i stood alone [part ii]
[part i]
~
What Stiles ends up having the least trouble remembering is that he’s not her husband. He’s Derek, at least in name and physical presentation, and sometimes he’ll say something and look slyly amused at his own wit, which is incredibly Derek and makes emotion clog up Stiles’ throat, but it’s not-him. He’s broken in so many places that Stiles doesn’t even know where to begin to navigate. She’s had her whole life to get used to-take for granted, even-that Derek loves her. Even their junior year of high school, when Derek had fallen for her hard and had no idea how to show it except to become awkward and tight-lipped and disappear for hours instead of coming over to her house to watch X-Files marathons, his love had still been the strongest force in Stiles’ life, even as it had adjusted from best friend/sister to I kind of want to bone you/soul mate.
Stiles is an expert at reading the many moods of Derek Hale, even a Derek Hale who apparently broods more than he laughs and manifests his awkwardness in physical violence and is a werewolf, what the fuck, so she can tell very easily, that she makes Derek uncomfortable and he doesn’t want her around.
She doesn’t take it personally, since this Derek apparently gives a whole new name to emotional constipation and occasionally looks between her and the males Stiles like one of them is going to get up and waggle their genitalia in his face in order to accentuate some kind of point.
The baby fucks it all up, though. Babies kind of excel at messing up plans, so the way that the Baby Hale messes up what would otherwise be a probably uneventful trip through the multiverse shouldn’t be terribly surprising.
“It’s a spell,” the male Stiles says from where he’s buried in a couch across the room. He’s been exiled there because after first being completely floored by the idea of there existing a female version of him who is both older and pregnant, he’d started asking Stiles questions and then just not stopped. Stiles can remember being hyperactive at his age, but Derek had toned down the worst of it; he’d always been the one to ask her to slow down and explain things, which had first been frustrating and then, eventually, useful when Stiles had gotten to college and her teachers had actually listened to her instead of being dismissive and unhelpful (thanks, Harris).
“Really,” says Derek. His sarcasm is almost indistinguishable from his normal, angry tone, but Stiles can see it in his eyebrows. “Astutely observed, Stiles.”
The male Stiles says, “Shut up, would you like to do this?” He’s clicking the cap on and off of his highlighter with a dizzying amount of noise; Stiles, who apparently “wouldn’t know a wendigo from a chupacabra” and “would probably be worse than useless in a research capacity,” is sitting in an armchair with a copy of The Beacon Hills Daily Mirror, reading about the drug lords her dad apparently arrested last week.
“Drug lords?” she asks Scott, who is sitting on the ground to her left surrounded by meteorological printouts and a ruler.
He grimaces. “Shamans.”
“Are those…easily confused?” Stiles asks. There’s a picture of her dad cuffing one of the arrested men on the front cover; he looks like your standard shady customer, and not really someone Stiles would ever pick out of a lineup as a likely contender for a shaman. Not that she knows what a shaman is, outside of the D&D class.
“In Beacon Hills, yeah,” Scott says. He has a laptop open and is Skyping Lydia Martin for help with the meteorological charts. Stiles had sort of stared when the connection had stopped fuzzing up and she’d gotten her first look at this universe’s Lydia, who is a redheaded bombshell and apparently stuck with her sister and father in LA for winter break.
To be fair, Stiles hasn’t seen Lydia in years, so there’s the possibility that whatever happened in puberty to this Lydia happened to hers as well, but when Stiles had had Lydia for AP Chem six years ago, she had been twelve and spotty and worn her red hair in an unflattering cap that was ruthlessly Spock-like. She’d also been one of the brightest students Stiles had and is likely to ever have, but like most accelerated students, she’d had one friend (Jeff Oppenheimer) and that relationship seemed to have mostly consisted of her tutoring him in exchange for him driving her to school every morning.
“Overlay the mixed layer depth climatology with the map of the ley lines in the preserve,” Lydia orders. She looks like she’s painting her nails and texting at the same time; apparently Scott has a girlfriend here, instead of the disconcertingly codependent friendship with Isaac that takes up most of his time in Stiles’ Beacon Hills, and she’s Lydia’s best friend. It’s comforting to know that at least Lydia Martin is still the most terrifyingly efficient person Stiles has ever met, even if she coordinates her handbag with her belt or whatever big thing is happening in Cosmo these days.
“How did you get this so fast?” Stiles asks. “I got here the day before yesterday; shouldn’t this data be unavailable for at least the next two months?”
Scott and Stiles shrug in unison and Derek glowers instead of responding, which is apparently business as usual. Lydia says, voice so icy that Stiles flattens back into her armchair, “The psychopath,” and then asks Scott, “Are there overlapping zones?”
Stiles has already met Isaac, Vernon Boyd, and Erica Reyes, who are the other teenage members of this ridiculous posse assembled by Derek for the purposes of supernatural vigilantism or whatever other bullshit reason Derek is using to cover for his obvious loneliness, and while Isaac is clearly unhinged here like he hadn’t been back home, she wouldn’t have termed either him or Boyd or Erica a psychopath, and Lydia has never been one for imprecision.
“Psychopath?” she asks Derek, even though looking at him directly scores a deep, agonizing line down the center of her chest. Her face feels flushed and her hands are clammy, but she’s managed to keep a hold over herself, slippery as it might be, for the past 48 hours by never being alone in a room with him, and there’s no reason to break her record now.
Derek stares directly across the room at the doorframe that opens into his miniscule kitchen. He says, “Peter’s alive,” the way Stiles might yell at her neighbor for letting her gargantuan dog shit in Stiles’ front yard and not pick it up.
“You said everyone was dead,” Stiles points out, trying not to sound like she’s accusing him of anything. Peter had always been one of her favorite of the Hale uncles, but she’s not going to exactly hold her breath about him being the same sass-loving guy that has joined Stiles in mercilessly destroying Erin and Natalie at Risk for every Fourth of July picnic since 2002. Besides, if Stiles is going to accuse Derek of anything, it’s going to be related to all the teenagers he’s drafted into his preternatural cult.
“Yeah, no, Peter died,” Scott assures her. “He just didn’t stay dead.”
Stiles says, “Oh, so it’s a family trait,” in a breathlessly insensitive fashion, although since the only person she’s really hurting here is herself, she decides to let it slide.
Derek says nothing, and Stiles can take a hint, even if she often prefers to ignore them. She opens up the Daily Mirror and starts in on the arts section, which is like three pages long and consists mostly of movie times and stuff out on DVD today. All of the movies listed are the same as the ones back in Stiles’ universe. It’s amazing to her that so many things could be different and yet others still achingly similar.
“I was kind of hoping there would be at least something I hadn’t seen before,” she tells Scott.
“That would be kind of awesome,” the male Stiles agrees, distracted and still clicking. “Like a new-”
“-Joss Whedon movie,” Stiles says in unison. “Wait, did he-”
“No, only 14 episodes,” the male Stiles tells her with a frown. “I know, I know, we’re all sad and bereft.”
Derek huffs out a long, angry breath, which Stiles translates as Jesus fuck there’s two of them now. She would sympathize, except he apparently got her husband’s assholeishness with none of the redeeming qualities like his breathtakingly beautiful smile or his willingness to painstakingly melt peanut butter and pour it over strawberry ice cream for her.
This universe sucks, and Stiles now wants ice cream.
“Do you have ice cream?” she asks Derek, and then immediately afterwards she adds, “Wait, who the hell am I kidding? You hate ice cream. Do you have any of that disgusting no-fat bullshit lime custard stuff?”
Derek’s face twitches like it doesn’t know what to do, which means yes.
Stiles puts down the paper and pushes herself out of the armchair; it takes an embarrassingly long amount of time, but until anyone else in the room is eight months pregnant, they can just fucking deal. “Great,” she says, and she waddles into the kitchen. It reminds her a lot of their first apartment, where she and Derek had lived for their last two years of Berkeley after Stiles had thrown the bitch-fit to end all bitch-fits about the expense of living in a dorm.
Because she knows Derek, she checks the cabinet to the immediate left of the sink. Sure enough, five Fiestaware bowls that basically have PREVIOUS PROPERTY OF GOODWILL stamped across the side are neatly stacked next to five matching dinner plates. Stiles doesn’t hold her breath about an ice cream scoop-Derek doesn’t believe in waste, or in having kitchen tools for things you could easily do with something you already have lying around, which is why Stiles has used a corkscrew to core apples for the past eight years-and she’s right, but he does have five spoons, nestled inside one another in a drawer underneath the cabinet.
The no-fat bullshit custard has a severe case of freezer burn, but Stiles holds the container over the sink and scrapes the worst of it off, before she dollops approximately half of the pint into her bowl. She’s pregnant, and if Derek is the only Hale left here he’s totally loaded; he can afford another pint of stupidly healthy fake ice cream.
She’s sticking the first spoonful into her mouth and making her way back to the living room when the front door opens and a familiar voice says, “Isn’t this appallingly domestic.”
Stiles stops in the doorframe. Peter, wearing a leather jacket like there are no other sartorial options in the entirety of Beacon Hills, grins at her lazily. “Knocked up by my nephew, I see.” There is something distinctly unhinged about the smile. Against her will, Stiles’ pulse kicks up and she shrinks back into the kitchen a little, curling herself around her stomach.
“Not quite,” Stiles says, trying to keep her voice steady so she doesn’t look like she’s cowering. The skin on the back of her neck is crawling and she suddenly doesn’t want to be anywhere near Peter, even if he’s always been her favorite. She deliberately jerks and dribbles a line of melted custard onto the shirt stretched across her stomach. “Whoops,” she says, hands shaking, “silly me. I’m going to wash this off,” and then she puts down the ice cream and walks as calmly as she can into the bathroom, where she shuts and locks the door.
She’s wearing the same shirt that she fell into this universe wearing, one of Derek’s old henleys layered underneath an unbuttoned plaid shirt that will close across her breasts but not her stomach, and she strips off the plaid and then the henley, leaving the former draped across the closed toilet seat as she drops the latter in the sink.
A few minutes later, after she’s scrubbed it clean and is waiting for it to dry, sitting on the floor with her knees drawn as close as they can get to her nose, there’s a soft knock on the door. “Stiles,” Derek says, “I have a shirt you can borrow.”
In order to reply, Stiles has to stop shaking. Derek had shown her the wolf thing-with the fangs and the claws-and she’d known intellectually from the vocabulary getting tossed around that the werewolf thing was serious business and involved policing, which is always inherently dangerous, but having Peter in the room had been the first time in this entire multiverse scenario where Stiles had actively been afraid.
Posturing is all good and well when you’re a twenty-eight year-old chemistry teacher with nothing to lose, but Stiles is not going to put her baby in the same room as Peter Hale.
She tells Derek this when she manages to get the door open two minutes later; he’s standing on the other side of the door, looking uncomfortable and unhappy. “Seriously, not a single second,” she says as she accepts the shirt from him. It’s actually the exact same henley, only this one looks like it’s had blood scrubbed out of it recently.
“I understand,” Derek says grimly. His eyes are stuck directly in the middle of her forehead, which Stiles realizes a beat too late is because she’s not wearing a shirt; the big white expanse of her belly is protruding between them, streaks of purple standing out against the underside. “I’ll tell him to leave.”
“Good,” Stiles says. She tugs the shirt over her head to give Derek some kind of relief, but he’s still too tense. “Hey, what’s up?” She touches Derek before she has time to list all of the reasons why doing so would be a bad idea, sliding her palm up the line of his forearm. The world gets protracted and slow; Derek’s skin is too hot, probably a werewolf thing, but it feels the same. “Is it the pregnant thing? Kind of weird, I know, but it can’t be totally unexpected.”
Derek, giving his best impression of a cardboard person, just stares at her. “You,” he says a beat later, “you smell like them.”
All of this smelling business is ridiculous, but Stiles is trying not to be a bitch about it. She’s lost Derek, who had been close to her entire world, but Derek has lost everyone-his sisters: Erin’s bitching and Natalie’s long-suffering groans and Laura’s bright sarcasm; and his parents: Beatrice and Mark making out in their shared upstairs office like fifteen-year-olds. “It’s not the same without you,” she admits quietly. “But they try.”
“Does-” Derek pauses and breathes out and then says, in a quick rush, “did Edith’s baby make it to term?”
Oh Jesus fuck. Stiles hadn’t realized that Derek had been so young when they’d all died. “Yeah,” she says. “Matilda. She’s-eight. She wants to play lacrosse professionally.”
Derek closes his eyes and minutely shakes his head. “Beacon Hills and fucking lacrosse.”
“Don’t even get me started on how many idiots I’m expected to pass in my standard chem class each year so they can play first line. Don’t even,” Stiles says. It’s an old point of contention. “Matilda soaks that shit up, though, and Jorge’s this parody of despair. I think he might sneak into her room and read her Tennyson while she’s asleep so she’ll absorb at least some culture.”
Derek looks like he wants to laugh, but he settles instead for a slightly bitter half-smile. “What did you mean about this not being unexpected?” He gestures his elbow in her tentative direction. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
His curiosity feels kind of delicate, so Stiles puts on an over-exaggerated joking expression and says, “Well, come on, it can’t be a total shock that if the universe gave me a uterus I’d be knocked up. Those Hale sperm are some quality swimmers.” She almost, almost, makes the joke that she’s heard out of Laura at least four times a year for the past decade, which is about how many hockey teams the Hales can outfit, but she swallows it back.
Derek’s face contorts. “Please don’t talk about sperm, Stiles,” he says. “Ever.”
“Aw,” Stiles coos, “is the werewolf embarrassed about a little sex education? It’s okay, Derek, I know about your kinks already. I mean, if you need me to sit the male Stiles down and explain to him how silk causes the least amount of chafing, I can totally do that for you-”
Derek turns purple and he growls, “What, no,” and Stiles cackles, a hand on the top of her belly for balance.
“It’s okay,” she tells him, squeezing his forearm gently. “You should share stuff like that when you’re comfortable, and I know the age thing must be kind of a head-fuck.” It feels weird to be giving her husband advice about his sex life with her younger, male doppelganger, but Stiles is mostly surviving this experience by pretending it’s happening to someone else, someone who isn’t in danger of becoming emotionally attached or who will go back home in a few hours or days and have to face an empty house and the pitying faces of the townsfolk of Beacon Hills.
On a scale of one to superbly effective, it’s about a seven, but Stiles has worked in worse situations; she spent her year of student teaching under Adrian Harris, after all.
“What are you talking about,” Derek demands, forgetting to inflect his voice at all. He’s gotten stiff around the shoulders and he’s drawing back from her. Stiles forgets about proper distance; she leans forward and digs her nails into his arm because she’s touching him and she needs the tether, especially because someone that looks like Peter Hale is in the next room but it is definitely not Peter Hale.
“I’m trying to be understanding about the fact that you’re fucking a teenager, Derek,” Stiles says. “I mean, it’s me, so I understand, we never could keep our hands off of each other. But seriously? You’re twenty-eight. This is kind of unbelievably messed up. If it wasn’t me, if I didn’t know exactly how I feel about you, I would probably be a little creeped out.”
Derek hisses, “I am not sleeping with Stiles.” His tone would not go remiss in a revival of Steel Magnolias, down the horrified way his eyebrows disappear into his hair.
He sounds damaged enough by the thought that Stiles lets him go. “Really?” she says, trying not to let too much skepticism into her voice. “Derek, I have known you for my entire life. I know what you look like when you’re in love.” She sounds unmistakably bitter; Stiles accordingly swallows and coughs slightly, rubbing her chin with the back of her bent wrist. “Do you mean you haven’t told him?”
Pissily, Derek says, “As you so casually pointed out, he is eighteen.”
“Eighteen’s legal,” Stiles says, because she’s usually the jackass playing devil’s advocate.
“He’s not-I’m not.” Derek stops and takes a deep breath; his nostrils flare and he closes his eyes at whatever he’s scenting, obviously trying to process it. “He’s eighteen and he doesn’t know what he wants.”
“Derek,” Stiles says, and when he refuses to open his eyes, she hits him in the side of the head with the flat of her palm. “Jerkface, look at me. I’m going to say this slowly because apparently you’ve recently suffered some kind of neurological disorder: Stiles wants you. It doesn’t matter if the Stiles in question is an eighteen-year-old dude or a twenty-eight-year-old high school chemistry teacher.”
Derek gives her a flat, unimpressed look, but Stiles knows him well enough to see the panic lurking in the corners of his eyes. It’s sort of astonishing to her that even though this Derek is broken in so many appalling places that her husband hadn’t been, she can still read him like a fucking intro to organic textbook. “There’s no way that you can know that,” he says, sounding tortured and full of existential angst.
Stiles gives in to the urge to scream, although it’s a very little one and she bites it back before it gets too hysterical. “Right, okay, if you want to be miserable for the rest of your life and squat in this shitty apartment with a bunch of teenagers who can barely tolerate you and some psycho whatever possessing your godfather and pretend that you’re not in love with him, fine. But no matter what the hell happened here, I know that Beatrice would fucking hate to see you like this.”
Derek’s hand closes over her throat and he pins her to the thin wall separating the hallway and bathroom so quickly that Stiles hits her head against the plaster with a low thunk. “Don’t,” Derek says, raw and low. “Don’t-do not say her name.”
He’s not actually impeding her ability to breathe-his palm is too much larger than the half-circumference of her throat-so Stiles bares her teeth and says, “It would kill her. Is that why you’re doing it? All she’s ever wanted has been for you to be happy and maybe to cut your fucking hair once in a while so you don’t have to wear so much goddamn gel.”
Derek repeats, “Don’t,” but Stiles talks over him, raising the volume when her voice gets breathy.
“As long as I’ve known you, your family has been the most important part of your life. The people we went to high school with-Miles and Moira and Wendell-they all grew up and moved out of Beacon Hills and never looked back. But you and me, we were back in town the day after we graduated from Berkeley. We spent three months arguing over paint chips for the living room and you recorded the message for the shop twelve times to get it just right. You care about everything.”
Derek’s hand is shaking under her chin, so she swallows and continues, staring at him baldly as he focuses on the middle of her forehead. “You are twenty-eight years old. Where are your friends your age? Do you really only spend time with your pack? Derek, they’re in high school. They know fuck-all and they’re still going to know fuck-all until they get out of town and grow up a little bit.”
He’s trembling too forcefully to keep a grip on her anymore; Stiles presses on the inside of his elbow until his arm bends and he releases her. His huge body is shivering in jerks, like Stiles has tazed him, and she wants to touch him but she knows that it’s a stupid, dumb, dumb idea. “I miss you every day. It’s worse than when I lost Mom. There is this big fucking hole in my fucking life because the best friend that I have ever had decided to go on a run at ass o’clock in the morning and some drunk fucker was playing live-action Mario Kart on I-5. But you’re alive here, so you are going to be fucking happy if it fucking kills you.”
Stiles realizes she’s crying when the trembling around Derek’s body becomes pronounced enough to make the doorframe behind him quiver. All things considered, fifty tearless hours was fairly impressive. Stiles will maybe be congratulating herself about that when she feels less like hollowing her chest out with a blunt spoon.
“Do you understand?” Stiles demands, like she asks her sophomores at the end of their first stoichiometry lecture. They always nod like helpless sheep; it’s not their fault, they just have no baseline of comparison. Derek’s head jerks up and to the left, which could be a sign of acknowledgement or an aborted headshake. “Great,” Stiles says. She plants her elbow in his chest and pushes him away, all the better for her to stomp into his bedroom across the hall. “Good night.”
She shuts the door in his face. It’s about as satisfying as getting angry at Derek ever gets, which is to say not at all.
~
While Stiles appreciates that Derek’s little cult/pack is rife with difficulties and drama, she has no compunction about leaning out of the window of the male Stiles’ Jeep-other than a huge dent in the passenger door, which had been caused by “miscellaneous supernatural mishap,” the male Stiles had told her dismissively, it’s a clone of her baby-and shouting, “Is this really the time?”
Scott and Isaac’s heads swivel in her direction guiltily. They’re keeping up with the Jeep, which is only going about 30 mph, with enough ease that they’ve apparently decided now is the best time for them to hash out some kind of drama related to Scott’s needing to “decide” something related to his relationship with Allison.
“Sorry, Mrs. Hale,” Scott calls, recalcitrant.
It says something unflattering about this universe that Scott and Isaac are used enough to running towards disaster to use the travel time to deal with some personal shit. Stiles turns to the male Stiles, who is driving with a determined expression and his hands at two and ten. “How is this even remotely okay.”
The male Stiles shrugs but keeps his eyes firmly on the road ahead of him. “You kind of get used to this stuff,” he says. “Imminent death. Approaching battle. Witches.”
“Witches,” Stiles mutters under her breath. “Jesus Christ.”
“Hey, do you kiss Babula with that mouth?” he retorts. “Also, can you not lean out of that window so much? If I hit a pothole you’re going to be the first flying whale.”
“Fuck you,” Stiles says genially. She’s definitely inflated, but she’s always been skinny so she just sort of looks like she’s got an overinflated basketball hiding under Derek’s henley. Now that she can hear the worry in his voice, though, she knows what’s up with the uncharacteristically safe driving. “Okay, mini-me, if we want to get there in the next year, you need to up the gas. I realize my delicate constitution is misleading, but I’m not actually going to shatter if you go above 45.”
“Fuck you,” the male Stiles says back, but he incrementally increases their speed, which means Scott and Isaac have to put on an extra burst of speed to follow and can’t hash out their CW melodrama anymore. “Normally I’m too interested in bravado to be overly concerned about my personal health, but is it really safe for you to be doing this?”
Stiles assumes he means traveling back across the multiverse while pregnant. “Not like I have much of a choice,” she says, striving for cheerful nonchalance. It doesn’t fool him, but Stiles doesn’t really expect it to; she’s always been disgustingly self-aware. “Look, the fact that Derek is alive here makes this probably the best version of the multiverse I’ve seen in six months, but I-I don’t belong here. He’s not right for me.”
Stiles would give a lot for that not to be true. She’d probably push the male Stiles out of the Jeep right now and take his place in a heartbeat, if this Derek was her Derek. But he’s not. She’s missed his smile ever since he died, and she still misses it. The male Stiles seems far more patient than she would be about coaxing it out.
Clearing his throat, the male Stiles tightens his grip on the steering wheel and says, faux casually, “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Stiles says. “I’m going to be honest with you, getting threatened has never been a big turn-on for me.”
“That’s a lie,” he interrupts immediately. “That is the biggest lie ever.”
Stiles admits, “Okay, yeah, it is, but I’m trying to be the bigger person here, okay?” The male Stiles shifts in his seat and nods twice, in a quick jerk, and then he melts enough to give Stiles a grin that she recognizes from when she decides to be a jackass.
“That can’t be hard for you,” he says. “Are you sure you’re not having triplets? Also, seeing me but shorter and pregnant is the biggest mindfuck ever, I hope you appreciate this.”
“Dude, you have a dick,” Stiles says. “What the fuck is up with that. How does that even work.”
“Seriously, between werewolves and genitalia you’re going with genitalia?” the male Stiles asks.
“Wouldn’t you?” Stiles points out. “You totally are, right now. Recognize in me the worst of yourself.” She waggles her fingers in his direction and he lets out a surprised bark of laughter.
She knows what he wants to ask, so she lets the conversation fall away after that and waits for him to figure out how to phrase it. They’re about twenty minutes out from the witches’ nesting ground or coven den or whatever the hell it’s called when the male Stiles finally says, apparently giving up on subtlety or beating around the bush, “How do I convince him?”
It’s not like there’s actual experience that Stiles can draw on about this; she and Derek had been best friends from childhood and they’d basically gone through puberty at the same time and looked at each other and that had been that. It’s easily the most boring love story of the entire Hale family. Laura walking up to Ginny at a Hey Marseilles show in Seattle and baldly saying, “You’re cute, let’s go out,” is more interesting than Stiles and Derek’s origin story.
But even if this Derek isn’t Stiles’ husband, it’s still Derek Hale. “He’s the fucking stubbornest human being on the planet,” she tells the male Stiles. “But he likes taking care of people; he loves family. I realize this is a bitch move, but you’re still really young, mini-me. You’ve got time for him to figure his shit out. He needs to do that first, or else anything you guys build together is going to have a shitty foundation.”
“Do we have time, though?” the male Stiles asks. “He’s a werewolf and I’ve almost died five times this school year.”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Stiles says, although she’s fairly certain that the male Stiles isn’t exaggerating his number of near-death experiences. “If you push him, he’ll go hide in his clubhouse.”
“Well, subway car,” he corrects, “but I guess that’s a fair point. God, I’m just so tired of waiting. I know he wants this, wants me.”
“Of course he does,” Stiles says, popping the collar of her flannel shirt. “We’re hot shit, look at us. Anyway, you don’t need a degree in Freudian dynamics to see that Derek’s got a list of issues longer than the Great Wall of China concerning relationships. I didn’t have to deal with those, but I think you’ll be okay.”
The male Stiles pulls off the road; the Jeep’s headlights illuminate a sign labeled HAIGHT MOUNTAIN NEXT RIGHT. Stiles can remember being twenty and confused and the heavy dose of self-loathing that had been settling around her shoulders, about the cancer and Mom and looking so much like her that sometimes her dad got a weirdly unfocused look in his eyes, like he was staring past her.
“She smoked because she was in college in the early eighties and people did that kind of stupid shit,” Stiles says abruptly. The male Stiles freezes. “It wasn’t because of stress or because you were hyperactive and she couldn’t handle you. Mom could always handle you.”
It’s hard to look at him and know that she got an extra ten years with Mom, just because she was born earlier. “Trust me,” she says, to the windshield because she can tell he doesn’t know what to say. “I know. She didn’t stop even after my ADHD got better.”
The male Stiles chokes on air next to her; Stiles nods twice, jerkily, and then slips out of the car as Scott and Isaac skid to a halt. “Derek’s a mile to the east,” Isaac tells her, as Scott, with a concerned and stalwart look on his face, inches towards the driver’s side of the car.
Stiles reaches out and grabs the collar of Scott’s jacket. “Give him a sec,” she says quietly, and then, in her normal speaking volume, “Can one of you run me through this stupidly complex plan again?” It’d taken ten minutes the first time; she figures ten minutes is plenty of time for the male Stiles to get himself together and join them.
She’s right; at the eight and a half minute mark, as Scott is using a series of complicated hand signals to explain what’s going to happen after they pin the coven of witches down in their bolt hole, the male Stiles opens the door and comes out of the Jeep. His eyes are slightly glossy, but his face is mobile as he says, “Are we explaining this to the old lady again?” and Stiles flips him off.
~
When Stiles opens her eyes again, the blood from the runes is flaking off of her forehead and she’s sitting in the driver’s seat of her Jeep-she checks; no dent-parked by the side of the road leading up to the Hale house. It’s day again, and when she flips open her phone to check, the date is December 20th.
There’s a new text message; it’s time-stamped 2:34 PM and reads, Please tell me you didn’t go into labor on some back road in the preserve and are currently cutting the umbilical cord with your teeth. It’s from Laura.
According to the clock on the dashboard of the Jeep, it’s 2:40 PM. Since Stiles has service again, she sends back, No childbirth imminent. I’ll be there in twenty minutes, and drops her phone onto the empty passenger’s seat.
If she stops and thinks, letting the space around her filter out, she can see the male Stiles’ Derek, his face in an awkward half-frown as Stiles has obligingly allowed a cowering witch to paint her forehead and wrists with runes. “I-I’m sorry,” he’d finally said, looking at her stomach deliberately. Since Stiles had never expected to see Derek ever again, let alone for him to apologize for leaving her to raise their child without him, she’d sort of nodded helplessly.
Obviously, Stiles couldn’t have stayed with them. The photocopies the male Stiles had hysterically waved in her direction had been very clear about how keeping two of the same person in the same universe was a perfect recipe for an implosion of reality. It hadn’t been her Derek. There had been fucking werewolves, for fuck’s sake. Stiles couldn’t leave her dad alone.
Stiles leans forward until her forehead, covered in drying blood, is resting against the top of the steering wheel. She’s shaking too hard for real tears; she just manages a couple dry shudders before she swallows compulsively and says, “It-it’s Tuesday. I just met a version of you in another universe that was a werewolf.”
She pauses and laughs. It sounds broken, so she keeps laughing until it sounds like she’s actually amused. “I know. A werewolf. What the actual fuck. Apparently it was a family thing. Can you imagine Erin as a wolf? I’d fear for the safety of the universe at large.”
From this position, she can watch her hands come around to rest against her belly, her palms smoothing down the knitted fabric of the other Derek’s henley. “I know I never say it, but I think the words are kind of important to me. I took it for granted, that you would be around for the rest of my life and I wouldn’t have to say it.”
She presses her hands until she can feel her wedding ring indent the skin of her stomach. “I miss you, Derek,” she says, and she has to exert an obscene amount of control over her voice to keep it from breaking too badly. “I’m going to miss you for the rest of my life. I’m sorry that I haven’t said it before.”
The baby shifts restlessly and a small foot kicks out against Stiles’ left hand. “Oomph,” she grunts. “Ow, Jesus, okay, yeah, I’m paying attention to you, too. Thanks for not making me puke for the past two days. I really appreciate it.” Since that sounds too sarcastic and Stiles is never going to tempt fate ever, ever again, lest she end up in a universe with, like, fish people or something, she adds, “No, really, that was sincerely meant.”
The baby settles and Stiles has at least twelve minutes until Erin comes barreling in a well-meaning panic down the road in Beatrice’s pick-up and the shirt still smells like Derek, a little, like Garnier and Tide and cedar, so Stiles closes her eyes again and just-breathes. “I miss you,” she repeats, and it hurts just as much, but it’s a little cleaner this time. “Oh god, do I miss you, you asshole.”