try and strike again.

“What the hell am I supposed to do?” Boyd is mad, moving forward and furrowing his brow. Frank’s got Stiles held back, and he’s much stronger and bigger, so as badly as Stiles wants to hit Boyd, he can’t. “Lie to her?”

“That’s my life you’re fucking with, that’s my god damn life,” he shouts, livid, so fucking angry he’s shaking. “Who else have you told? My dad, now Erica, who else?”

“I’m not just telling everyone and anyone –“

“Don’t you understand the gravity of what happened to me?” He elbows Frank in the side to try and break free, but it’s no use – he holds him, steadfast, and isn’t letting go for anything. “What would happen to me if everyone found out? You don’t care!”

Boyd pinches the bridge of his nose and lets out this deeply exhausted sigh. “She knew. She didn’t know, but she knew. She asked me, god dammit, she asked me!”

“I want you gone,” he snaps. “I will get you fucking fired, I’ll sue you for breach of fucking contract –“

“No you won’t,” he rolls his eyes. “You’re being fucking hysterical!”

“I can’t do it, I’ve told you, again and again, I can’t do it, I can’t fucking do it,” Frank lets him go. Stiles staggers forward and then presses his hands to his eyes, sucking in a great big breath. “Why would you fucking do that to me?”

“Believe it or not, it wasn’t some plot to ruin your life, Stiles. I just - she’s your fucking friend,” he gestures, and Stiles just shakes his head. He feels as though he doesn’t have any god damn friends anymore. “She should know.”

Derek puts his hand on Stiles’ shoulder. “Maybe let’s go cool off,” he suggests, tone gentle, his spooked-animal voice. Stiles shakes his head. He doesn’t want to cool off.

“I have begged you, and begged you, to not tell anybody, to not –“

“You are so fucked up, you cannot think straight,” Boyd hisses at him. “You need psychiatric fucking help, you’re so fucked up in the head.”

“Say something like that to him again, and we’re going to have a problem,” Derek says – he puts his arm in front of Stiles and pulls him back, away, as if to shield him from Boyd’s words. “How is that fucking helpful?”

“I’m tired of protecting that piece of shit just because Stiles won’t say anything,” he says back, squaring his shoulders. “If you won’t, I will. I know where the video is.”

Stiles shakes with anger, gritting his teeth, holding onto Derek’s arm with both hands just to keep him from trying to hit Boyd again. “You wouldn’t.”

“What video?” Derek asks.

“Stiles,” he leans forward, claps his hands once, like he’s waking Stiles up from a trance. “You are destroying yourself. Hate me all you want. I give a shit about you even if you resent me for it.”

“You have no right to tell anyone what happened to me,” he hisses, even as Boyd turns and storms off down the hallway, likely to go punch a pillow or find something to work his frustration out on. “You have no right!”

Boyd vanishes around the corner, gone, leaving Frank and Derek and Stiles staring after him. For his part, Frank just blinks impassively, then looks right into Stiles’ face. “He has a point,” he says, but Stiles scowls at him and tugs on Derek’s arm, to walk away and leave.

Derek follows. He’s quiet as they walk, like he’s thinking, going over that entire scene over and over in his head. Stiles knows that he was acting crazy, but it’s par for the fucking course for him these days. He knows that one second he was having a good day with Derek and the next second he was having a fit, panicked, screaming at Boyd in the hallways and saying horrible things to him.

He has a right to be angry. What happened to him is nobody’s business to tell anyone else, no matter how good their intentions are. But he also knows that these are his own problems, that he’s taking out on those around him. It isn’t always fair.

He stops and presses his back against the wall of the empty hallway, just breathing, in and out, willing himself to calm down. Derek stops right next to him, leaning on his side against the wall, crossing his arms over his chest and lowering his neck to stare at the ground. He doesn’t say anything, and neither does Stiles. Not for a long time.

Stiles wonders if this is going to be his life. If he’s going to keep grasping at straws, trying to have some semblance of a normal life, trying to become someone who’s not a complete fucking sack of garbage, and failing every single time. If he’s always going to have the devil on his back, if he’s always going to be carrying this dead fucking horse around, the rotting corpse of his trauma, seeping into his relationships, his life, his career, until it finally destroys all of it.

Until Stiles faces what happened to him. Until Matt is forced to accept the consequences for it. Until Stiles tells the truth and stops it from happening to anyone else. He knows he is doomed to repeat the cycle, again and again. This realization is one that has been coming for a long time, but it is crippling, nonetheless. It’s like he’s paralyzed, and he won’t be allowed to move, not until he does the right thing. But the right thing….is poison, in his mind. Poison.

Derek clears his throat. He lifts his head and he says, “what video?”

Stiles palms his face. He had forgotten, that that had come up.

“In the car leaving the bar in Boston, Boyd said – he said there was proof, or something. And just now, he mentioned a video.”

The truth is owed to Derek probably most of all, because he has been so fucking patient and he’s been the only god damn person Stiles can actually rely on, but Stiles….can’t. He’s shitty. He can’t. “Don’t make me,” he shakes his head, closing his eyes. “I’ve gotta go out there and do this god damn show, please, not now, don’t make me talk about it.”

Derek wants to know, and he wants to know terribly, but he says, “all right,” in a quiet voice. He gives Stiles space. He never pushes. He would be happy to stand in this hallway for the rest of the night, until Stiles was ready to move, asking no questions.

Stiles is overwhelmed with gratitude for him. He reaches out and pulls Derek in for a hug, the longest hug, the hardest hug. He squeezes as hard as he can and closes his eyes and holds onto him for dear life, and Derek hugs him back, no questions asked.

“I can’t do it,” he says, over Derek’s shoulder. “I can’t play the show. I thought I was okay but then all that – and Erica – and the fans – I can’t –“

Derek sighs. Stiles feels the movement against his own body. “You have to.”

Yes. Oh, yes, he does. He has never had less of a choice about something in all of his life.

“You are the one who insists that music is your emotional outlet,” he pulls out of the hug so he can take Stiles by his shoulders, hold him, look right into his eyes. “Think of it that way.”

More than half of the songs he’s going to be playing have something to do with this city. It’s not always obvious, in the way he had written the lyrics, but this place is the theme. The blue bedroom. The broken glass. The lights on the water at night. He’s going to get up on stage in the city where his nightmares live and play those god damn songs.

It’s his worst fears realized. And, at the same time, it’s almost like he’s coming full circle. He tries to think of it that way. He knows his time is running up. His days of holding onto this are fucking numbered. He knows. This show is the first nail in the coffin – it’s the catalyst for the unearthing of everything he has been burying, to just fucking finish it.

The temptation to hide, to not get up there, to not set these things in motion, is almost too strong to ignore. But he tries his damnedest anyway. When it comes time for him to get up on stage, he’s got Derek there with him. Standing in the wings, listening to the crowd sing along to Free At Last, watching Scott and Erica and the rest of the band get set up in position.

The stage hand whose name he never learned appears with his guitar, and hands it off to him with a nod of her head. “Last show, huh?”

“Last show,” he agrees. Derek watches as Stiles slings his guitar on.

As he starts to head off toward the platform, Derek grabs him by his wrist and says, “I’m going to be right here, all night long.”

Stiles swallows the lump in his throat. He wishes he were drunk, right now, but he’s not supposed to be doing that anymore. “Okay,” he says.

“Right here,” Derek repeats.

Stiles turns and goes to stand on the x, where he’s supposed to stand, and he grips his guitar. The lights go out and the crowd loses their fucking minds, and Stiles turns and meets Derek’s eyes again. He wishes he could bring Derek onto the platform and take him on stage and have Derek hold his hand throughout the entire show, but he knows that this is something he has to do on his own.

He takes in a deep breath. The platform jerks, and then he’s moving up, up, but he keeps his eyes on Derek for as long as he can, and Derek watches him go.

Up on stage, he’s familiar with the venue. It used to be one of his favorite arenas to play, back when he was somebody else. He walks up to the microphone and stares at his hands, the fretboard, the strings, and he closes his eyes for a second.

This is the thing he has been dreading, for so long. To be here, facing it, it’s like he could fucking vomit. Instead, he plays. He does the fucking songs. The smoke billows out at him and he stands in it, and he wonders if anyone out there understands that he’s the one who’s burning, has been burning this entire time, has been fucking screaming at the top of his lungs, trapped in the flames, while everyone watches and enjoys it.

He does the guitar switch for Nashville. These are fans who have studied the set lists and have it memorized and they know what it means when he gets his acoustic guitar, they know that Nashville is next – and this is their city. Even before he has the acoustic guitar fully in his hands, they’re losing their fucking minds. The screaming is deafening, all encompassing, so loud he winces as he gets the strap around his shoulders.

As he puts it on, he locks eyes with Erica, hovering to the side, frowning at him. She just looks at him, and there’s no venom there, no hatred, no anger. She feels bad. She feels like shit because she’s treated him so terribly and has said horrible things to him because she didn’t know how badly he was suffering. Stiles doesn’t know what to do with her guilt, cannot make her feel better because he’s a fucking open wound himself, so he looks away, at the ground, turning to face the crowd again.

He strums a few times, while the screaming continues. He paces across the stage and he looks out and focuses on faces. Girls, boys, men, women, an entire sea of them, all here just to see him. Many of them have been waiting all god damn night to hear this fucking song. They have sat in their bedrooms and cried and related to it, memorized the lyrics, empathized with him, gotten tattoos, have spent hours upon hours playing it again and again and again, until the CD wouldn’t play anymore. Stiles has spent so long running away from this song, that it’s hard to imagine.

They take it and make it something else. Something personal, to them. It’s something that he has always loved, about music. About writing. That people could hear what he wrote and be touched by it, in their own way. Many of them likely don’t even think about Matt Harding when they hear it.

He goes to the microphone and he looks out at them all. They quiet down, just enough for him to clear his throat, and open his mouth to speak. “You know, it’s funny, because the sentiment of this song is that I would never come back to this city again, for as long as I live. Now here I am.”

They cheer and clap. Stiles stands there, still and quiet, and allows it.

“I know you guys love this song. And I thank you. For listening. It causes me a lot of pain,” his voice cracks in the microphone, and the crowd is so quiet you could hear a fucking pin drop. “And this is the last time I’ll ever play this fucking song. Just for you guys, one more time.”

He pulls away and starts the intro, staring out across the crowd, sort of detached. He’s been detached for so long that it comes naturally to him, singing the lyrics, playing the chords, listening to the crowd sing it all back to him. In his nightmares, he hears this song. But tonight, he just gets through it. It’s like when Matt used to not just hit him, but beat the living hell out of him – Stiles would just get through it. He’d just go still, and small, and hope that it would be over soon. That’s what he’s been doing this entire tour. Making himself small.

But he’s so tired of it. God dammit, he’s so fucking tired of it.

He takes his last bow of the tour to an arena in complete chaos, screaming and cheering his name, and then he walks off stage, for the last time. He hands his guitar off. He stands there and listens to the crowd, watches the lights go on, the post show music starts up, and he just takes it in.

It’s over. This thing he’s been dragging his half dead body through, for months. It’s done. There should be more fanfare. Confetti and champagne and dancers and the whole lot – but there’s not. This moment is quiet and personal. Just him, nodding to himself. He did it. No one else will congratulate him, so he’ll do it for himself.

As promised, Derek is still exactly where Stiles left him; standing to the side, arms crossed, smiling a small smile in Stiles’ direction. The sight of him is like the first glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s all Stiles can do to go to him, collapse right into his arms and sigh.

“You did it,” Derek tells him, with a pat or two on the back. “And you did it so well.”

Stiles pulls away from the hug, and he looks right at him. His hazel eyes, his dark hair, his cheekbones, his smooth skin. He reaches out and puts his hand on Derek’s face, cupping his cheek, and he says, “I know that we have a lot to talk about and I’m a fucking basket case and you – there are things you deserve to know. But I just want to get through this last night. And I just want to go home with you after. And I promise I’ll tell you. The video and – and we can talk. But not now. Is that okay?”

Derek kisses Stiles on the forehead. “You know I can only do what you ask me to,” he says in a low voice, looking Stiles right in the eyes. “I’ll wait. It’s yours to tell me when you want to.”

Derek knows what’s on the video. He doesn’t know the specifics, but he knows if there’s a video, then it’s gotta be of something that Matt did to him. Maybe he doesn’t want to know. Maybe it’d be best if he didn’t. If no one ever did. But it isn’t an option. Stiles gets that, now. It never was.

“I can’t believe it’s over,” he holds both of Derek’s hands in his own and squeezes, shaking his head. “God, I thought I’d die on this tour.” Maybe the only reason he didn’t is because of Derek.

The crew is breaking it all down. The drums, the stage, all of them moving quickly, skirting around where Stiles and Derek are standing. “Your birthday is in a couple of weeks,” Derek tells him, as if Stiles could ever forget that. “I’d like to show you a good time. If you want.”

“A good time?” Stiles smiles, in spite of himself.

“Maybe you want a party.”

Stiles makes a face.

“Okay, no party. Maybe you’d like to go to dinner.”

“Maybe,” he shrugs. He hasn’t given much of a shit about his birthday in years, now. Both the birthdays he had when he was with Matt were complete nightmares; Matt would pretend like it was going to be a special day and then it would just be sex Stiles didn’t want and an inevitable argument that ended with Stiles crying in the bedroom, by himself.

Then, Stiles shakes his head, as if shaking the thoughts away as well - he should really stop constantly comparing Derek and Matt, in his head. It’s not fair to Derek.

Stiles leans in to kiss Derek on the mouth, just as a voice is calling Stiles’ name somewhere to their left. He turns his head and sees, like a specter from his nightmares, his father coming right for them, and Stiles reacts instantly. He shoves Derek’s hands off of him like they’ve caught fire, at the same time that Derek turns to see who’s coming for himself. He has no idea what Stiles’ dad looks like, but for some reason, he takes one look at the man, and he gets a wry smile on his face. Like he can just tell that’s Stiles’ fucking dad.

“Uh, okay,” he says, hasty. His dad is maybe twenty feet away, and he’s stuck watching a couple of crew members hauling a big black box right in front of him, so he he’s not coming toward Stiles and Derek just yet. “…my dad. That’s my dad. He hates everyone I ever date and he can be a real asshole and he’s going to be shitty to you so just put on a brave fucking face.”

He says all this in a rush, in a hushed tone, while Derek just bends his neck low and listens, his eyes going bigger the more that Stiles says. Before he gets the chance to say anything back, Stiles’ father is right there, standing in front of them, with his hands perched on his hips. He’s glaring at Derek very critically. Stiles palms his face and takes in a deep breath. “Dad,” he greets, “uh, what are you doing here?”

“It’s your last show. I thought I’d surprise you,” he doesn’t even look at Stiles as he says this. His eyes are lasering holes into Derek’s head.

His dad likely keeps up with the gossip about Stiles like a fan girl would. He knows who Derek Hale is. He knows that Derek and Stiles are having sex. He is not pleased with this information, not one bit, because he’s never pleased to learn that anyone anywhere is putting their hands on his only son.

“Dad, this is Derek,” Stiles sighs, like he’s completely resigned to this going poorly.

“I know who he is,” his dad says, while Stiles sincerely thinks about pushing Derek back into one of the boxes the crew is working on packing up, locking him up in there, and having him carted away to the trucks, just so Derek won’t have to be put through this.

Derek reaches his hand out, and Stiles’ dad immediately takes it. He’s doing the excessively firm and excessively rough dad handshake, Stiles can tell even just from looking at it. He introduces himself not just as Stiles’ dad, or as John Stilinski, but as Sheriff Stilinski, because of course he fucking does. He sincerely believes that letting all the men that Stiles lets into his life know that he’s the Sheriff of a small town in the middle of fucking nowhere California is going to strike the fear of god in their hearts.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Derek says, with his movie star smile on. Stiles wants to pinch him in the side and tell him to not bother trying to charm Stiles’ dad. The man is uncharmable. He’s like a snake. “Stiles speaks very highly of you.”

“Uh huh,” he narrows his eyes. God, he hates Derek’s fucking guts, for no reason, none whatsoever. “That’s funny, because Stiles has told me next to nothing about you.”

“Because you’re a fucking lunatic,” Stiles tells him through grit teeth, before shooting Derek an apologetic and anxious smile. “Can I speak to you alone for a second?”

Before his dad even has a chance to say yes or no to that, Derek excuses himself and makes himself scarce. He leaves with a lingering touch to Stiles’ lower back, which his father does not miss for one second, and heads off and away, likely to find where the band is congregating to hang out with them for a couple of minutes.

Stiles watches him go, his broad shoulders, his black hair, and then he turns to his dad and frowns. “What are you doing here?”

“I told you,” he insists, “I came to surprise you. Last show. It’s a big deal.”

“You’ve never come to –“

“You’ve never invited me,” he corrects before Stiles can even finish, and Stiles looks away. That’s true. Stiles doesn’t typically invite his dad to come see the shows, hasn’t invited him since halfway through his last tour, when Matt’s hooks were starting to dig deeper and deeper into Stiles’ skin. Stiles hasn’t invited him to a single show on this tour. Partly because they either weren’t or were barely speaking, and partly because he didn’t want his dad to see him like this. “I came to take you home, too.”

Aha, and that’s the truth. That’s what all this is really about. Stiles makes a face and rears his neck back, shaking his head. “Take me home?”

“You need to get away from all this nonsense,” he gestures around, the crew, the guitars, the venue itself, the sound of the crowd still trickling out of the arena. “You need to come home and be with your family, people who actually give a shit about you, not these fucking – Hollywood bullshit people, like Derek idiotic Hale.”

Derek idiotic Hale. “Gee, dad, why don’t you tell me how you really feel?”

“I’m not arguing with you about this,” he snaps, dad voice on, Sheriff’s voice on. It’s the kind of tone that used to have Stiles quaking in his boots when he was a kid, but now just makes Stiles blink and cock his head to the side. “You are going to get on a plane and come back to Beacon Hills.”

“No,” Stiles shakes his head, resolutely. “I don’t want to.”

“You need help,” he takes Stiles by his arm, grips, like he thinks Stiles is going to try to walk away from him. “Kid. You need help, and being around these people isn’t helping.”

“By these people, you’re referring to Derek again?”

“Him, and the rest of them.”

“Derek isn’t like the rest of them.”

His hand tightens. “I’m not going to argue with you,” he hisses, and he means it. As far as he’s concerned, Stiles is already on the plane with him, going back to his hometown, where his dad is going to force him into rehab, force him to talk about what happened to him, force him to stay away from Derek, because Derek is going to turn out to be just like all of them have been.

“Locking me away in my kid bedroom isn’t going to solve anything, dad,” he rips his arm away, but he stands his ground. “It’s not going to make things better.”

“It’ll get you away from these leeches,” he once again gestures to the room at large. “You think these people care about you?”

Stiles takes in a deep breath, and he closes his eyes. “Dad. I am not going.”

“What the hell are you going to do about all this, then? Huh? You’re just going to drink yourself to death, is that it? What are you going to do, Stiles!”

“I don’t know yet,” he says, and he’s serious. Before, he had been holding onto his resolve that he would go the rest of his life, he would die, before anyone ever found out what happened to him in these past few years. The shame, the humiliation, the circus, all of it was too much for him to bear. He knew he’d never be able to get up and tell the truth. He was too much of a coward.

Now, he doesn’t know.

“…look, I’ve gotta go meet some fans, and all that. I’ll get dinner with you after, okay?”

His dad puts his hands on his hips again, and Stiles imagines him in his Beacon Hills Sheriff uniform, with his utility belt on. His gun, his badge. When Stiles was a kid, he thought that his dad was a superhero who could solve any problem, save anyone, protect anyone from harm’s way. Then he grew up. Stiles knows where he gets his alcoholism from, and likely, so does his father, and it kills him to think that he’s passing that problem down, generation to generation.

His dad is no hero. He’s just a man who does his best with what he’s given. It’s more than enough, Stiles has always thought so, but his dad thinks he’s failed his son. What happened wasn’t his fault, but something in his brain tells him that it was.

“I’m worried about you,” he tells Stiles, voice somber and sad. All his father has done these past few years is worry about Stiles. It must be exhausting, all the time. “I don’t want to lose you, again, because of some asshole.”

Even though it’s not appropriate, Stiles can’t help but laugh at that. “Derek isn’t some asshole, trust me. You don’t know him. Seriously, I promise we’ll get dinner and we’ll talk, but I really have to go.”

“Okay,” his dad does not sound convinced, but he doesn’t reach out to try and grab Stiles when Stiles starts to move away. He just stands, frowning, watching Stiles go with a tight expression on his face. He wishes that he could put Stiles in a suitcase and drag him kicking and screaming all the way back to his childhood home, most likely. He thinks that everything would get better, if he could just get Stiles back at home, where Stiles will be under his own close watch, but Stiles knows better.

He would be miserable, there. Miserable. He doesn’t know where on earth he could possibly be happy, but it would not be hiding out in Beacon Hills, that is for god damn sure.

When he walks into the meet and greet room with Derek Hale, the girls from his fan club all sort of balk at them – Stiles hadn’t told anyone that he was bringing Derek along with him, and now they’re all staring like he’s just walked in with an alpaca on a leash, or something. They don’t say that Derek can’t be there or that he has to stand behind the camera, but they do nervously clear their throats and avoid eye contact with him, because he makes them nervous.

They’re more than used to Stiles, at this point. Derek, for whatever reason, they cannot even look at. It’s because he’s hot, most likely.

As they stand against the giant blown up backdrop of the album cover, the small fire in the woods somewhere, Stiles takes Derek by his wrist and says, “I am so fucking sorry about that. My dad is nuttier than most, I had no idea he would be here to attack you like that.”

“I owe you one, remember?” He lifts an eyebrow. “Remember when you got dragged to breakfast with my sisters and my mother, and my mom came close to pulling out her wedding planning workbook?”

Stiles snorts. “Oh, but your mother is a nice lady. My dad is going to cut you open and cook your insides.”

Derek rolls his eyes, like Stiles is being dramatic. Honestly, Stiles sort of isn’t.

“I know we were supposed to have sex and everything after,” he says this loud and clear in front of four people, who all stop and stare at him for a second after he does, but he doesn’t care. “But now my dad is here. I have to have dinner with him.”

“I’ll come,” Derek shrugs.

“You do not have to, seriously.”

“I’d like to come,” he insists, again, and Stiles stares at him.

“Derek. He is going to bite your head off, chew it up, and spit it out.”

“I owe you one,” he repeats, a grin spreading across his face.

Stiles almost starts to do that thing he always does, whenever Derek does something nice to him or for him. Where he immediately calls to mind the memory of Matt being in the exact same situation and being horrible, terrible, making Stiles feel like shit and ruining his life, just to compare and contrast the two men, as if there could ever be a Venn diagram on earth between these two. Their Venn diagram would just be two completely separate circles, not a single part touching.

He shakes his head and, for the first time, does not think about Matt.

“Okay, if you insist. But I warned you,” he wags his finger, but Derek just smiles wider, like he thinks it’s funny. Like the idea of being put on trial at the dinner table with Stiles’ dad interrogating him is more funny to him than anything else.

The first fan gets ushered in, and it’s a fourteen year old girl who immediately bursts into hysterical tears at the sight of Stiles standing there. She doesn’t even barely notice that Derek is there, going through the motions of wrapping her arms around Stiles and hugging him and telling him that he’s important to her and she loves him and he’s so great, while Derek just stands and watches.

When she finally gets a hold of herself enough to pull away and wipe at her eyes, she looks at Derek. She blinks, and then looks to Stiles as if for confirmation. Shakily, she asks, in a whisper, as though Derek would not hear her, “is that Derek Hale?”

“No. Eerily convincing look alike,” Stiles jokes – at her baffled expression, he realizes that she is in the no-humor zone, so he shakes his head and says, “yes, that’s Derek Hale. He had nothing better to do.”

She seems to not know what to do about him. She glances at him, and then immediately looks back at Stiles. “Is he your boyfriend?”

Stiles has been asked this question many, many times before. For months on end, he has been getting asked this question, and every single time, the answer has been no, because it had to be no. Because Stiles wasn’t ready, because Stiles was still stuck in his apartment in Nashville, because Stiles had to keep Derek at an arm’s length away for his own sanity, because he thought that was the right thing to do. All this time of trying, and failing, and trying, and failing, Stiles only ever saw that as evidence that he couldn’t be a normal person with a normal boyfriend.

Stiles has been doing the work. He has been pushing himself every single fucking day, and even when he failed. Even when he got up on that stage in Las Vegas and couldn’t even play his guitar, he was doing the fucking work. Derek is not a guy from a romance novel who comes in and magically fixes Stiles life, because no one is that guy, because life doesn’t work like that – Derek has just been there. Like a rock, in the ocean, letting the waves crash against him again and again. It means more than Stiles could ever say.

“Yeah,” Stiles tells her, “he’s my boyfriend. You want a picture with him in it, as well?”

She immediately agrees, even as she shoots a furtive glance in Derek’s direction again. He intimidates her, it would seem. All the same, she stands right in the middle of the two of them and smiles as the flash goes off, gushes at both of them in thanks, and off she goes.

In the interim period between her and the next fans, Derek turns to Stiles and says, “do you ever get used to people saying shit like that to you?”

Stiles shrugs. “I guess I sort of got numb to it at some point.”

Derek smiles at him, “and since when am I your boyfriend?”

“Oh, whatever,” he blushes and looks away, at the floor. “You don’t have to be so smug about it, you know.”

“Smug?”

“Because you finally wore me down.”

They smile at one another, because both of them know that’s not really how it happened, not even close.

They do the rest of the fans; there’s a group of twenty-something girls who lose their fucking minds when they walk in and see both Stiles and Derek standing there, and a gay kid who about passes out at the sheer sight of them, and some younger kids who sort of regard Derek like they’re seeing a superhero in real time. The pictures come out hilarious, as Stiles had anticipated that they would, and it’s frankly the most fun he thinks he’s had in a long time. It’s miraculous that something not shitty could’ve possibly come out of this Nashville trip, but really, several not shitty things have come out of this Nashville trip.

Stiles and Derek are together for real. Here, of all places on earth. Stiles could laugh out loud at the irony of that shit.

After Stiles and Derek left Nashville, and after the tour was finally over, when Stiles was free and not bound to any sort of schedule, he immediately ran back to his home in Malibu. Derek had to go to California for Thanksgiving and he was going to be gone for an entire week and a half, wiling his time away with his family, while Stiles holed himself up by the beach, decompressing, laying on his couch, staring at his ceiling.

The dinner with Stiles’ dad had been…well, terrible. But not nearly as bad as Stiles would have expected it to be. His dad had been disappointed when he saw Derek walking up with Stiles, instead of just getting Stiles alone to corner him and harass him and demand he come back home, and he had been gruff and awkward at first. Derek was sort of relentless, in trying to get the Sheriff to talk to him, in making an effort to get to know him, even though the man was fucking surly at best and a complete dick at worst.

But, no one got punched in the face, which was a win as far as Stiles was concerned. Likely, his dad is never going to like or trust Derek, which is fine. Even before there was a literal movie villain that Stiles let into bed with him, the Sheriff didn’t like other men coming around his son. Least of all great big ones with anger issues who have beat people up on camera a lot.

Stiles spends his first couple of days alone in Malibu just thinking. He smokes ten cigarettes a day, sits on his back patio with his sunglasses and a frown, drinking wine, and thinks. He never thought he would make it out of a trip back to Nashville alive, but he did it. And not only did he make it out alive, he came out the other side for the better. He thinks about he and Derek’s relationship, and he thinks about the fans, and he thinks about how just ten months ago, he had a hard time even getting out of bed in the morning.

Derek calls him every morning and every night, even when they don’t have that much to talk about. He calls and says that everyone is pretty revved up about him coming over for Christmas, that the Starbucks Stiles used to work at really does have a plaque up just like Laura had said. That he misses Stiles, can’t wait to see Stiles again, wants to be with Stiles every possible waking second.

These are sentiments that used to make Stiles want to throw Derek off a cliff just to give him a wake up call. But now when Derek says shit like that, Stiles just smiles, and agrees and nods his head. He feels the same way. It’s not wrong for him to feel this way. He has spent so much time convincing himself he wasn’t allowed to have anything this nice, wasn’t allowed to feel this way, and now he’s just given up on all that.

Fuck it. Matt took everything from him, and what he didn’t take, he just ruined and left behind. Stiles is learning how to pick up the pieces and fix them, rather than simply standing over the ruins and crying at their destruction.

It is in that vein that Stiles decides to show Derek the video.

Derek is in Malibu the week after Thanksgiving, sitting on Stiles’ tangerine couch. Stiles had promised Derek that he would tell him what the video that Boyd kept mentioning was, but he never actually did, and Derek was sensitive enough to know not to bring it up or try and force Stiles to tell him. Derek imagined what it was, anyway. But he couldn’t really imagine what it was actually like.

They kiss and talk for a while. Derek has got a family picture that he brought with him, and he lays it out on the coffee table, pointing to each individual sister and calling them by them. This one is Mary, and she thinks you’re overrated. This one is Heather, and she wishes you were bisexual because she thinks you’re really cute. This is Aunt Molly, who’s psycho and has lots of cats and will probably ask you really invasive questions about being gay because she was weirdly religious for a while but is now working on being more open minded.

Stiles listens and laughs. He’s never been with anyone who’s had such a big family like Derek, so he gets a bit nervous and he hopes that he’ll make a good impression, and that no one thinks he’s just this shitty fucking alcoholic who uses men like their brother to write his bullshit songs.

In spite of all that, Derek seems giddy at the prospect of bringing Stiles home for Christmas. Because he’s a normal man with a normal family, and he wants them to like Stiles and get to know him and understand what Derek sees in him.

Stiles pushes the family picture away and pulls his laptop closer to them. He clears his throat and says, “I gotta show you something,” and Derek blinks, like he’s surprised. Stiles pulls the flash drive that Lydia had made for him, not the original because she’d never trust him with it, out from his jean pocket, and holds it in the palm of his hand.

Derek stares at it, while the laptop comes to life on the coffee table. He says, “is that…?” He already knows what it is. Stiles doesn’t have to tell him. He had promised, after all, and in spite of what a piece of shit he’s been these last few years, he’s not one to break promises.

He puts the flash drive in and pulls the file up, double clicking it before he can talk himself out of it. Then he just sits, with his hands stuffed into his pockets, as they video plays. As Derek sees it all happen. He watches Stiles and Matt get on the elevator, watches them argue, and then he only makes it as far as the first crack of Matt’s hand across Stiles’ face. The one that sends Stiles against the wall, that has him bent over in pain, clutching his face – he reaches forward and slams the laptop shut.

It’s abrupt enough that Stiles jumps in surprise, breath catching in his throat.

“I’ve seen enough,” he says. He sounds angry. He sounds very, very angry, and when Stiles looks at him, he sees the tell tale signs of him trying to control himself. The stillness. The intense look in his eyes like he’s convincing himself to not get angry, to not lose his temper, to not smash the laptop through the glass of the coffee table, or punch a hole in the wall somewhere in Stiles’ living room.

Stiles waits quietly, as Derek breathes in and out, in and out. He looks at the veins on Derek’s arms, his hands, his legs, how strong he is, how easy it would be for him to treat Stiles the exact same way that Matt had. How if Derek wanted to overpower him, he could. If Derek wanted to beat him, he could.

It’s important for Stiles to know this. And it’s important for him to know it, to acknowledge it, because it goes hand in hand with the knowledge that Derek would never do any of those things. He could. He won’t. It doesn’t ever cross his mind to do those things, because Derek is a real man, like in the movies, like Stiles has fantasized about. All those songs he’s written, they don’t hold a candle to what it’s like when you really find someone worth writing about.

Derek takes in one more deep breath and looks at Stiles. It’s a look that Stiles is familiar with – it’s the one that Boyd had on his face, after he pulled Matt off of Stiles’ body in Nashville. The one that Erica had on her face on stage right before Stiles played Nashville. The one that Lydia had on hers when she showed Stiles this exact video. The one he knows that everyone else is going to have on when he uses this video against Matt, when that day comes, if it ever does.

“What are you going to do with this?” Derek asks, voice even.

Stiles says, “I don’t know.”

“You know you could ruin his entire life with this.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Derek looks at him some more. He will not press the issue, and he will not make Stiles do anything that he doesn’t want to do – he’s just making sure Stiles is aware of what he’s got in his hands. The kind of power that he has. Stiles has never had power over Matt, not even for a second, not even when he thought the guy was in love with him. This is huge. He knows it’s huge. He knows what he’s fucking got. He knew the first second he saw it.

“I’m not ready,” he confesses, and Derek nods his head. That’s all he needs to know. He reaches out and pulls Stiles against his body and holds him. He holds him so hard and tight and long, while Stiles melts into him and imagines that they’re in Vancouver again, in Derek’s big bedroom, with the water to their left out the window. “I don’t want them to know, yet.”

“Who?”

Stiles sucks in a deep breath, against Derek’s chest. “The fans.”

“Jesus, Stiles.”

“They’re going to fucking hate me,” he admits this fear out loud for the first time, curling himself into Derek’s body as much as he can, making himself smaller. “They think I’m so great, and I’m not. I let him…”

“That’s not true,” Derek insists, hugging Stiles closer to him. “Stiles, they’re not going to think of you any differently.”

“And everyone else is going to laugh at me, or hate me, or think I’m exaggerating, or that Matt didn’t do anything wrong, or I did something to deserve it.”

This, Derek really has no place to deny, because it is most certainly what will happen, but he does it all the same. “That’s not going to happen.”

It is going to happen. Derek is just being nice, again. When this gets out, his fans are going to be so fucking disappointed in him. He’s supposed to be this amazing person who stands up for himself and writes exactly what he means and isn’t afraid to tell the truth, and they’re going to see. The rose colored glasses are going to come off, and the curtain is going to fall down, and they’re going to see him for what he really is. Stiles can’t bear the thought of it. And the rest of the world will say horrible things about him. They’ll revile him and call him names and they’ll all hate him, because he’s knocking a guy they all thought was great right off of his pedestal.

Stiles learned a very long time ago that most people would love to see him torn down. He knows some people are going to watch that video and enjoy it. He is sure of it. That scares him, to think of people getting off on his torment. But they’re out there.

All of these things will happen, no matter what Stiles does or says. He can’t stop it. And he isn’t ready. He doesn’t know what’s going to have to happen, to make him ready, to make him brave enough to weather the storm, but he just knows it’s not now.

“I thought you said you didn’t want a birthday party?”

“I don’t want a birthday party, and it’s not a birthday party. It’s a party that happens to also be on my birthday.”

Derek frowns at him in the mirror, fiddling with his collar. “When I offered to throw you a birthday party, you scoffed directly in my face.”

“It’s a party for the end of the tour, that just so happens to coincide with my birthday,” he reiterates, for only the ten thousandth time since Stiles told Derek about this party. Really, Stiles would much rather not have any party whatsoever, but this is less a party for him, and more a party for everyone who spent the last eight months working their asses off on a tour that Stiles was, quite frankly, barely emotionally present for. The least he can do is show up to their party. Even if it is on his birthday.

“I had plans for your birthday, you know,” Derek reminds him, and he’s got a clear case of the sour grapes about this entire thing.

“Oh, what were your plans? Dinner? Sex?”

Derek makes a face in the mirror. “Good dinner. Good sex.”

“We can still do both of those things. After the party,” he turns away from the glass and looks at Derek head-on, giving him a smile that he hopes is a bit of a consolation. “You could just not come, you know.”

Derek laughs, and he shakes his head. “You and I are practically stitched together on our sides. I’d go pretty much anywhere with you.”

That is true. Ever since Derek got back from his Thanksgiving break, he’s been living in Stiles’ Malibu house out of the same suitcase he had packed for a different trip. They go to the beach and hold hands and eat takeout and watch movies and have tons, really gallons upon gallons, of sex. They haven’t spent a single second apart since he got here. Even though Stiles means it when he says Derek does not have to come to this party, there’s a part of him that really dreads the thought of him not being there with him.

Stiles is attached. He wants to bundle Derek up and knit him into a sweater that he can wear all the time. He’s got co-dependency issues, and that’s something he certainly needs to work on, but he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong or unhealthy with his obsession with Derek Hale. He’s like cat nip.

In the backseat of the big black armored car that drives them into LA at sunset, Stiles and Derek spend most of the time kissing. It’s not normal kissing, either – it’s, like, we’ve gotta swallow each other’s tongues or else the world is going to end type of shit. Fuck or die type of shit. Derek presses kisses along Stiles’ jaw and neck and Stiles catches his breath, grips onto Derek’s arm, wants to have sex with him right here and right now, the party be damned –

A throat clears from the front of the car. The passenger seat. Stiles opens his eyes to find Boyd’s glaring at him in the rear view mirror. “There’s other people in here, you know.”

“I would’ve thought you’d learned how to tune me out years ago,” Stiles pushes Derek away all the same, much to Derek’s evident chagrin.

Boyd looks at him in the mirror, again. “Unfortunately not.”

They haven’t really spoken to one another since their fight in Nashville, when Stiles tried to hit him and threatened to fire him and sue him, in one fell swoop. Stiles and Boyd have had lots and lots of disagreements over the years, thanks in a large part to Stiles’ complete aversion to authority figures and being told what to do, but this one…was sort of different. Stiles has wanted to apologize to him, time and time again, but he has bitten his tongue, because he still does not believe that he was wrong.

It was wrong to try and hit him and it was wrong to attack him like that. But what Boyd had done, spreading Stiles’ secrets around like they were his to tell, no matter his reasoning, was not okay. Boyd offers no apologies. Neither does Stiles. They’re at a stalemate.

Derek holds Stiles’ hand and looks out the window, watching the other cars go by, the billboards, the buildings, and Stiles wonders what he’s thinking about. He wishes sometimes that he could climb inside of Derek’s head, like a swimming pool, and go wading through all of his thoughts and secrets and desires. He hasn’t wanted to know someone this personally, this badly, in so long, but it is an old welcome feeling. He can’t wait to go home and see where Derek slept when he was a kid, he can’t wait to go meet all the people that made Derek who he is. It’s nice, to allow himself these things, instead of viciously telling himself he’s not allowed to have them.

Derek turns and meets his eyes, catching Stiles watching him. “You’re staring,” he says.

“I like you,” Stiles admits.

Up front, Boyd makes a gagging sound that both of them ignore.

“Do you think your family is going to like me very much?” Stiles asks, shifting his eyes down to where their hands are entwined, fiddling with Derek’s fingers.

“Most of them already do. Are you nervous?” He asks this question like he can’t believe it, that Stiles Stilinski of all people could ever be nervous, especially over something as silly as meeting Derek’s fucking family. “Don’t be nervous. They’re going to like you. They think you’re a genius.”

“Mary thinks I’m overrated,” Stiles reminds him with a grim smile.

Derek smiles back. “Oh, she’s just pretentious. Once you walk into the room she’ll get star struck and awkward, trust me.”

“I’m just thinking about how many different things have been printed about me this past year,” he stares pointedly downwards, tracing his finger along the back of Derek’s hand. “About the Vegas show, and my drinking, and how I’m a fuck up. All that shit.”

“Well. They’ve also read everything that’s been printed about me. That I’m a psychopath, and I punch cars over minor indiscretions, and I yell at PA’s. They still like me.”

“They have to like you. You buy them cars.”

“So, buy my sisters a car,” he shrugs. He’s joking, Stiles knows that he’s joking, but maybe he should be trying to buy into their good graces. Christ, money is his only redeeming quality anymore. “You’re doing that thing you do, where you overthink everything to the point where you’ve already turned it into a disaster in your head. We’re talking about eating lasagna at my mother’s house, for Christ’s sake.”

Derek says this like it’s a complete non-issue, but it’s a really big deal to Stiles. He just wants to make a good impression. He’s already picked out his outfit, his best jeans and his nicest red shirt, because he’s fucking freaking out about it. Derek’s nonchalance is not rubbing off on him, not in the least fucking bit.

They pull up to the bar where the party’s taking place, and the paparazzi are outside. Cameras flash as other people of note walk up, and Stiles sighs and glares out the window. Ten months ago, the thought of stepping out here into this lion’s den would’ve made him have a complete panic attack, would’ve made him clam up, go still, to the point where he’d have been totally unable to open the car door for himself.

Now, he just pops the door open with his hand clasped in Derek’s and steps out. He accepts the flashes, the clicks, the people calling his name, and he ignores it all. He even smiles a little bit.

The place is loud inside. It’s lit up purple, that’s the first thing that Stiles notices about it; it’s a great big purple room, with white couches and trendy people everywhere, most of whom Stiles can honestly say he does not recognize. There is a big banner over by the DJ booth that says happy birthday Stiles, and when he goes up to the bar to order he and Derek a couple of drinks, the bartender says his tab is getting taken care of by Lydia.

He turns and has to lean into Derek’s ear to be heard over the music, while they wait for their drinks to come. “Drinks are on my manager tonight, apparently.” Because what better way to say happy birthday to the struggling alcoholic than providing him with an open bar?

They go and find a spot to sit, and wind up at a couch right across from someone he’s never seen before and one of the Queer Eye guys that Stiles absolutely fucking despises. Who put together the guest list for this thing, he thinks bitterly, shoving his face into his drink and rolling his eyes. Derek presses his body right up against Stiles’ and endures it, as people come up to them and wish Stiles a happy birthday and congratulations for the end of the tour.

People either ignore Derek completely or reach their hands out to shake once, quick, before focusing all their attention right back on Stiles. They’re shmoozing to him, anyway. Some of these people, other artists or producers, come to shit like this just to get their name in Stiles’ head, just on the off chance that when he’s putting together his next record, he’ll think of them. It’s all fake bullshit. Stiles drinks and holds Derek’s hand. This isn’t the worst birthday he’s ever had, but it’s climbing up to the top ten shittiest list more and more as the night goes on.

Then, Erica comes walking up. She’s in a skin tight black dress that leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination – it’s so absurd of a dress that Derek actually double-takes her when he sees her coming, probably completely unable to help himself. She is ridiculously hot after all, so Stiles cannot really blame him.

She sits down right next to him on the couch, and she purses her dark purple lips for a moment, looking at him. She looks at Derek, and sticks her hand out toward him. “Hi. I’m Erica. We never formally met.”

Derek shakes her hand and nods.

When she takes her hand away, she sets it down in her lap and sighs, giving Stiles that look again. You know. The I feel sorry for you look that Stiles hates so much. “I was such an asshole to you all year long.”

Stiles does not want to have this conversation. Not here, or anywhere, or ever. He waves his hand like it’s fine, it’s whatever, just forget about it, but she keeps talking.

“I know you’re, like, beyond pissed at Boyd, but it’s not necessarily his fault,” she grins, showing all her teeth, and it’s a bizarre facial expression for her to make in this moment. “I more or less wrestled it out of him after months of harassing him about it. Then when he told me, I was just like…whoa.”

“You really don’t have to do this.”

“I kinda do. Because, I’m your friend. I know I haven’t acted like it because I’m a bitch,” another bizarre grin. She’s so crazy. “But I am. And I should’ve noticed…any number of things. Instead I just saw what I wanted to and treated you like shit for it. There’s no excuse. I feel like trash over it.”

Stiles meets her eyes, and they’re sincere, which is rare for Erica. She’s got this tough as nails exterior that offers no sincerity, no tender moments, no softness, none of that, but in this moment, she’s all of those things. She feels guilty and she just wants Stiles to tell her that he doesn’t resent her for the way that she treated him, that’s all she really wants.

He clears his throat. “It’s okay,” he says. He pats her on the arm a couple of times.

Derek sips his drink and is looking away, as if to afford them a little bit of privacy, even though he’s an eavesdropper and is sitting there listening to this entire thing.

“It’s not. I owe you, like, a million hours of girl time for how shitty I’ve been.”

Stiles’ lips quirk at the corners. Girl time. He hasn’t heard that phrase in years. Back in the day, he and Erica used to be very good friends – they bonded over their mutual love of talking shit about people and eating copious amounts of junk food. Erica ironically started referring to their hangouts as ‘girl time’ because by and large, Stiles’ desire to gossip and eat Chinese food was the gayest thing about him, other than liking dicks up his ass.

Once he got together with Matt, that sort of all went away. It was Matt’s biggest goal, to whittle and chisel at Stiles’ friendships until there was nothing left, until all Stiles had was him. Erica didn’t understand why she had a close friend and then suddenly didn’t anymore, and she got angry and she took that anger out on him in unfair ways, because she didn’t see what was really happening. Matt won that round.

“Unless this guy is going to get rid of all your friends, too,” she points at Derek, who tunes back into the conversation, with a bemused smile on his face.

“No,” Stiles shakes his head, patting Derek on the knee. “Not him, trust me.”

She smiles. A real smile. Not the crazy person smile. Then she leans in and hugs him, squishing herself up against him and putting her mouth right next to his ear. “You should ruin his life, Stiles. It’ll be fun. And cathartic.”

She pulls away and sticks her straw in her mouth, winks at them, and stands, vanishing out into the party. It’s not a surprise that Erica finds ruining men’s lives entertaining, considering Stiles has seen her do similar things to men who have wronged her in much less shitty ways than Matt wronged Stiles, so he just smiles at her retreating back and turns to face Derek again. Maybe this isn’t such a bad birthday after all.

“She seems nice,” Derek tells him, and Stiles shakes his head.

“She’s not.”

“Oh,” Derek laughs.

He jabs his straw in his empty drink, all ice and a cherry dug into the bottom of the cup, and he is struck by the realization that his life is completely different than it was at the start of this god forsaken tour. He has suffered so much in these months, and he has failed, and he has made an asshole out of himself, and he’s drank himself stupid, and the entire time, when he was down in it, all he could think was how he’s fucking treading water. He was one wrong move away from drowning the entire time. That’s how it felt.

But looking around now, thinking back on it from the outside looking in, he has to blink and just…take a second. At the start of the tour, he and Scott were barely speaking. Now, they talk every day. He and Lydia were on terrible terms, constantly fighting, and now, maybe they’re not best friends and likely never will be again, but they understand each other. Erica thought he was this great big piece of shit, and now she wants to be his friend again. He had shut his father out and locked the door on him, and now they’re speaking again.

And, Derek. Most of all Derek. His fuck buddy. His friend. That all changed, too. Because Derek Hale went from being the guy that Stiles would not allow himself to have, to being everything to him. He went into this tour with nothing. Some bottles of liquor and a pack of cigarettes, and his pain.

Now, it’s like he’s cobbling his life back together.

He excuses himself to the bathroom and has to kind of search to find it, because he’s never been to this bar before. It’s towards the back, in a hallway, underneath a great big sign with an arrow pointing down into the darkness of it. It’s a bit of a long hallway with minimal lighting, but there are a handful of people milling around, tucked away into corners, murmuring to one another to get away from the loud music and lights of the main room. A couple of them recognize him and say hello to him and he says hello back, before dipping into the men’s room to piss.

As he’s washing his hands, rubbing the soap all over, he glances up and meets his own eyes in the mirror. He blinks at what he sees. He does not look miserable. It’s depressing that this is where the bar is set for progress, but Christ, it’s something. He doesn’t look hungover or exhausted or sad or too thin – he looks…like himself. The kid from before, the one who hadn’t gone through all that bullshit. Older, yes, but it’s him.

He dries his hands off and tosses the paper towel in the trash, pushing the swinging door open to come back out into the dim little hallway. He walks two steps, maybe three, and then bumps into someone before he realizes what’s happening.

He says, “excuse me, sorry,” staggering back a bit to make room for the stranger to get around him – but big hands wrap around Stiles’ upper arms. It’s alarming to be touched like this by some random person in a dark hallway, so he tries to pull away, shaking his head and finally looking up to meet this person’s eyes head on.

Stiles feels the blood leave his face, lightning fast. He goes cold, clammy, mouth opening and closing around unspoken words. Matt Harding has got his hands on Stiles’ body. He’s inches away from him, looking right at him, with this sly smile on his face, like no time has passed. None whatsoever. These are the hands that have beaten Stiles so bad he couldn’t get up the next day, that have thrown Stiles into glass and made him bleed, made him cry, made him beg for it to stop, that have wrapped around Stiles’ neck to try and squeeze the life out of him.

And Matt smiles at him. He smiles. “Why do you look so surprised?” He asks, cocking his head to the side. “I wouldn’t forget your birthday.”

Stiles is frozen. Completely paralyzed. When Matt moves him away, deeper into the hallway, into the darkness, where no one else is around, he doesn’t fight it. Because Stiles never actually learned how to fight Matt off. He never learned how to be stronger than him, faster than him, smarter than him, any of it. He only ever learned how to go still and quiet, so that’s what he does. He goes stiff. He allows himself to be pulled away from where anyone can help him. It’s all he knows how to do.

He’s pressed up against the wall. Matt puts his hand on the wall right next to his head, so his arm boxes him in, so he’s stuck, even as Stiles’ eyes dart to the tunnel of light outside the hallway where there’s other people and where Boyd is, where Derek is, where his friends are, people who know that Matt shouldn’t be here.

Because Stiles hasn’t told everyone that Matt shouldn’t be here. It’s how Matt even got in here. He’s Stiles’ ex-boyfriend, he’s still on the list, of course come right in, because Stiles has been too chicken shit to admit what happened to him, and now here he is. Because Stiles had basically rolled out the fucking welcome mat for him.

Matt notices his eyes searching for a way out of this, and he furrows his brow. “What’s the matter? You don’t like me anymore?”

“I –“ Stiles can’t look directly at Matt’s face. He keeps his eyes on the floor, and then he looks up when he hears someone’s footsteps coming. Just a stranger, heading to the bathroom, and Stiles wants to say help me, get him away from me, but the words die in his throat.

“You know how long I’ve waited to have an opportunity to finally talk to you again?” He asks, and he reaches his free hand out and touches Stiles. On the face. It’s this reverent, gentle touch, the kind of touch that would trick Stiles into thinking that Matt loved him, years ago. “You fucking cut me out of your life like I was nothing to you, when you know, you know, you know you and I belong together.”

These are the kinds of insane rants that Matt always used to go on. He’d wax poetic about how Stiles is the only person on earth he cares about, and so Matt should be the only person on earth that Stiles cares about, not his friends, his family, because Matt and Stiles belong together. No one else fits into the narrative. Just him and Stiles, alone, forever.

“I’m the only one who could ever put up with your bullshit,” he pulls his hand off of Stiles’ face and uses it to pound the wall, right next to Stiles’ head. Stiles flinches. He curls in on himself and he’s so scared, in this moment, that he’s going to die. He is petrified that Matt is going to finally do it. What he couldn’t do in Nashville, because they stopped him before he could.

After all, Stiles has been mentally trapped there all this time, all this time, and it would be the only logical ending to this story. If Matt suffocated him right here, right now. He is angry enough to do it.

“…you think there’s anyone else on this earth who could love you, the way that I do? And you need me,” he points to his chest, and Stiles finds himself nodding. Insanely, he finds himself nodding. Agree at all costs. Self-preservation at all costs. “You fucking need me, all that bullshit you wrote about me, all that bullshit you said about me, do you have any idea what it’s been like for me?”

“I didn’t –“

“I’m talking,” he barks, right into Stiles’ face, so Stiles goes quiet. Clamps his jaw shut. It’s just like in that bar in Boston, when all Matt had to do was look at him, and Stiles became that meek little piece of shit that Matt kicked around for fun. Too afraid to move or speak out of fear of being hurt. Matt grabs him by his jaw and forces Stiles to look up at him, right at him, so their eyes meet. Stiles swallows the lump in his throat and he thinks, this is it. This is it. “…I’m going to make you love me again. You’ll see. You can’t be without me. You need me. You’re going to leave here with me. I’m going to take you home, where you belong, and you’ll see. You –“

“Hey,” comes from the end of the hallway. It’s harsh, loud, and Stiles doesn’t immediately recognize the voice – he turns, and so does Matt. The light is behind him so it’s just a silhouette, but it’s Derek Hale. Stiles knows it’s Derek, and from the way Matt frowns and squints, it seems like Matt knows that it’s Derek, too. Stiles only hadn’t recognized that voice because Derek never speaks to him like that.

Derek steps forward. He’s wearing a sleek black jacket that he shrugs out out of, even as he’s coming closer and closer to them, and he throws it off to the side, as Matt stands up straight, pulling his arms away from Stiles, so Stiles has room to move. Derek undoes the buttons on his shirt sleeves, rolls his sleeves up to the elbow like he’s getting ready to get a job done, and Matt sighs through his nose.

“This fucking guy again,” he mutters under his breath, and Stiles panics.

“Derek, calm down,” he says, but it’s pointless. He has never seen Derek angry before, but he sees it now – and he can tell, just from the way his shoulders are in a tight line, the way he’s already prepared for the fight, the way his jaw is set, that nothing anybody says is going to keep him from going absolutely fucking ballistic. This is the side of Derek Stiles has never seen before.

Stiles tries to move forward, to put himself in between Derek and Matt, because he’s genuinely afraid of what Matt is going to do to Derek – but Matt stops him. He pushes Stiles back, against the wall, hard. So hard the wall rattles and Stiles grunts. It’s the exact wrong fucking thing to do, considering Derek is already lividly angry at the prospect of Matt even being in Stiles’ general vicinity.

Putting his hands on Stiles is the final nail in the fucking coffin. Derek walks right up to him and punches him, and boy, does it connect. It is such a good hit that it’s loud, bone crunchingly loud, aggressive enough that Stiles jumps back in surprise, yelping. “Derek,” he says, but more likely than not, the Derek he knows has left the fucking building. Nothing he could say could get him to stop.

Matt spits a wad of blood out onto the floor and stands up straight, and he smiles. Literally smiles, because he’s been waiting for a second chance at Derek since that night in WeHo. Matt laughs, this psychotic laugh, and then it’s just a mess. He hits Derek and that’s loud, too, both of them grabbing at each other and slamming into the walls, and people are noticing. There’s a fight in the hallway, and one of the first people to take note of that fact is Boyd.

He comes running in from the party, alarmed, eyes big in his head, and he takes one look at what’s going on. Derek and Matt, beating the hell out of each other, and then he looks away and focuses on Stiles. Before Stiles even knows what’s happening, Boyd is grabbing him and forcibly moving him away from the action – the grunting and the art on the wall falling to the ground and the back window shattering – wrapping his arms around Stiles’ middle and tugging him away.

Stiles resists. He kicks his legs and fights it, saying, “he’s going to fucking kill Derek, don’t just leave him there,” but Boyd doesn’t care, and he’s a whole hell of a lot stronger and bigger than Stiles is, which is the point of him. He hauls Stiles up, off of his feet so Stiles can’t dig his heels in anymore, and starts carrying him out of the hallway, so Stiles can’t even see what’s going on anymore. He can only hear it, and it sounds bad. It sounds really, really bad.

“I’m not in charge of Derek, I’m in charge of you,” he grunts, while Stiles fights with all his might to be let go. “Derek is going to be fine, you need to get away from that –“

“Let me go,” he demands, to no avail. He’s frantic, panting, kicking his legs in the air and hollering to be set free.

He’s in the main room, where the music is cutting off, where people are standing around asking what’s going on, is everything okay, what’s going on with Stiles, where’s he taking Stiles. Scott comes running over with his brow furrowed, shaking his head like he doesn’t understand – then, he looks over Boyd’s shoulder and sees the fight, and his face goes slack with shock. He moves without thinking, running past, to go join in the effort of breaking them apart, or maybe even to help Derek beat the hell out of Matt. It’s not clear. Stiles doesn’t get to stick around to see any of it; as security runs past, as people murmur to each other about how crazy this is, Boyd carts him out of the bar, into the chilly night air, and dumps him onto the sidewalk.

Police lights flash across their faces, but Stiles doesn’t care. He darts forward to try and skirt past Boyd to get back inside, to do something, but Boyd stops him. He holds Stiles against the wall with a hand on his chest and he gives Stiles a look. “Derek is fine,” he says. “He knows how to fight.”

Stiles’ chin wobbles and he goes still. He knows Boyd is right. No one is going to die in there; maybe Derek will get hurt, yes, most likely, but no one is going to die. Stiles’ panic took over and convinced him someone was going to die tonight, and if it wasn’t going to be him, then Matt was going to see to it that it be the person Stiles likely cares about the most. He presses his head against the brick wall outside, as officers get out of their cars and head inside, their lights bright and blinding, their walkie-talkies murmuring as they pass.

He presses his hands to his face and he feels the panic leave. The terror. The feeling like he was about to get his fucking neck snapped with Matt’s bare hands – and as soon as it’s gone, fully gone, it is replaced with sadness. He cries. Boyd stands with him and he stays close, but he offers no condolence, because what is there to say?

Stiles had just clammed up in there, completely. He had gone catatonic, when presented with the sight of Matt again. He had done nothing. He had just stood there and let Matt touch him, when he swore up and down Matt would never get the chance to lay a finger on him again. He had let Matt get in his face, speak to him, say all those shitty things to him, and Stiles had just nodded along, survival instinct kicking in.

He hates himself for that. He cries into his hands and he just fucking hates himself for that.

Boyd clears his throat. “It was only a matter of time,” he says, voice low, succinct, and Stiles knows that he’s right. Of course it was only a matter of time before he came and pulled this kind of shit – it’s not impossible for someone like Matt to get close to him, especially not since they have a history. The doorman had his name on a list. Because Matt’s name is on lots of clearance lists for Stiles’ events. Because Stiles won’t say that he can’t be around him, and he won’t say why, because he’s been to pussy to do anything about any of this.

Stiles pulls his hands off of face and he sets his jaw. He wipes the tears off of his cheeks and he grits his teeth, he crosses his arms over his chest, and he glares at the ground. Well, that’s it. That’s it. The only reason Derek is in there getting in a bar fight with the guy is because Stiles wouldn’t say anything.

Then, that’s it.

The double doors to the bar open and Stiles jumps, turning just in time to see Matt, bloodied and looking a whole hell of a lot worse for the wear, being led out of the bar in handcuffs, flanked by two officers. Stiles gapes and he and Matt meet eyes, briefly, so Stiles gets a pretty good look at the extent of his injuries.

Blood. All Stiles sees is blood.

“Where’s Derek?” He asks, to no one in particular. He watches them stuff Matt in to the back of a squad car and then he moves, like he’s going to go talk to them, but Boyd stops him with a big hand. “Where’s Derek?” He asks again, even as Boyd is holding him back from running headlong into the bar.

His question gets answered anyway. The doors open again, and this time, it’s Derek who they’re bringing out. He’s not in handcuffs, which Stiles guesses is a good sign, but he’s still got officers all around him, and when Stiles moves to go and try to talk to him, one of them breaks off from the herd and puts a hand out, stopping Stiles dead in his tracks.

Stiles cranes his neck to try and get a look at how hurt Derek is or isn’t. All he can see from this angle is that he’s rumpled, his purple shirt bloodied.

“Hold on, Mr. Stilinski,” the officer says to him, and he’s chewing gum. He smacks it a couple of times, putting his hands on his belt, looking Stiles up and down, as though assessing for injuries. “I need to get your statement. Derek Hale says this Matt guy put his hands on you.”

Stiles blinks. “Uh –“

“He says he was defending you and things escalated from there.”

“Yeah, he…” Stiles clears his throat and shakes his head. “…he was threatening me. He pushed me, he –“

“He pushed you.”

Stiles palms his face.

“Derek Hale says this guy is a bit of an asshole,” he jerks his chin toward the car where they’ve got Matt locked into the back. “He says this guy has hit you before in the past. Is that true?”

Stiles’ mouth goes dry and he breathes out, slow, through his nose. Likely, if Stiles doesn’t say that Derek had a very good reason to walk up and start punching the living daylights out of Matt, they’re going to wrap handcuffs around his wrists, too, and take him to fucking jail. Stiles will have to bail him out. He’ll have to go to court. It’ll be an entire thing. Derek hadn’t done anything wrong to deserve all that, so Stiles has to tell the truth.

He straightens up and he says, “yeah.”

The officer nods his head, looking over his shoulder at where Derek is very animatedly giving his own account of events to another policeman. “So this is a whole can of worms, huh?” He seems to be muttering this mostly to himself, but Stiles nods his head all the same. He has no idea how much of a can of worms this night is going to wind up opening on the world. The officer sighs and turns back to look at Stiles, pulling a notepad out and shaking his head. “Let’s get your full statement of events, how about?”

Stiles tells him exactly what happened. He tells him this was his birthday party slash tour ending party, and all his friends were here, and even some people he doesn’t know very well. He says he does not know how Matt got in, but that they used to date, for a long time, and likely, the security at the door let him in because they didn’t know any better. Matt probably has been stalking him for some time, keeping tabs on where he is, because he’s obsessive, because Stiles made him angry.

He tells them that Matt used to hit him. That he was in an abusive relationship with him for a long time. Matt followed him to the bathroom and cornered him the second that Stiles was alone, and he threatened him and said terrible things to him and he pushed him, and Derek had come and reacted.

“Is Derek going to get in trouble?” He asks when he’s done, nervously fiddling with the sleeve of his shirt. “Are they…is he going to be arrested?”

“This whole thing is kind of a mess,” is his response, as he gives Stiles a bit of a critical once over. “Matt’s a pretty big guy. I never knew he….”

“I haven’t told anyone,” Stiles admits and he blinks, like he’s realizing the full extent of the situation. He looks over his shoulder at Derek, again, and then he looks back at Stiles.

“This whole thing is a fucking mess,” he repeats, but he goes on. “Derek didn’t go easy on him, you know, there’s a lot of injuries, a lot Matt could press charges for.”

Of course Derek didn’t go easy on him. Stiles rubs at his eyes and shakes his head.

“If it’s like you say, then it’s self-defense and we won’t move on him. What Matt wants to do is another story.”

“How come Matt’s in handcuffs?”

“The guy’s an asshole,” the officer shrugs, and then he turns and walks away, leaving Stiles standing there with Boyd. Stiles watches Derek telling his own version of events, and from this angle, he can see more of Derek’s injuries.

Truthfully, he does not look that bad. Or at least, he doesn’t look as bad as Matt looks. He’s got a bloody shirt, some blood dripping from his mouth, and he’s sort of messed up looking – but generally, he looks…fine. Matt had looked like a walking blood stain, and Derek is just fine. It’s a wonder how Derek is standing there free as a bird and Matt is locked up in the squad car; Stiles wonders if Matt had tried to hit any of the officers, or what transpired that led to him getting shoved back there.

Stiles walks forward, as soon as they leave Derek leaning up against one of the squad cars flashing lights across all of their faces. Derek turns and sees him coming, blinking at him, and a small smile spreads across his face.

When he’s close enough, Stiles stops. He crosses his arms over his chest and he just stands there, Boyd hovering over his shoulder. He isn’t sure where to start, or what to say.

Derek asks, “you mad?”

“I don’t know,” he answers, honest, shaking his head and looking away. “That was…”

“You’re mad at me.”

“No, I’m not. I just, uh…” he stares at his feet. “…I thought he was going to kill me.”

“You know I wouldn’t let that happen,” he grins. His teeth are completely covered in blood, and he grins, shaking his head. “What’d I tell you? If I saw that guy again, I’d ruin his fucking day.”

“You said you’d kill him, actually.”

Derek shushes him, pressing a finger to his lips. “Not in front of the police, Stiles.”

“Did they say you’re in trouble?”

Derek shrugs. “If Matt presses charges. But you know, he won’t. He’s a fucking little bitch.”

“Seems like you kinda had the upper hand in the whole….punching each other, thing.”

“Of course I did,” he shrugs, like it’s not a big deal, like he’d fight ten more guys if he had to, whatever. “The guy only knows how to suckerpunch people smaller than him.”

Stiles huffs a laugh. Maybe so. Maybe fucking so. “I just would hate for you to get into trouble, just because of me –“

Derek cuts him off. “Stiles,” he moves closer, and he’s smiling again. His bloody teeth. “…I am in love with you. I would hunt that guy to the ends of the earth and beat him a hundred thousand times, no matter the consequences. I don’t care if I get into trouble. I’ll do it again, and again, because I fucking love you. And I know that’s the worst god damn thing in the world to you, and I know you don’t want to hear it because you think you don’t deserve it, but it’s true.” He shrugs. “I’d go to jail for you without blinking. Come on. You know that.”

Stiles doesn’t know that. Or, what he means is, that Derek has made that sentiment crystal fucking clear to Stiles a hundred different times – like when Derek said he’d lick the floor Stiles walks on, that he’d sleep on the floor every night, that he loves fucking Stiles, he wants Stiles to come back home and meet his family – but Stiles has just never wanted to believe it. He just never thought it could be true, that Derek could really love him. Or that anyone could.

Look at what he went through. Look at the guy who claimed to love him before. Can anyone blame him?

He clears his throat. “I do want to hear it, actually,” he says, nodding his head. “I wanna hear it. I…I tried not to, but I feel the same. I mean, I love you, too.”

Derek sucks the blood off of his teeth, and Stiles hates that he finds it attractive. “You gonna write about it?”

“Of course. It’s all I’m good at.”

Another cop appears and says they have more questions for Derek, so Stiles gives them space and moves to stand by the garbage can on the sidewalk. Inside the bar, he can see some of his friends – Erica, Scott, some casual onlookers – also being asked questions about what happened. They all look a bit shellshocked, like they can’t believe that happened, it was crazy, the whole thing was nuts, and Stiles feels shitty, because it wouldn’t have had to happen, ruining their party, if only he had the balls to ever do anything about it.

He remembers when he had asked himself – what would it take? What would finally be the final straw? What would be his breaking point? When would he finally say enough is enough? What would make him brave enough, to take that final leap off the cliff’s edge?

His eyes flick to the car where he knows Matt is. He hesitates, and then he quickly squashes down the hesitation. He walks, shoulders bunched up, and approaches the cop who’s standing outside the car, watching Stiles approach. He points to the car and says, “can I speak to him?”

He gets looked at, up and down. “All right,” he agrees, slowly. He pops open the back door and stays standing right there, hovering over Stiles and watching everything like a hawk.

Stiles squats down and he peers inside. Matt is sitting there, hands behind his back, bleeding profusely from his nose. They stare at one another, locking eyes, and Stiles frowns at him. He says, “I will never love you again. I never want to see you again. You make me fucking sick. You can’t control what I do, or what I say anymore, and I’ll write what I want about you.”

Matt swallows. “Don’t be so dramatic, Stiles.”

“You ruined my fucking life,” he ignores Matt and narrows his eyes. “‘Now, it’s my turn.”

Matt’s got this look on his face, like he knows. He knows that Stiles can ruin him. He knows that Stiles has the power on him, and not the other way around, for once in his fucking life. And he looks scared. He looks like he’s about to watch his entire life go up in fucking flames. And Stiles smiles. He can’t help himself.

He stands and the officer slams the door shut behind him. “This might be wildly inappropriate,” he starts, pulling a pad and a pen out, “but my daughter is nuts about you. Shes’ got tattoos of your shit and everything. Would you mind…?”

“Of course,” Stiles scribbles his signature across the pad quickly, dotting the i’s with stars.

Stiles shoves as much as he can into three duffle bags. Clothes, notebooks, all his most important worldly possessions, toothpaste, his tooth brush, body wash, all of it dumped into bags frantically, his hands shaking. He goes into the living room and collects things from there, shoving more and more in, piling his bags up at the door, and then he stops when he sees his piano, hovering in the corner.

His beloved piano. The one he wasn’t allowed to touch, for years. That can’t come with him. That’s okay. He can afford to buy another piano, wherever he winds up going.

Boyd helps him with his bags down to the car, and people are down there, taking pictures. Where are you going, Stiles? Hey Stiles, how’s it going? What happened in LA, Stiles? Where’s Derek Hale, Stiles?

Stiles ignores them. He sits in the back and drives the mere thirty seconds it takes to get to Derek’s apartment building. He pauses before he gets out, hesitating with his hand on the door handle, taking in a deep breath.

To Boyd, he says, “I think I’m just gonna go with Derek.”

Boyd blinks at him. “Oh.”

“I think I’m gonna just go with him, just him. You don’t have to come.”

“You’ll be all right…?”

“I’ll be with him, so it’s – it’s fine,” he nods. It’s time for Boyd to go and live his own life for a while, not being Stiles’ shadow. He and Erica deserve a vacation, deserve Hawaii and the beach and spending time together, no Stiles in sight, for as long as they can. Stiles has been asking too much of him for years, now. It hasn’t been fair.

With that, Stiles opens his door, and Boyd follows him out. Up the steps, to where Derek’s own security is standing. They see him coming and sort of grimace, because the last time Stiles came face to face with Derek’s them, he caused a great big scene, and they got in trouble for it.

But this time, Stiles just politely asks them to let him know that he’s here, and if Derek would let him in.

Of course Derek does, and Stiles pounces on him the second they’re inside together, grabbing onto his hands, holding on tight. “I need to leave,” he says, no introduction, no nothing. “I need to get out of here, and I need you to come with me.”

“Leave?” Derek is stupefied. He holds Stiles’ hands back, but he shakes his head, confused. “Where?”

“I don’t know, away, just away, where no one knows I am, I just need to fucking disappear.”

“Stiles, what’s –“

“I called Lydia and I told her I’m ready, now. I’m ready,” he nods his head, resolute, and Derek stares at him. “I’m ready, I want to be done. I told her I’m tired of it, of all the – of just fucking carrying this around, because it’s killing me, it’s killing me, and I want it done and over with. And I can’t be done with it, until…” he takes in a big, deep breath, his eyes watery. “…until I tell the truth. I told her to do what she needs to do with that video to – to make him pay. I wrote a statement. I told the police. It’s happening, I did it, and now I need to go, and I cannot go alone, I need you.”

Derek is stupefied for a moment, struggling to catch up. He still has a black eye, from the fight in the bar in LA, and he likely got his ass reemed by his agent and his publicist, because he hasn’t been in a fight in years and he’s supposed to be doing better, and they’re all printing stories about how Derek is unhinged and crazy again. These are all things that have happened because of Stiles. And if Derek said no, he doesn’t want to go, he won’t go with Stiles, then Stiles would understand.

It would destroy him, really it would, but he would understand.

Derek says, “where do you want to go?”

Stiles palms his face. He says, “I don’t know. Just – away.”

“Vancouver?”

Holy shit, Vancouver. Holy shit. The water. Derek’s big house and all its security and gates and trees. The bedroom. The city. The green, green grass in Derek’s backyard. “Yes,” he says, nodding frantically, “I want to go there. I need to go there.”

Derek nods his head. “I’ll go with you. Just…let me pack.”

“Now,” he gestures, “five minutes ago. I have to be gone before…”

“I know,” he agrees. “I’ll be fast.”

Derek rustles around in his apartment, digging out a bag and filling it just like Stiles had done at his own place. Stiles walks to the windows and stares down, out, across New York City. He thought this place was such a dream, when he first moved in, as a twenty year old kid who was living the life he always wanted. It seems silly to love this place that much, now. It seems silly to love a lot of things that much, now.

“You’re really just going to try and disappear?” Boyd asks him, and Stiles doesn’t even hesitate.

“They’d pull me apart, otherwise. You know that.”

Boyd does know that.

They are going to fucking rip him apart. And as long as he’s somewhere with Derek, where they can’t get to him, Stiles doesn’t even care. Let them say what they want. Stiles knows what happened to him.

He lived it.