Work Text:
you can tell me if they’ve come back again
the shadows in your nightstand
stirring up a flight plan
- central line by Lexie Carroll
There’s a new girl in Stiles’ class. Cora. She has an older brother; Stiles learns that his name is Derek.
Derek wears cool leather jackets and picks Cora up from school in a sleek black Camaro. Stiles watches him from the front steps and feels something.
He’s not sure what. Something.
Stiles likes the woods. They’re the one place where he can actually think. The world is so loud and he is so small, and everyone else is buzzing and it makes it really hard to think sometimes. Everyone wants him to be still but the world isn’t still so why should he be?
The doctors call it ADHD. Stiles looked it up, when he was a kid, googled it on his dad’s computer. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Stiles doesn’t have a deficit of attention, he just has the wrong kind. The hyperactive part is kind of true, though. But he’s read that not everyone with ADHD has hyperactivity. It annoys him that the name isn’t right.
If you have ADHD, you already don’t always fit in with everyone else. It seems like all the name does is further exclude people.
The woods don’t exclude him. The woods don’t care if he’s too loud or too quiet. The woods don’t try to make him something he isn’t.
Stiles is sixteen when he meets Derek in the woods for the first time. He thinks Derek is eighteen. Maybe nineteen. He’s not in school, anyways.
But Stiles doesn’t think he’s in university, either. He doesn’t know what it is that Derek does.
That first time, Derek doesn’t say anything. He just watches Stiles. It occurs to Stiles that he’s probably on the Hales property. But Derek doesn’t tell him to leave.
He just looks at Stiles for a long moment, then turns and walks away.
But the next time Stiles is in the woods, there’s a couple of logs across the stream that form a bridge, logs that weren’t there the last time. Stiles remembers that that’s what he was doing when he saw Derek. When Derek saw him.
He was trying to cross the stream.
It’s raining. The next time Stiles sees Derek. The water splashes blue and loud from the sky, falling on the leaves and the forest floor, the layer of dead decaying plant matter. The stream runs full in its banks.
Stiles is sixteen, and he thinks he might be slowly falling apart.
He stands in the rain. He’s not surprised to see Derek there. Derek doesn’t look surprised to see him.
This time, Stiles says something. “Hello,” he offers. Derek says nothing. “I’m Stiles,” he says. Introductions are good, right?
But all Derek says is, “I know.”
Okay. Stiles isn’t sure what to make of that. But Derek doesn't sound annoyed, or angry, he just sounds - empty.
Stiles understands that. He understands the way the emptiness could eat someone up inside, if they let it. Sometimes he thinks that might be happening to his dad. That maybe the loss of his mom is a dark hole of gravity beside his dad, and Stiles isn’t enough of a counterweight to keep him from falling in.
Stiles realizes that he’s never seen Cora and Derek’s parents. That it’s only Derek that ever picks Cora up from school. He studies Derek with new eyes, and thinks that he probably does understand the emptiness. The shadows.
Time passes. Stiles has to start getting ready for graduation. Him and Cora aren’t friends, but he watches her in class, watches her talking excitedly about her plans, about all the faraway places she wants to go, and he feels Derek slipping away.
She is his tether here. There is nothing for him here if she leaves, no reason for him to stay. Stiles isn’t even sure if he could call them friends, him and Derek. A year that they’ve known each other, and they still hardly talk.
They have worked their way up to hello and goodbye, but most of the time they spend in the woods is in silence.
Derek seems to prefer it. Stiles doesn’t know how Derek always knows when he’s heading to the woods. He’s there to meet Stiles far too often for it to be considered coincidence.
But then. Stiles is good at figuring things out. Noticing things. Out of place things tend to niggle at him like loose teeth, patterns that become far too large to ignore.
Derek is never there the day before a full moon, or after. Sometimes two or three days after. Sometimes he shows up with bruises. Sometimes his eyes are shadowed and his movements stiff.
The place in the woods they meet in is always clear. Fallen trees disappear. Rocks move into more convenient places. Boulders, even.
Stiles knows. Sometimes, he even thinks that Derek knows that Stiles has figured it out.
But they don’t talk. This is a secret that sleeps between them. Peacefully. Stiles is never afraid. He knows Derek would never hurt him.
Stiles doesn’t know what he will do when Derek leaves. He’s pretty sure, now, that Derek will. That he will have to say goodbye.
They graduate. It’s - happy. At least, Stiles thinks it's supposed to be. His dad cries. Derek is there, for Cora. Stiles meets his eyes from the stage and nearly falls. He laughs it off, and no one bats an eye.
Sometimes Stiles wonders if Derek is the only one who actually sees him.
After, Stiles goes to the woods. Derek is there. (Of course he is. Where else would he be?)
"Hello," Stiles says. Just like he always does.
"Stiles," Derek says. Stiles lifts his eyes in surpise. This is different. This is the first time Derek has said his name.
Stiles likes the way it sounds, the careful way Derek pronounces it. He feels like he could tell Derek his real, actual name, and he would learn to say it right. He would treat it with care, like Stiles' name was something precious.
"Yeah?" he says. He doesn't know what is about to happen. Is this Derek saying goodbye?
It can't be. Not yet. Stiles needs more time.
"I’m not leaving,” Derek says. Stiles stops breathing for nearly a minute.
“What?”
“I’m not leaving,” Derek says patiently. He’s good at that. Being patient. It’s sort of required, to be Stiles’ friend.
“But Cora is,” Stiles says.
Derek shrugs. “So?”
“So…” Stiles searches for the right words. “So why would you stay?”
Derek shrugs again. “You’re here.”
Something warm blooms inside of Stiles. It pushes out the cold. It pushes out the empty. It fills him with something he doesn’t have the words for. He thinks that, for the first time in his life, he might actually be speechless.
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I am.”