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I found you hidden in plain sight (why'd I take so long?)

Summary:

Stiles is pretty sure he’s hallucinating. He’s got to be. There’s no other plausible explanation, he thinks, as he sits on the sidelines of the lacrosse field and feels the cold, hard bench underneath him, the roar of the crowd at his back like the worst white noise machine in the world.

There’s no other reason why he sees it, the hulking, black figure of a wolf peering at him from the treeline behind the bleachers. Its eyes flare in the glaring glow of the stadium lights, but they’re the wrong color, he thinks: blood-moon red instead of cobalt blue, but the familiarity of it all makes his stomach roll and clench.

Notes:

I stopped watching TW after Derek left, so this is my post-season 3/4ish fix-it. Because Sterek forever and honestly nobody did a very good job addressing Stiles's PTSD.

And we stan Alpha Derek forever here okay.

I don't normally do multi-chap fics, but I'm giving it a shot, you guys. Tags will be added as needed.

Happy holidays, and enjoy, I guess???

Chapter Text

I found you hidden in plain sight (why’d I take so long?)

 

Coming back to Beacon Hills, if Derek is being honest with himself (which, it’s a thing now, he tries—he really does), hadn’t really been part of his plan. Which, there hadn’t really been one when he left. After all of it, after the nogitsune, after Allison, and Aiden—Derek had stuck around for the funerals at least, he owed them that much, but it was so hard, too hard, to even think about just waking up the next morning and going back to doing the same thing.

Wasn’t that the definition of insanity—he thinks he’s read that somewhere—doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?

He’s not proud about how he did it, leaving like that, no goodbyes, but it was necessary, mostly because at the time Derek didn’t think he could actually go through with it if he had to stand there with Scott just looking at him, reeking of grief, with those angsty, puppy-dog eyes. Or Stiles, who looked so broken and wrong that Derek wouldn’t have trusted himself to know how to fix him, wouldn’t have even trusted himself to try.

Derek has always been shit at fixing things.

They didn’t need him, anyway, is what he tells himself when he’s feeling guilty about it. They were a pack, and the pack survives—Derek was the outlier, the one who didn’t belong, didn’t quite fit.

So he runs.

Again, it’s not his proudest moment.

So he drives aimlessly for a long time, stopping only to sleep; in motels in quiet towns he’s never heard of, or more often than not, in the back of his truck underneath the stars. He visits some of the packs he knows were loyal to his mother, knows he could have a place in them if he wanted, but he doesn’t, so most of the time he never stays more than a day or two.

He ends up in Maine, in a town he literally picked off a map if only because it was the literal geographical opposite of Beacon Hills. He rents a property, does nothing but sit on his porch and read for the first few weeks, running in the woods anytime he needs to let out the wolf. He keeps waiting for trouble, but it never comes. There’s nothing. It’s so quiet and calm and utterly and completely benign that Derek, for the first time he can remember, actually starts to feel bored. So he takes some classes, ends up signing up for a paramedic certification course, where the training is easy because he’s used to blood and guts and plenty of gore, so very little, if anything, phases him.

He gets a job at a hospital the next town over, thinks it’s nice to use his abilities for something other than killing monsters.

He works, he eats, and he sleeps. It’s bizarrely normal.

Until it’s not.

And seriously, Derek’s life has been laughably empty of what Stiles would have called “werewolf bullshit.” But the universe has its own fucked up sense of humor. Even though, when it happens, Derek doesn’t feel a bit like laughing. Thankfully he’s alone in the hospital locker room, stripping out of his uniform stained with blood from a particularly gruesome car accident on the interstate that had ended with Derek siphoning what pain he could from the only survivor, a young girl, whose heart gave out before they even made it to the hospital parking lot.

He’s washing road grime off his hands when it hits him, hot as literal flames licking through his veins and his body, a heady surge of power that makes his blood beat against the walls of his skin. His claws and his teeth lengthen, and he’s gripping the side of the sink so hard it cracks. When he opens his eyes and sees the irises flaring red in the mirror, he actually has to bite down on his own arm to stop the roar that’s caught in his throat.

Derek still doesn’t feel like laughing, later, when he falls out of bed in the middle of the night and wakes up on his floor, fully shifted as an actual wolf.

Seriously. Fuck his life.

And then, within a day, he feels overcome with it, a pull, a little like someone has shoved a hook straight into his chest and is yanking on the lead, reeling him in like a fucking fish on a line. It’s a maddening feeling, makes him feel like his body is as ill-fitting as clothes that are too tight, too small. He makes it a week before the feeling is so overwhelming that he can barely control his shift. The home he’d made for himself no longer felt welcoming.

Instead, somehow, it had become a prison. 

Getting the leave of absence he asks for is almost suspiciously too easy. (“ Son, you haven’t taken a day off in almost two years. Nice to know you’re actually human.”)

Ha fucking ha, Derek thinks.

 

 

Stiles is pretty sure he’s hallucinating. He’s got to be. There’s no other plausible explanation, he thinks, as he sits on the sidelines of the lacrosse field and feels the cold, hard bench underneath him, the roar of the crowd at his back like the worst white noise machine in the world.

There’s no other reason why he sees it, the hulking, black figure of a wolf peering at him from the tree-line behind the bleachers. Its eyes flare in the glaring glow of the stadium lights, but they’re the wrong color, he thinks: blood-moon red instead of cobalt blue, but the familiarity of it all makes his stomach roll and clench.

“Stiles? Hey, Stiles… you okay?”

It’s Liam who asks, earnest and so annoyingly kind that Stiles wants to rip his freaking head off.

“I’m okay, man. I’m fine. Just, you know, bored. So much bench, so little time, am I right?” he says offhandedly, still scanning the tree-line for that strange apparition. It isn’t worth it, trying to ask Liam if he’s seen anything—he can imagine the strange look he’ll give him just fine enough in his head, thanks.

“Are you sure? Do you need me to get Scott?” That is the last thing that he wants. Stiles doesn’t think he can handle those hopeful puppy-dog eyes that Scott gives hime, when he can just look at Stiles and know he’s struggling. Yeah, he knows about the nightmares, about the panic attacks that paralyze him both in sleep and in wakefulness, but he doesn’t even want to entertain the thought of how Scott’ll stare at him if he finds out he’s actually progressed to a full-blown “I see pink elephants” (or red-eyed wolves, rather) psychotic break.

“No-no, I’m fine. I promise. I’m good, dude. I swear.”

Liam eyes him warily, and Stiles does his best to keep his heart rate steady, even. He’s had to practice this quite a lot—meditation and shit. Lying to werewolves is hard.

“Okay,” Liam finally says, though he says it like he doesn’t quite believe him.

That’s all right. Stiles doesn’t really believe himself when he says it, either.

 

Later, Stiles lies in bed and counts his fingers, tries to meter his breaths, but it doesn’t really matter—The nightmares always come anyway. So he waits, like he does so many nights, for his dad to peek into his room to check that he’s asleep (he isn’t, but he’s gotten pretty good at faking after all these years) before leaving for the station. It’s only after Stiles hears the car peel out of the driveway that he gets up and makes the familiar jump out the window down to the jeep.

Stiles could walk out the front door, he knows he could—but fuck it, he’s nostalgic, okay?

His heart races as he climbs into the front seat and speeds off to the same place he’s been going almost every night for the last year and a half. At this hour, it’s so startlingly quiet in Beacon Hills that the car’s rattling engine is positively deafening, and the sound of it keeps him on edge because even though his father’s not home most of the time, he feels like he must be able to hear it even all the way across town at the station.

But Stiles hasn’t been stopped yet, so if he knows, maybe he just lets it happen. It wouldn’t really surprise Stiles anymore. Not much does these days.

The loft is empty, like it always is, just like he’d found it that night after the funerals. Stiles had come here thinking that maybe Derek could help him somehow; because he never seemed to look at him like he was quite as broken as he felt.  Maybe because he was broken too, knew what it felt like to somehow feel too much and somehow nothing all at once.

Only he wasn’t there.

He was just gone.

No one had seemed surprised. Everyone had expected him to come back eventually, chalking it up to Derek just being Derek, mysterious and withdrawn as usual. They told him to forget it, not to worry, but Stiles knew better.

Because if you leave without saying goodbye, Stiles thinks, you probably don’t have a reason to come back in the first place.

The first time he'd fallen asleep there had been an accident, when he’d finally been driven out of his house by night terrors that made him thrash so hard he’d wake up bruised and bloody from where he’d clawed at himself, his throat hoarse and sore from screaming. A few times he’d actually woken to the walls of his bedroom shaking (that whole Spark thing, yeah, any hope of harnessing that was straight out the window at this point), and his father had eventually taken down the shelving units above Stiles’s bed so they wouldn’t collapse on top of him.

Doctors didn’t help. Therapists didn’t help. Pills didn’t help.  Not even time helped, despite how god damn insistent everyone seemed to be that it would. Time heals all wounds, his ass.

Stiles knew better than to believe that anymore. 

After all of that, he’d needed a place that was quiet, still, that wasn’t the stifling gloom of his bedroom, or his house, where his father’s watchful, worried face felt like it could crush him. Like it would crush them both.

It’s stupid, Stiles thinks, as he crawls into a bed that isn’t his (that he certainly never slept in when its actual occupant was around), wearing clothes that don’t belong to him, that this is the only place he feels anything close to safe. Anything close to comfortable. It doesn’t make sense.

But somehow, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s true. 

Derek hadn’t intended to hide when he came back. He wasn’t like, ashamed. Not anymore, at least. But when he’d finally made it home (no, not home, not anymore, he reminds himself) -- to the loft -- it was early morning, just past dawn. He’d driven straight through the night, if only because he knew he wouldn’t sleep anyway, certainly not at some roadside motel that reeked of industrial cleaner and strangers with poor hygiene. He was exhausted, that bone-deep kind that reminds him of that feeling of swimming with all his clothes on. Heavy enough to sink through the floor.

But when he sees Stiles slip down the back stairs, backpack slung over his hunched shoulders, it’s not just confusion that keeps Derek in the cab of his truck like someone’s actually glued him to the seat.

It’s shock. 

Because up close like this, there’s really no escaping it—the thump, thump, thump of the sound that’s been haunting him for days.

It’s Stiles.