any way the wind blows
Title: How to Date a College Graduate (2/2)
Author: veterization
Disclaimer: I do not own Teen Wolf.
Rating: NC-17
Genre and/or Pairing: Stiles/Derek
Word Count: ~13,000
Summary: AU. Set two years in the future of "How to Date Your Best Friend's Brother" in which Stiles is graduating high school and Derek is working on his master's degree. There is prom, graduation, and a few very uncomfortable confrontations.
Back to Part I!
“Where the hell are you?” Stiles demands into his cell phone, sprawled out on his bed with everything but rose petals surrounding him. He peers out of the window to survey the dark driveway and the flickering streetlights as if resolutely hoping that this time, there's a Camaro grumbling up the gravel of the driveway and Derek creeping up the front steps. “My dad left the house half an hour ago and we are totally wasting what could be sexy times.”
“Um,” Derek says uncomfortably from the other line in the sort of voice that makes Stiles think that he won't be spying a nice car drive up to his house at all tonight. “Something came up.”
“Something other than my dick?” Stiles says, looking down at his nightstand where a brand new pack of condoms and lube sit, staring up at him mockingly when a mere minute ago, they were making him tingle in his midsection. “We've planned this for ages, Derek, we haven't have had time to actually be alone together in forever. And sex aside, and yes, I might sound like half of an old married couple when I say this, but I'd be happy just to see your face tonight.”
“I'm not in California,” Derek confesses, and it’s the first Stiles has heard of it so he has the decency to sound vaguely sheepish. “I’m in Chicago.”
“Chicago? As in, not my house?” Stiles parrots back at him. “Why?”
“Like I said, something came up. Rather unexpectedly,” Derek sounds apprehensive, like he’s holding back on sharing all of the details. A pregnant pause settles into the air before he decides to expound. “My professor pitched the idea of me studying criminology alongside the Chicago Police Department as a reward for all the research I’ve been doing and he wanted me to check out the area.”
“Why-why would you need to check out the area?” Stiles asks, feeling a tightly-strung ball of dread form in his stomach.
“Well,” Derek sounds downright uneasy now. “If I take him up on his offer, I’d move here. For at least a while. It’s a really good opportunity.”
“And you-you’re just mentioning it now?” Stiles asks, feeling rather numb. A part of him points out that if he was a good, supportive boyfriend he would be cheering Derek’s endeavors on and telling him exactly how proud he is of his success and that all his hours spent pouring over textbooks in his room and writing term papers will finally pay off, but another part of him selfishly would rather yell if it means that he’s about to transition into being one of those couples that feebly attempt long distance. He suddenly wishes Scott were here with him, because Scott would definitely be telling off his brother for his insensitivity right about now and telling him to get his ass back to Beacon Hills or he would go tattle-tale to mom that he’s thinking of moving.
“I didn’t know myself, Stiles!” Derek persists. “I’ll just be checking out the area for a few weeks and then I can think about it more.”
“A few weeks?” Stiles’ eyes rivet toward the calendar tacked crookedly onto his wall. “What about graduation?”
“I’d… watch the tape.”
“You’re kidding!” Like a string of nightmares he can’t open his eyes from, Stiles imagines having to share his life with Derek through videos on YouTube and grainy Skype conversations. He imagines life whirring by in Chicago while he stays stationary in the mud in Beacon Hills with Scott. Maybe he’d get a dog to keep him company once Scott would leave to go start a family of eight plus with Allison, or maybe he’d become his father’s lackey at the station to keep busy. He roughly blinks the images of his potential future away and resists the urge to maim his newly-bought box of condoms in rebellion.
“I’m really sorry about this, Stiles,” Derek mumbles, sounding quite small unlike his usual burly and commanding tone of voice. Stiles can drum up no sympathy.
“Yeah, well, me too,” Stiles mutters, sweeping the lot of his purchases into his arms to push under the bed and out of sight. “Just so you know, I bought all the condoms and all the flavored lubes you like today for you and waited awkwardly in line at the cashier. My cashier was very judgmental and old and I didn’t even tell her it was a for a science project to diffuse the tension, so there, I hope you feel bad about yourself when you see what I do for you!”
“You bought flavored lubes?” Derek asks in a low voice.
“Oh god, don’t get turned on, you asshole! I’m mad at you! You deserve the worst boyfriend of the year award!”
“Stiles.”
“No! No! Absolutely no changing my mind,” Stiles bites his lip and is already on his way to the kitchen to pull out bowls and bowls of his favorite comfort snacks. Right after this, he’s calling Scott, and Scott is showing up whether or not he’s getting freaky with Allison. Stiles is making no exceptions. “I’m hanging up on you.”
“Stiles.”
Stiles hits the end button before he goes on a rant about how this is not what he had in mind when he agreed to betray his best friend’s trust and start a covert affair with his best friend’s brother two years ago when he was still naïve and permanently horny and about how he now knows what Taylor Swift must feel like whenever she writes another passive-aggressive break-up song and how he wants the Die Hard DVDs he left at Derek’s dorm back, but instead he hangs up, instantly calls Scott, and wallows in self-pity and poor hygiene for the next three days.
--
Stiles doesn't know what side to put his tassel on.
It's Graduation Day, capitals very much needed because Stiles is freaking out at the prospect of officially turning into an adult, because in the real world he can't use the I left my essay in my printer excuse and he certainly can't convince his father that he's feeling too clammy to go to school when he has a test in math class. He fiddles with his robes, adjusts his cap until it's resting at a jaunty angle, and waits for the panic to ebb away.
The plus of freaking out over graduating is that Stiles knows that no matter how much he panics, Scott is panicking at least twice as much. He can imagine him as he whines to his mother to fix his robes and dab the sweat off his forehead, and with that thought in mind, Stiles feels sufficiently better about his state of mind and even slightly amused.
“Are you ready, Stiles?” His father hollers up the stairs, and Stiles takes off the cap. He's ready, he supposes, to grab the diploma and shake his snooty principal's hand and wake serenely off the stage and into the arms of the cruel real world, but he doesn't know if he's ready to do it without everyone he needs to be there too.
Although he'd never admit it or disclose his concerns to his father, he wishes his mother would be here to see him, mostly because Stiles' mom was the best mom ever. He doesn't remember everything about her, just blurs of wavy brown hair, a laugh as infectious as his, and how delicious her hot cocoa was and how sweet her perfume smelled when she kissed him on the temple before she dropped him off to preschool. He knows that his father has it worse, that his father probably remembers all of the little details, like what it felt like to kiss her or talk to her or meet her parents or dance with her at prom. The prom he had to dance at with his best friend and his favorite gay classmate because his boyfriend wasn't going.
Thinking about Derek all the way in Chicago is hard, but thinking about Derek always being in Chicago is even harder, him not showing up to Stiles' graduation just the beginning of a very long life where the two of them are running in opposite directions. He thinks about how he'll be in the line with all his friends, how he'll hug Allison and all but tackle Scott and he'll try to hit Jackson in the shin before he leaves if he can, and how his father will be waving at him from the stands, and how Derek won't be there. He doesn’t realize until just then exactly how much he pictured Derek in his future until Derek told him he might not be there to experience his future with him.
“Stiles! Hustle, hustle! I know your last name doesn't start with three As in a row but we don't want to miss it when he gets to Stilinski!” Stiles' father yells up the stairs, sounding almost as nervous as Stiles, and Stiles starts hustling.
With or without Derek, he doesn't want to miss this.
--
When all of it is over, Stiles doesn't feel any different.
He's glad, really, and he doesn't know what he expected, like that he would sprout a beard the moment he would leap from the stage or that he'd be officially broke and homeless and saddled with adult worries the moment he shook his principal's beefy hand. He feels the same, just as silly, just as young, and just as free.
He's already thrown his cap carelessly into the air and is unable to locate its whereabouts after the toss by the time all the students burst into a mad round of applause, burst into tears, and hug their friends like all of them are about to board crashing planes. The mentality is contagious, and it only takes a few seconds before Stiles is joining in and throwing his arms into the air and hollering like he's skydiving off a cliff. He grabs the person next to him-a girl he's never spoken a word to before in his entire high school career-and pulls her into a bone-crushing hug before he leaps off to find Scott and scream in his face.
He finds his dad right afterward, and they spend a good two minutes locked in a tight embrace while Stiles' father muffles all of his tears in Stiles' sleeve and pretends his boy is still stumbling around his house in diapers instead of prancing around his high school gym with a well-earned diploma. He pulls back and gets a congratulatory pat on the cheek from Scott's mother, even goes out of his way to find Mr. Harris and shake his hand even though he spent the majority of the last four years sulking in detention in his classroom, and then, suddenly, there's Derek.
He feels a bit like he's in that fifteen-minute montage near the end of the movie where a romantic ballad overwhelms all other noise and his life turns into slow motion, Derek wrapping him up in his arms and burying his nose in his neck like he's breathing him in. Stiles clings back just as tightly through his eloquent sputters of, “What-but-I thought you weren't-can't believe you're here, you huge asshole!”
“Didn't want to miss it,” Derek mumbles on his ear, and he clings onto Stiles like he doesn't intend on letting go soon even though students are streaming by them left and right. “I'm proud of you.”
“You asshole.”
“I know.”
“You asshole! How did you even-”
“Told the Chicago Police Department I had somewhere to be,” Derek says, and plants a short kiss under his ear that somehow manages to work as the apology that Stiles was waiting to hear.
“You’re being punished! No sex for at least a week!”
“How about we go to the backseat of my car?” Derek murmurs in his ear, and Stiles weighs his options of enduring another hour of sundry classmates he never spoke to much or only ever played with once on the same basketball team in PE class coming up to him to pat him on the back and wish him the best of luck versus tearing all of Derek’s clothes off in his Camaro. His no-sex rule seems almost counterproductive already.
“Deal.”
--
Stiles' graduation gown is far gone and discarded an hour later when he shakes off his father and Scott and ends up sprawled in the backseat of Derek's car, parked discreetly behind a clump of trees in the Beacon Hills reserve while they attempt to break the record of fastest undressing ever to have been accomplished, Stiles' t-shirt already draped over the steering wheel and Derek's jacket sitting forgotten in the foot room. The backseat is too small for them, nothing but a small slippery expanse of cool leather and naked skin, but Stiles doesn't mind a little cramping and a few awkward positions if he gets to spend the next few hours touching Derek, licking Derek, and sucking marks all over Derek without abandon.
“You know, I still haven’t completely forgiven you,” Stiles admits while he’s shimmying out of his pants and admiring the firmness of Derek’s ass under his hands, an ass he’s definitely missed groping in the past few weeks.
“That’s okay,” he says, and something vaguely diabolical flits over his feature. “You will.”
And he then proceeds to give Stiles the messiest, filthiest blowjob of his life while Stiles grips the seatbelt for support in one hand and a handful of Derek’s hair in his other hand.
Derek’s mouth, Stiles is convinced, was created purely for the purpose of pornographic eating and blow jobs, mostly because his tongue might as well be classified as a weapon that one needs to use discretion with were they to go headfirst into battle. Stiles lets loose a string of curse words that would have his stick-in-her-ass grandmother rolling in her grave when Derek hollows his cheeks around Stiles’ erection and sucks, tongue pressed against the underside of Stiles’ cock and fingers rubbing insistently against his puckered entrance. He slides them in with nothing but saliva to ease the way-which Stiles can deal with, considering that it was either that or car wax-and keeps up the steady pace of his mouth working away on Stiles’ length, and the sight of him ducked between Stiles’ legs combined with the torturous sensations of Derek’s fingers rubbing inside him is enough to make him blow his load right there, but right when Stiles starts bucking up into the wet heat of Derek’s mouth, Derek pulls back and smiles.
“Forgiven yet?” He asks, looking so evil Stiles might be able to snap a picture of his face and send it into Disney as inspiration for their next heinous villain, and Stiles’ head hits the cool window behind him.
“Yeah, yeah, forgiven, keep going.”
“Nuh uh,” Derek denies, and slows down the pace of his fingers thrusting in and out of his hole to an agonizing pace. “Wanna hear you beg, Stiles.”
“Beg for you to please hurry up and fuck me?” Stiles asks, and Derek’s eyes flash with poorly veiled lust. Stiles pulls him into a kiss that’s all demanding teeth and tongue, using his momentary advantage to push Derek down the seat and position himself over his cock. Derek doesn’t seem to be against this change of plans at all, briefly slicking up his dick before he grabs Stiles’ hips and lets him slide down until he’s sitting on his lap.
It always feels good, but this time it’s especially so. Maybe it’s because it’s been a while since they’ve done this, or maybe it’s because Stiles was starting to believe that Derek being in Chicago meant they wouldn’t do this for a good while, or maybe it’s just because they’re both scrambling for more and not breaking eye contact. Stiles slides down until Derek’s biting his own lip and gripping Stiles’ hips hard enough to pulverize bone marrow, and the sight of his self-restraint is not nearly as appealing as his pleasure, so Stiles promptly starts rocking up and down on his length.
“Oh, fuck, Stiles,” Derek groans, bucking his hips up so his cock slides into Stiles further than before, the stretch and burn of his dick sliding into him so familiar and perfect that it doesn’t take long for either of them to come at all. They rock against each other and exchange breathless kisses, and Stiles barely even needs to give his erection a helping hand before he’s coming.
The afterglow, however, is cut short and brought to an unexpected halt when in the middle of sharing lazy post-orgasm kisses and tangling their legs together in the limited room of the backseat, the sudden noise of a knock on the back window yanks them from their reverie and from Stiles once again memorizing the smell of Derek’s shampoo. They sit up like guilty teenagers caught necking in the backyard after curfew, which Stiles realizes he is when he sees that the face of the police officer in the window is his father’s, looking gruff and authoritative until he too comes to the realization his son is the one half naked in the back of the car in the middle of the woods right next to his best friend’s brother.
“Oh sweet mercy,” Stiles murmurs hollowly as he watches the light of recognition flash on his father’s face and slowly morph into one of horror as he takes in the faces of the shamefully naked couple and identifies them as familiar ones. “Derek, make sure my grave has something funny on it under my name.”
--
Sitting in the middle of what might just be the worst family conference of all his life, including the one where Stiles inadvertently was there to listen to Scott and Derek’s mother explain that she was getting a divorce, Stiles takes a moment to pray to whatever cosmic deity might be overseeing this particular agonizing portion of his life to make sure he makes it out unscathed. Or alive. He’ll settle for just alive.
Across from him sits his father, appearing too baffled to even say a word, and Scott and Derek’s mother, lips pursed into nothing but a thin white line of sternness that Stiles knows to mean she’s either about to start yelling or she’s currently struggling to find the proper method of parenting to deliver when her son and her younger son’s best friend are found making out in the back of a car. In between him and Derek, Scott sits like a buffer that Stiles, for once, is incredibly grateful for, except he’s avoiding eye contact with everybody and shrunken in on himself like he knows that everybody in the room is ready to interrogate him concerning his involvement for the whole affair or blame him for letting the secret slip when he’d much rather be shut in his room eavesdropping from a safe distance.
Stiles considers looking at Derek for support, just to gauge his reaction to the circumstances, except Derek is staring resolutely ahead like he’s either ready to burn a hole through the wall or he’s currently filing through mental excuses that dismiss this whole misunderstanding that he must have had at the ready for years just in case the Sherriff one day accosted him for deflowering his virgin son. His hands are clenched into white-knuckled fists on his knees that Stiles sort of wants to grab just to make sure he doesn’t accidentally break his own fingers.
Naturally, even though he really doesn’t want to be, he’s the first to talk. His mouth moves without his permission. “So. Um. How about you take away my computer privileges for a week and we all just forget that this ever happened?”
The whole room collectively ignores him. His father looks more confused than ever when he finally finds the voice to speak once more.
“Maybe… maybe we can talk about how this even began?” His father begins meekly, still looking so lost in his own skin, like he would know perfectly well how to deal with this situation if the couple getting to second base in the back of the car was just some rowdy teenagers, but he doesn’t have a clue of how to deal with this with his own son at the receiving end of this sort of trouble. Stiles admits that he’s a troublemaker and that trouble seems to have taken up permanent albeit rent-free residence under his bed, but this might be slightly worse than listening in to his father’s police calls when there’s a robbery in occurrence when he should be busy studying in solitude at home.
“Well,” Derek starts stiffly. “It just sort of happened, Sherriff.”
Sherriff. Stiles wants to bury his face in his hands and only peek out between his fingers for the rest of his life. Derek has known his father for years, has made small chat with him over holiday dinners when the Stilinskis came over for celebrations, and yet here he is, acting like he’s never laid eyes on the man before. Stiles realizes that Derek, big, strong, built from the hardest of all bricks Derek is walking on eggshells. Stiles eyes the nightstick tucked securely into his father’s police belt and understands perfectly why.
“Did you force my son to be with you?” Stiles’ father asks gruffly.
“No! No. It wasn’t like that, dad, I was the one who practically jumped him,” Stiles interjects.
Scott whines pitifully to the floor. Nobody feels the need to rub him on the back until the nausea and the terror fades away.
“You?” Stiles’ father repeats incredulously. “You? I thought you had it bad for that Lydia chick?”
“Who?” Derek intervenes sharply, and really, this is not the time for a streak of jealousy. Stiles ignores him.
“Dad, that was back in seventh grade when I told you about that. I’ve been going out with Derek since-”
Stiles promptly shuts up. Derek looks very much like he wants to cuff Stiles on the back of the head until he’s too dizzy to speak and reveal more incriminating evidence against Derek’s rapidly dwindling reputation among the Stilinski household, not to mention his own mother, who looks like she’s about ready to burst into tears.
“Since?” The sheriff demands, and when Stiles shuts his mouth and refuses to answer, he rounds on Derek instead. “Son, you and I are gonna be in a lot of hot water together if you’re telling me that you touched him before he even made it through the puberty machine!”
“Dad!” Stiles says as the whole situation spins out of control toward a very meek outlook. “Dad, I was sixteen. And it was me who was all over the guy. I mean, c’mon, he was ripped and had that oddly attractive broody demeanor and I had a severely neglected sex drive.”
“Stiles, stop talking,” Derek tells him lowly, and that’s when the sheriff gets riled up again.
“You control him like that all the time? Back when he was a minor, maybe?”
There’s a small interlude of hasty yells and a very graceful high-pitched scream from Stiles’ end when the sheriff gets up and advances on Derek like he’s ready to pummel him into the next week even though he was heartily calling him son a good few days ago, pairs of hands pushing him back into his seat on the couch. Stiles keeps his gun-wielding hand in his eye just in case this turns into a hostage situation.
“Scott, did you know about this?” Derek and Scott’s mother pipes up from the other end of the couch, looking supremely uncomfortable. Scott whines some more and then mumbles a few unintelligible words into his palm.
“He knew,” Derek reveals without a beat. Scott howls in shock at that and promptly punches Derek on his shoulder. The sheriff looks slightly satisfied at the abuse.
“Dude!” Scott wails, very much acting like the woeful victim in the entire situation. Stiles has half a mind to start blurting out that Scott carries condom in the back pocket of his jeans at all times because he and Allison are just that insatiable when it comes to devouring each other if only to toss around a few smidgens of blame that might take some of the heat away from him and Derek.
“And you never said anything, Scott?” His mother addresses him.
“Mom, I was just trying as hard as I could not to walk in on them making out! I tried to stay out of it, I did, but I found them making out on the couch two years ago and couldn’t exactly ignore it after that!”
“Two years ago?!”
“Okay, everybody, listen up!” Stiles calls from where he’s being very firmly ignored. Four faces, all ready to combust with a plethora of emotions that all seem that like they’ll ultimately end in nausea, turn to Stiles. “I get that everyone’s upset! Except for you, Scott, this has nothing to do with you.” Stiles adds as an afterthought before barreling back onto track. “And the fact of the matter is that it happened, and, and if I was Marty McFly and I had access to a time machine I wouldn’t go back and change it, okay? Derek’s right, it was my idea back then and I haven’t changed my mind now. So whether or not you like it doesn’t really matter, because I’m fine going Romeo and Juliet behind your backs. Well, not the ritual suicide. But the-the whole forbidden love and quarreling families thing-“
“Stiles, shut up,” Derek advises in a terse tone that leaves no room for argument. Stiles takes a deep breath and steps off his proverbial soapbox. When he sits back down his father is rubbing his temples like this is all information he’d gladly erase from his brain so he could return to being blissfully oblivious. Mildly, Stiles wonders if this will all feel better tomorrow, like a weight off his shoulders now that the secret’s out of the bag and he won’t have to endure any more supremely uncomfortable family confrontations from this point onward.
“Okay, kids. Here’s the deal,” the sheriff finally speaks up after sharing a cryptic glance with Derek’s mother. “We won’t get in the way of either of you because we know that you’re both so stubborn that you’d probably end up rebelling and seeing each other anyway. But you-” he points an accusatory finger at Derek, “are gonna do this right. You’re not going to treat my son like illegal high school goods, got that? And if I find out that you’re abusing him-”
“Dad,” Stiles mutters when his cheeks start heating up at the protective speech he thought for sure one day he would be the one to be on the receiving end of when he’d find a girlfriend with a neurotic father.
“-I will remind you that I have a license to carry weapons. Uh, no harm intended on your son, Melissa.”
“Well, that negated the purpose of that whole speech,” Stiles observes dryly, but a good amount of tension uncoils from his innards and lets him breathe again when he realizes that he won’t be one of those stereotypical teenagers anymore who has to come up with excuses ranging all the way from I promised to look after the school hamster for student naturalist extra credit to Scott’s been dumped again every time he sneaks out to see Derek. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the clenched fist on Derek’s thigh relax as well.
In the end, they all exchange hugs and apologize to their respective parents for their secrecy-and in Derek’s case, for that little bit of pedophilia and what his father crudely refers to as blatant statutory rape-before they’re free to go, Derek’s mother first cuffing him around the head and threatening to take ownership of the keys to Derek’s Camaro if he pulls yet more stunts with underage Stilinski children.
Fortunately, Stiles thinks they’re out of the woods for that one.
--
After the Backseat Incident, Stiles’ father tries much harder than Stiles would have anticipated to whole-heartedly accept Stiles’ endeavors and even turns an eye so blind it needs its own seeing-eye dog to get around town to the fact that Stiles was with Derek before he turned eighteen. The day he walks into the station to deliver his father lunch and discovers a small rainbow flag standing proudly on his father’s desk by his computer is both one of the best and most embarrassing moments of Stiles’ life.
“Oh, dad, not rainbow flags,” Stiles moans when he picks up the tiny ornament and twirls the rainbow ribbon in his hand. His father remains completely serious about the decoration and returns it to its spot by his keyboard.
A day after the long-winded family explanation, Stiles had sat down with his father and endured his endless questions concerning where his heterosexuality went and when did Lydia Martin turn ugly and stupid if he’s no longer head over heels for her, answering each one with the same answer: he still likes all of those things, whether it be heterosexuality or Lydia Martin, he just happens to like Derek more.
His father’s expression looks mildly constipated throughout their whole conversation, like processing the fact that his son is gay for his best friend’s older brother is way too similar to a Lifetime movie for him to fully grasp, but eventually he seems to catch on to all of the details and doesn’t try to push Stiles in a different direction and merely ends the discussion with a quiet, “your mother would’ve wanted what you would’ve wanted, so I do too,” that almost makes Stiles bawl like a three-year-old girl.
“Hey, if any of the guys at the station have a problem that my son is gay, they have to deal with the flag,” his father says firmly, pointing to the figurine like it’s the guardian of gay peace. Stiles shakes his head and hands him his lunch while he sits down to unwrap his own.
“So what’s going on with that string of thefts?” Stiles asks around a mouthful of tater tots, pointing to the evidence board behind his father’s chair.
“Actually, Stiles,” his father says slowly. “I was hoping we could talk about something else. I was hoping we could talk about Derek.”
“Oh god. You didn’t change your mind about wanting to have him castrated, did you?”
“No! No, I just wanted to know how your relationship is going,” he seems to stutter a little bit over the word relationship, but Stiles knows perfectly well that he’d be slipping over the word no matter who it was Stiles was managing to date for over two years. Stiles shrugs.
“It’s okay. A little bummed because he wants to leave Beacon Hills, but what can you do, right?”
“Woah, woah, woah. He wants to leave Beacon Hills?”
“Yeah,” Stiles mumbles. “His professor offered him the chance to study crime alongside some detectives in Chicago, so he’s pretty set on the idea of taking him up on that.”
“Crime? I thought he was into mythology.”
“He is. But I always told him that he could fight crime with that glare of his and I guess it inspired him,” Stiles pauses in the slurping of his milkshake. “Hold on. Is that irony that it’s me who basically caused him to think about moving away from me?”
“Stiles, if your boyfriend wants a job he can come here and look over how we do things at the station,” his father says slowly, like Stiles is a little intellectually depraved for not having come up with this idea himself. “We’re not exactly bursting with help over here.”
“Oh my god,” Stiles says, and drops his sandwich straight in his lap. Mayonnaise splatters over his jeans and a few tomatoes squeeze away to land on the floor, but he ignores the mess. “Are you serious?”
“And this way I’d be able to keep an eye on him, too. Make sure he’s treating you right.”
“You’re serious!” Stiles shoots up from his chair, the weight on his mind lifted like he's back to imagining living with Derek in Beacon Hills alongside Scott as their annoying neighbor who always runs out of milk and a very loud guard dog that sits on their lawn. The strings that were pulling at his heart at the thought of Derek living hundreds of miles away while trying to maintain a relationship through phone calls, then the occasional email, then the utter silence, are loosened and Stiles no longer feels like he always needs to carry his inhaler with him at all times.
Two weeks later, Derek's master's degree is hung up in the sheriff's office, right next to Stiles' diploma, his first grade art project, and the faded picture of Stiles' mother carrying an energetic baby caught in the middle of a cheery wave. Derek slips his hand into Stiles' when he sees it first, Stiles' father pointedly looks away to give them a moment's privacy, and Stiles enjoys the proudest moment of his life.
--
“I swear, this is at least the thirtieth staircase we’ve walked up,” Stiles pants around a tower of precariously stacked cardboard boxes secured in his grip while his feet feel for the next step and wait, inevitably, for his clumsiness to make an appearance and for him to go tumbling down all thirty steps like a cartoon character. “I’m not convinced that we’re not climbing up the stairs to heaven.”
“Well, they won’t let you in,” Scott says, sounding not even a little out of breath, and when Stiles turns around and catches sight of the scrawled words clothes and stuffed animals on Scott’s armful of boxes while he’s in the middle of carrying dishes and textbooks he realizes that he’s definitely been conned into being the mule. “You like sucking dick too much for you to make it past the gates.”
“Thanks for that, Scotty,” Stiles calls cheerfully over his shoulder when his feet hit the landing of the fourth floor and the crooked numbers 402 catch his eye hanging on the first door down the hall. He cries out in joy at the relief of not having to call his father and tell him that the brand new mugs and plates from Walmart are already out of commission after one day officially out on his own.
They march into their dormitory room-all but practically two squared feet of room for them to share-and drop their boxes, Scott pretending all the while to shake out his exhausted arms. Sitting on the bed enjoying a snack without a care in the world while Stiles lets the oxygen stream back into his lungs is Derek, who almost snorts with laughter at the sight of his boyfriend exhausted after one round up the stairs.
“You’re all sweaty,” Derek points out. “You haven’t even gotten the heavy stuff yet.”
“Maybe the guy with the Popeye muscles and the daily workout routine could get off his ass and help lift stuff,” Stiles says while he flops onto the bed next to him. The dormitory is small, maybe as small as his bathroom was at home, but that’s okay. He and Scott will rough it up like pilgrims in one-room-schoolhouses. Scott sits himself on top of the dresser and commences his own snack break even though all he’s done in the course of three hours is lift what might as well have been the combined weight of three pillows up to their dorm room.
“I’m good,” Derek airily declines. “I think I prefer watching you do the work.”
“You just get turned on when you see me all sweaty.” Stiles singsongs smugly, snagging Derek’s shirt in his thumb to tug him closer on the bed. There are piles of dented boxes piling up in the corner and the room is decorated with nothing but the two beds and dresser that the dormitory supplies in every room, and Stiles knows that they’re all omens informing him that he’s in for a long day of endless unpacking and heavy lifting that may stretch into a hot night if he doesn’t get up and keep busy, but a second later he catches a whiff of Derek’s cologne and decides that a few minutes nuzzling Derek’s stubble won’t hurt anybody’s schedule.
“That’s because I then have an excuse to take off your clothes,” Derek admits without missing a beat. Stiles is about to yank him on top of his chest so he can screw productivity and screw Derek for a bit instead when Scott disgustedly yells, “Ewwww!” from around his water bottle. Derek rolls his eyes and leans over the bed to give Stiles a slow kiss. Scott all but runs from the room.
“It’s just too easy with him,” Derek murmurs atop Stiles’ lips, who snickers and loops his arms around his neck. The air is warm like summer always gets in August, with a promise of mugginess from September that leaves Stiles’ forehead beading with sweat and every day tinged with an air of utmost laziness. Stiles already knows what this school year at college is going to be like for him-lots of missing his father, lots of pigging out on candy bars and vending machine snacks, lots of being crammed without a breath of space, lots of all-nighters with Scott, and lots of Derek.
“We haven’t christened this dorm yet,” Stiles murmurs, already feeling breathless again after just getting the air back in his lungs after hauling himself up what was clearly a good few million steps with boxes obstructing his view when Derek starts sucking marks-actual marks that Stiles doesn’t have to hide with douchebag scarves anymore when he sees his father-into the crook of his neck. “We haven’t had sex on any flat surface in this room.”
“That sounds like a challenge,” Derek rumbles on his throat, and Stiles’ dick jumps to life.
“Nothing you and your master’s degree can’t handle,” Stiles bucks up into Derek’s hips and revels in the rewarding groan he hears skip brokenly from Derek’s mouth. He cups Derek’s cheek and kisses him soundly on the mouth. He pulls back and tries to focus on Derek’s eyes or his nose, but he’s too close and nothing but a blur of dark stubble and pointy nose, close enough that Stiles feels comfortable murmuring, “I love you,” on his lips.
“Hey, hey, hey! That’s my bed, you guys! That’s so wrong!” Scott’s hysterical voice breaks their reverie from the doorway, face petrified and hands about to drop his box of deodorant and shampoo, and Stiles bursts out laughing because he knows that this is what his life will be for the next few years, next few decades, maybe the rest of his life, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
Author: veterization
Disclaimer: I do not own Teen Wolf.
Rating: NC-17
Genre and/or Pairing: Stiles/Derek
Word Count: ~13,000
Summary: AU. Set two years in the future of "How to Date Your Best Friend's Brother" in which Stiles is graduating high school and Derek is working on his master's degree. There is prom, graduation, and a few very uncomfortable confrontations.
Back to Part I!
“Where the hell are you?” Stiles demands into his cell phone, sprawled out on his bed with everything but rose petals surrounding him. He peers out of the window to survey the dark driveway and the flickering streetlights as if resolutely hoping that this time, there's a Camaro grumbling up the gravel of the driveway and Derek creeping up the front steps. “My dad left the house half an hour ago and we are totally wasting what could be sexy times.”
“Um,” Derek says uncomfortably from the other line in the sort of voice that makes Stiles think that he won't be spying a nice car drive up to his house at all tonight. “Something came up.”
“Something other than my dick?” Stiles says, looking down at his nightstand where a brand new pack of condoms and lube sit, staring up at him mockingly when a mere minute ago, they were making him tingle in his midsection. “We've planned this for ages, Derek, we haven't have had time to actually be alone together in forever. And sex aside, and yes, I might sound like half of an old married couple when I say this, but I'd be happy just to see your face tonight.”
“I'm not in California,” Derek confesses, and it’s the first Stiles has heard of it so he has the decency to sound vaguely sheepish. “I’m in Chicago.”
“Chicago? As in, not my house?” Stiles parrots back at him. “Why?”
“Like I said, something came up. Rather unexpectedly,” Derek sounds apprehensive, like he’s holding back on sharing all of the details. A pregnant pause settles into the air before he decides to expound. “My professor pitched the idea of me studying criminology alongside the Chicago Police Department as a reward for all the research I’ve been doing and he wanted me to check out the area.”
“Why-why would you need to check out the area?” Stiles asks, feeling a tightly-strung ball of dread form in his stomach.
“Well,” Derek sounds downright uneasy now. “If I take him up on his offer, I’d move here. For at least a while. It’s a really good opportunity.”
“And you-you’re just mentioning it now?” Stiles asks, feeling rather numb. A part of him points out that if he was a good, supportive boyfriend he would be cheering Derek’s endeavors on and telling him exactly how proud he is of his success and that all his hours spent pouring over textbooks in his room and writing term papers will finally pay off, but another part of him selfishly would rather yell if it means that he’s about to transition into being one of those couples that feebly attempt long distance. He suddenly wishes Scott were here with him, because Scott would definitely be telling off his brother for his insensitivity right about now and telling him to get his ass back to Beacon Hills or he would go tattle-tale to mom that he’s thinking of moving.
“I didn’t know myself, Stiles!” Derek persists. “I’ll just be checking out the area for a few weeks and then I can think about it more.”
“A few weeks?” Stiles’ eyes rivet toward the calendar tacked crookedly onto his wall. “What about graduation?”
“I’d… watch the tape.”
“You’re kidding!” Like a string of nightmares he can’t open his eyes from, Stiles imagines having to share his life with Derek through videos on YouTube and grainy Skype conversations. He imagines life whirring by in Chicago while he stays stationary in the mud in Beacon Hills with Scott. Maybe he’d get a dog to keep him company once Scott would leave to go start a family of eight plus with Allison, or maybe he’d become his father’s lackey at the station to keep busy. He roughly blinks the images of his potential future away and resists the urge to maim his newly-bought box of condoms in rebellion.
“I’m really sorry about this, Stiles,” Derek mumbles, sounding quite small unlike his usual burly and commanding tone of voice. Stiles can drum up no sympathy.
“Yeah, well, me too,” Stiles mutters, sweeping the lot of his purchases into his arms to push under the bed and out of sight. “Just so you know, I bought all the condoms and all the flavored lubes you like today for you and waited awkwardly in line at the cashier. My cashier was very judgmental and old and I didn’t even tell her it was a for a science project to diffuse the tension, so there, I hope you feel bad about yourself when you see what I do for you!”
“You bought flavored lubes?” Derek asks in a low voice.
“Oh god, don’t get turned on, you asshole! I’m mad at you! You deserve the worst boyfriend of the year award!”
“Stiles.”
“No! No! Absolutely no changing my mind,” Stiles bites his lip and is already on his way to the kitchen to pull out bowls and bowls of his favorite comfort snacks. Right after this, he’s calling Scott, and Scott is showing up whether or not he’s getting freaky with Allison. Stiles is making no exceptions. “I’m hanging up on you.”
“Stiles.”
Stiles hits the end button before he goes on a rant about how this is not what he had in mind when he agreed to betray his best friend’s trust and start a covert affair with his best friend’s brother two years ago when he was still naïve and permanently horny and about how he now knows what Taylor Swift must feel like whenever she writes another passive-aggressive break-up song and how he wants the Die Hard DVDs he left at Derek’s dorm back, but instead he hangs up, instantly calls Scott, and wallows in self-pity and poor hygiene for the next three days.
--
Stiles doesn't know what side to put his tassel on.
It's Graduation Day, capitals very much needed because Stiles is freaking out at the prospect of officially turning into an adult, because in the real world he can't use the I left my essay in my printer excuse and he certainly can't convince his father that he's feeling too clammy to go to school when he has a test in math class. He fiddles with his robes, adjusts his cap until it's resting at a jaunty angle, and waits for the panic to ebb away.
The plus of freaking out over graduating is that Stiles knows that no matter how much he panics, Scott is panicking at least twice as much. He can imagine him as he whines to his mother to fix his robes and dab the sweat off his forehead, and with that thought in mind, Stiles feels sufficiently better about his state of mind and even slightly amused.
“Are you ready, Stiles?” His father hollers up the stairs, and Stiles takes off the cap. He's ready, he supposes, to grab the diploma and shake his snooty principal's hand and wake serenely off the stage and into the arms of the cruel real world, but he doesn't know if he's ready to do it without everyone he needs to be there too.
Although he'd never admit it or disclose his concerns to his father, he wishes his mother would be here to see him, mostly because Stiles' mom was the best mom ever. He doesn't remember everything about her, just blurs of wavy brown hair, a laugh as infectious as his, and how delicious her hot cocoa was and how sweet her perfume smelled when she kissed him on the temple before she dropped him off to preschool. He knows that his father has it worse, that his father probably remembers all of the little details, like what it felt like to kiss her or talk to her or meet her parents or dance with her at prom. The prom he had to dance at with his best friend and his favorite gay classmate because his boyfriend wasn't going.
Thinking about Derek all the way in Chicago is hard, but thinking about Derek always being in Chicago is even harder, him not showing up to Stiles' graduation just the beginning of a very long life where the two of them are running in opposite directions. He thinks about how he'll be in the line with all his friends, how he'll hug Allison and all but tackle Scott and he'll try to hit Jackson in the shin before he leaves if he can, and how his father will be waving at him from the stands, and how Derek won't be there. He doesn’t realize until just then exactly how much he pictured Derek in his future until Derek told him he might not be there to experience his future with him.
“Stiles! Hustle, hustle! I know your last name doesn't start with three As in a row but we don't want to miss it when he gets to Stilinski!” Stiles' father yells up the stairs, sounding almost as nervous as Stiles, and Stiles starts hustling.
With or without Derek, he doesn't want to miss this.
--
When all of it is over, Stiles doesn't feel any different.
He's glad, really, and he doesn't know what he expected, like that he would sprout a beard the moment he would leap from the stage or that he'd be officially broke and homeless and saddled with adult worries the moment he shook his principal's beefy hand. He feels the same, just as silly, just as young, and just as free.
He's already thrown his cap carelessly into the air and is unable to locate its whereabouts after the toss by the time all the students burst into a mad round of applause, burst into tears, and hug their friends like all of them are about to board crashing planes. The mentality is contagious, and it only takes a few seconds before Stiles is joining in and throwing his arms into the air and hollering like he's skydiving off a cliff. He grabs the person next to him-a girl he's never spoken a word to before in his entire high school career-and pulls her into a bone-crushing hug before he leaps off to find Scott and scream in his face.
He finds his dad right afterward, and they spend a good two minutes locked in a tight embrace while Stiles' father muffles all of his tears in Stiles' sleeve and pretends his boy is still stumbling around his house in diapers instead of prancing around his high school gym with a well-earned diploma. He pulls back and gets a congratulatory pat on the cheek from Scott's mother, even goes out of his way to find Mr. Harris and shake his hand even though he spent the majority of the last four years sulking in detention in his classroom, and then, suddenly, there's Derek.
He feels a bit like he's in that fifteen-minute montage near the end of the movie where a romantic ballad overwhelms all other noise and his life turns into slow motion, Derek wrapping him up in his arms and burying his nose in his neck like he's breathing him in. Stiles clings back just as tightly through his eloquent sputters of, “What-but-I thought you weren't-can't believe you're here, you huge asshole!”
“Didn't want to miss it,” Derek mumbles on his ear, and he clings onto Stiles like he doesn't intend on letting go soon even though students are streaming by them left and right. “I'm proud of you.”
“You asshole.”
“I know.”
“You asshole! How did you even-”
“Told the Chicago Police Department I had somewhere to be,” Derek says, and plants a short kiss under his ear that somehow manages to work as the apology that Stiles was waiting to hear.
“You’re being punished! No sex for at least a week!”
“How about we go to the backseat of my car?” Derek murmurs in his ear, and Stiles weighs his options of enduring another hour of sundry classmates he never spoke to much or only ever played with once on the same basketball team in PE class coming up to him to pat him on the back and wish him the best of luck versus tearing all of Derek’s clothes off in his Camaro. His no-sex rule seems almost counterproductive already.
“Deal.”
--
Stiles' graduation gown is far gone and discarded an hour later when he shakes off his father and Scott and ends up sprawled in the backseat of Derek's car, parked discreetly behind a clump of trees in the Beacon Hills reserve while they attempt to break the record of fastest undressing ever to have been accomplished, Stiles' t-shirt already draped over the steering wheel and Derek's jacket sitting forgotten in the foot room. The backseat is too small for them, nothing but a small slippery expanse of cool leather and naked skin, but Stiles doesn't mind a little cramping and a few awkward positions if he gets to spend the next few hours touching Derek, licking Derek, and sucking marks all over Derek without abandon.
“You know, I still haven’t completely forgiven you,” Stiles admits while he’s shimmying out of his pants and admiring the firmness of Derek’s ass under his hands, an ass he’s definitely missed groping in the past few weeks.
“That’s okay,” he says, and something vaguely diabolical flits over his feature. “You will.”
And he then proceeds to give Stiles the messiest, filthiest blowjob of his life while Stiles grips the seatbelt for support in one hand and a handful of Derek’s hair in his other hand.
Derek’s mouth, Stiles is convinced, was created purely for the purpose of pornographic eating and blow jobs, mostly because his tongue might as well be classified as a weapon that one needs to use discretion with were they to go headfirst into battle. Stiles lets loose a string of curse words that would have his stick-in-her-ass grandmother rolling in her grave when Derek hollows his cheeks around Stiles’ erection and sucks, tongue pressed against the underside of Stiles’ cock and fingers rubbing insistently against his puckered entrance. He slides them in with nothing but saliva to ease the way-which Stiles can deal with, considering that it was either that or car wax-and keeps up the steady pace of his mouth working away on Stiles’ length, and the sight of him ducked between Stiles’ legs combined with the torturous sensations of Derek’s fingers rubbing inside him is enough to make him blow his load right there, but right when Stiles starts bucking up into the wet heat of Derek’s mouth, Derek pulls back and smiles.
“Forgiven yet?” He asks, looking so evil Stiles might be able to snap a picture of his face and send it into Disney as inspiration for their next heinous villain, and Stiles’ head hits the cool window behind him.
“Yeah, yeah, forgiven, keep going.”
“Nuh uh,” Derek denies, and slows down the pace of his fingers thrusting in and out of his hole to an agonizing pace. “Wanna hear you beg, Stiles.”
“Beg for you to please hurry up and fuck me?” Stiles asks, and Derek’s eyes flash with poorly veiled lust. Stiles pulls him into a kiss that’s all demanding teeth and tongue, using his momentary advantage to push Derek down the seat and position himself over his cock. Derek doesn’t seem to be against this change of plans at all, briefly slicking up his dick before he grabs Stiles’ hips and lets him slide down until he’s sitting on his lap.
It always feels good, but this time it’s especially so. Maybe it’s because it’s been a while since they’ve done this, or maybe it’s because Stiles was starting to believe that Derek being in Chicago meant they wouldn’t do this for a good while, or maybe it’s just because they’re both scrambling for more and not breaking eye contact. Stiles slides down until Derek’s biting his own lip and gripping Stiles’ hips hard enough to pulverize bone marrow, and the sight of his self-restraint is not nearly as appealing as his pleasure, so Stiles promptly starts rocking up and down on his length.
“Oh, fuck, Stiles,” Derek groans, bucking his hips up so his cock slides into Stiles further than before, the stretch and burn of his dick sliding into him so familiar and perfect that it doesn’t take long for either of them to come at all. They rock against each other and exchange breathless kisses, and Stiles barely even needs to give his erection a helping hand before he’s coming.
The afterglow, however, is cut short and brought to an unexpected halt when in the middle of sharing lazy post-orgasm kisses and tangling their legs together in the limited room of the backseat, the sudden noise of a knock on the back window yanks them from their reverie and from Stiles once again memorizing the smell of Derek’s shampoo. They sit up like guilty teenagers caught necking in the backyard after curfew, which Stiles realizes he is when he sees that the face of the police officer in the window is his father’s, looking gruff and authoritative until he too comes to the realization his son is the one half naked in the back of the car in the middle of the woods right next to his best friend’s brother.
“Oh sweet mercy,” Stiles murmurs hollowly as he watches the light of recognition flash on his father’s face and slowly morph into one of horror as he takes in the faces of the shamefully naked couple and identifies them as familiar ones. “Derek, make sure my grave has something funny on it under my name.”
--
Sitting in the middle of what might just be the worst family conference of all his life, including the one where Stiles inadvertently was there to listen to Scott and Derek’s mother explain that she was getting a divorce, Stiles takes a moment to pray to whatever cosmic deity might be overseeing this particular agonizing portion of his life to make sure he makes it out unscathed. Or alive. He’ll settle for just alive.
Across from him sits his father, appearing too baffled to even say a word, and Scott and Derek’s mother, lips pursed into nothing but a thin white line of sternness that Stiles knows to mean she’s either about to start yelling or she’s currently struggling to find the proper method of parenting to deliver when her son and her younger son’s best friend are found making out in the back of a car. In between him and Derek, Scott sits like a buffer that Stiles, for once, is incredibly grateful for, except he’s avoiding eye contact with everybody and shrunken in on himself like he knows that everybody in the room is ready to interrogate him concerning his involvement for the whole affair or blame him for letting the secret slip when he’d much rather be shut in his room eavesdropping from a safe distance.
Stiles considers looking at Derek for support, just to gauge his reaction to the circumstances, except Derek is staring resolutely ahead like he’s either ready to burn a hole through the wall or he’s currently filing through mental excuses that dismiss this whole misunderstanding that he must have had at the ready for years just in case the Sherriff one day accosted him for deflowering his virgin son. His hands are clenched into white-knuckled fists on his knees that Stiles sort of wants to grab just to make sure he doesn’t accidentally break his own fingers.
Naturally, even though he really doesn’t want to be, he’s the first to talk. His mouth moves without his permission. “So. Um. How about you take away my computer privileges for a week and we all just forget that this ever happened?”
The whole room collectively ignores him. His father looks more confused than ever when he finally finds the voice to speak once more.
“Maybe… maybe we can talk about how this even began?” His father begins meekly, still looking so lost in his own skin, like he would know perfectly well how to deal with this situation if the couple getting to second base in the back of the car was just some rowdy teenagers, but he doesn’t have a clue of how to deal with this with his own son at the receiving end of this sort of trouble. Stiles admits that he’s a troublemaker and that trouble seems to have taken up permanent albeit rent-free residence under his bed, but this might be slightly worse than listening in to his father’s police calls when there’s a robbery in occurrence when he should be busy studying in solitude at home.
“Well,” Derek starts stiffly. “It just sort of happened, Sherriff.”
Sherriff. Stiles wants to bury his face in his hands and only peek out between his fingers for the rest of his life. Derek has known his father for years, has made small chat with him over holiday dinners when the Stilinskis came over for celebrations, and yet here he is, acting like he’s never laid eyes on the man before. Stiles realizes that Derek, big, strong, built from the hardest of all bricks Derek is walking on eggshells. Stiles eyes the nightstick tucked securely into his father’s police belt and understands perfectly why.
“Did you force my son to be with you?” Stiles’ father asks gruffly.
“No! No. It wasn’t like that, dad, I was the one who practically jumped him,” Stiles interjects.
Scott whines pitifully to the floor. Nobody feels the need to rub him on the back until the nausea and the terror fades away.
“You?” Stiles’ father repeats incredulously. “You? I thought you had it bad for that Lydia chick?”
“Who?” Derek intervenes sharply, and really, this is not the time for a streak of jealousy. Stiles ignores him.
“Dad, that was back in seventh grade when I told you about that. I’ve been going out with Derek since-”
Stiles promptly shuts up. Derek looks very much like he wants to cuff Stiles on the back of the head until he’s too dizzy to speak and reveal more incriminating evidence against Derek’s rapidly dwindling reputation among the Stilinski household, not to mention his own mother, who looks like she’s about ready to burst into tears.
“Since?” The sheriff demands, and when Stiles shuts his mouth and refuses to answer, he rounds on Derek instead. “Son, you and I are gonna be in a lot of hot water together if you’re telling me that you touched him before he even made it through the puberty machine!”
“Dad!” Stiles says as the whole situation spins out of control toward a very meek outlook. “Dad, I was sixteen. And it was me who was all over the guy. I mean, c’mon, he was ripped and had that oddly attractive broody demeanor and I had a severely neglected sex drive.”
“Stiles, stop talking,” Derek tells him lowly, and that’s when the sheriff gets riled up again.
“You control him like that all the time? Back when he was a minor, maybe?”
There’s a small interlude of hasty yells and a very graceful high-pitched scream from Stiles’ end when the sheriff gets up and advances on Derek like he’s ready to pummel him into the next week even though he was heartily calling him son a good few days ago, pairs of hands pushing him back into his seat on the couch. Stiles keeps his gun-wielding hand in his eye just in case this turns into a hostage situation.
“Scott, did you know about this?” Derek and Scott’s mother pipes up from the other end of the couch, looking supremely uncomfortable. Scott whines some more and then mumbles a few unintelligible words into his palm.
“He knew,” Derek reveals without a beat. Scott howls in shock at that and promptly punches Derek on his shoulder. The sheriff looks slightly satisfied at the abuse.
“Dude!” Scott wails, very much acting like the woeful victim in the entire situation. Stiles has half a mind to start blurting out that Scott carries condom in the back pocket of his jeans at all times because he and Allison are just that insatiable when it comes to devouring each other if only to toss around a few smidgens of blame that might take some of the heat away from him and Derek.
“And you never said anything, Scott?” His mother addresses him.
“Mom, I was just trying as hard as I could not to walk in on them making out! I tried to stay out of it, I did, but I found them making out on the couch two years ago and couldn’t exactly ignore it after that!”
“Two years ago?!”
“Okay, everybody, listen up!” Stiles calls from where he’s being very firmly ignored. Four faces, all ready to combust with a plethora of emotions that all seem that like they’ll ultimately end in nausea, turn to Stiles. “I get that everyone’s upset! Except for you, Scott, this has nothing to do with you.” Stiles adds as an afterthought before barreling back onto track. “And the fact of the matter is that it happened, and, and if I was Marty McFly and I had access to a time machine I wouldn’t go back and change it, okay? Derek’s right, it was my idea back then and I haven’t changed my mind now. So whether or not you like it doesn’t really matter, because I’m fine going Romeo and Juliet behind your backs. Well, not the ritual suicide. But the-the whole forbidden love and quarreling families thing-“
“Stiles, shut up,” Derek advises in a terse tone that leaves no room for argument. Stiles takes a deep breath and steps off his proverbial soapbox. When he sits back down his father is rubbing his temples like this is all information he’d gladly erase from his brain so he could return to being blissfully oblivious. Mildly, Stiles wonders if this will all feel better tomorrow, like a weight off his shoulders now that the secret’s out of the bag and he won’t have to endure any more supremely uncomfortable family confrontations from this point onward.
“Okay, kids. Here’s the deal,” the sheriff finally speaks up after sharing a cryptic glance with Derek’s mother. “We won’t get in the way of either of you because we know that you’re both so stubborn that you’d probably end up rebelling and seeing each other anyway. But you-” he points an accusatory finger at Derek, “are gonna do this right. You’re not going to treat my son like illegal high school goods, got that? And if I find out that you’re abusing him-”
“Dad,” Stiles mutters when his cheeks start heating up at the protective speech he thought for sure one day he would be the one to be on the receiving end of when he’d find a girlfriend with a neurotic father.
“-I will remind you that I have a license to carry weapons. Uh, no harm intended on your son, Melissa.”
“Well, that negated the purpose of that whole speech,” Stiles observes dryly, but a good amount of tension uncoils from his innards and lets him breathe again when he realizes that he won’t be one of those stereotypical teenagers anymore who has to come up with excuses ranging all the way from I promised to look after the school hamster for student naturalist extra credit to Scott’s been dumped again every time he sneaks out to see Derek. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the clenched fist on Derek’s thigh relax as well.
In the end, they all exchange hugs and apologize to their respective parents for their secrecy-and in Derek’s case, for that little bit of pedophilia and what his father crudely refers to as blatant statutory rape-before they’re free to go, Derek’s mother first cuffing him around the head and threatening to take ownership of the keys to Derek’s Camaro if he pulls yet more stunts with underage Stilinski children.
Fortunately, Stiles thinks they’re out of the woods for that one.
--
After the Backseat Incident, Stiles’ father tries much harder than Stiles would have anticipated to whole-heartedly accept Stiles’ endeavors and even turns an eye so blind it needs its own seeing-eye dog to get around town to the fact that Stiles was with Derek before he turned eighteen. The day he walks into the station to deliver his father lunch and discovers a small rainbow flag standing proudly on his father’s desk by his computer is both one of the best and most embarrassing moments of Stiles’ life.
“Oh, dad, not rainbow flags,” Stiles moans when he picks up the tiny ornament and twirls the rainbow ribbon in his hand. His father remains completely serious about the decoration and returns it to its spot by his keyboard.
A day after the long-winded family explanation, Stiles had sat down with his father and endured his endless questions concerning where his heterosexuality went and when did Lydia Martin turn ugly and stupid if he’s no longer head over heels for her, answering each one with the same answer: he still likes all of those things, whether it be heterosexuality or Lydia Martin, he just happens to like Derek more.
His father’s expression looks mildly constipated throughout their whole conversation, like processing the fact that his son is gay for his best friend’s older brother is way too similar to a Lifetime movie for him to fully grasp, but eventually he seems to catch on to all of the details and doesn’t try to push Stiles in a different direction and merely ends the discussion with a quiet, “your mother would’ve wanted what you would’ve wanted, so I do too,” that almost makes Stiles bawl like a three-year-old girl.
“Hey, if any of the guys at the station have a problem that my son is gay, they have to deal with the flag,” his father says firmly, pointing to the figurine like it’s the guardian of gay peace. Stiles shakes his head and hands him his lunch while he sits down to unwrap his own.
“So what’s going on with that string of thefts?” Stiles asks around a mouthful of tater tots, pointing to the evidence board behind his father’s chair.
“Actually, Stiles,” his father says slowly. “I was hoping we could talk about something else. I was hoping we could talk about Derek.”
“Oh god. You didn’t change your mind about wanting to have him castrated, did you?”
“No! No, I just wanted to know how your relationship is going,” he seems to stutter a little bit over the word relationship, but Stiles knows perfectly well that he’d be slipping over the word no matter who it was Stiles was managing to date for over two years. Stiles shrugs.
“It’s okay. A little bummed because he wants to leave Beacon Hills, but what can you do, right?”
“Woah, woah, woah. He wants to leave Beacon Hills?”
“Yeah,” Stiles mumbles. “His professor offered him the chance to study crime alongside some detectives in Chicago, so he’s pretty set on the idea of taking him up on that.”
“Crime? I thought he was into mythology.”
“He is. But I always told him that he could fight crime with that glare of his and I guess it inspired him,” Stiles pauses in the slurping of his milkshake. “Hold on. Is that irony that it’s me who basically caused him to think about moving away from me?”
“Stiles, if your boyfriend wants a job he can come here and look over how we do things at the station,” his father says slowly, like Stiles is a little intellectually depraved for not having come up with this idea himself. “We’re not exactly bursting with help over here.”
“Oh my god,” Stiles says, and drops his sandwich straight in his lap. Mayonnaise splatters over his jeans and a few tomatoes squeeze away to land on the floor, but he ignores the mess. “Are you serious?”
“And this way I’d be able to keep an eye on him, too. Make sure he’s treating you right.”
“You’re serious!” Stiles shoots up from his chair, the weight on his mind lifted like he's back to imagining living with Derek in Beacon Hills alongside Scott as their annoying neighbor who always runs out of milk and a very loud guard dog that sits on their lawn. The strings that were pulling at his heart at the thought of Derek living hundreds of miles away while trying to maintain a relationship through phone calls, then the occasional email, then the utter silence, are loosened and Stiles no longer feels like he always needs to carry his inhaler with him at all times.
Two weeks later, Derek's master's degree is hung up in the sheriff's office, right next to Stiles' diploma, his first grade art project, and the faded picture of Stiles' mother carrying an energetic baby caught in the middle of a cheery wave. Derek slips his hand into Stiles' when he sees it first, Stiles' father pointedly looks away to give them a moment's privacy, and Stiles enjoys the proudest moment of his life.
--
“I swear, this is at least the thirtieth staircase we’ve walked up,” Stiles pants around a tower of precariously stacked cardboard boxes secured in his grip while his feet feel for the next step and wait, inevitably, for his clumsiness to make an appearance and for him to go tumbling down all thirty steps like a cartoon character. “I’m not convinced that we’re not climbing up the stairs to heaven.”
“Well, they won’t let you in,” Scott says, sounding not even a little out of breath, and when Stiles turns around and catches sight of the scrawled words clothes and stuffed animals on Scott’s armful of boxes while he’s in the middle of carrying dishes and textbooks he realizes that he’s definitely been conned into being the mule. “You like sucking dick too much for you to make it past the gates.”
“Thanks for that, Scotty,” Stiles calls cheerfully over his shoulder when his feet hit the landing of the fourth floor and the crooked numbers 402 catch his eye hanging on the first door down the hall. He cries out in joy at the relief of not having to call his father and tell him that the brand new mugs and plates from Walmart are already out of commission after one day officially out on his own.
They march into their dormitory room-all but practically two squared feet of room for them to share-and drop their boxes, Scott pretending all the while to shake out his exhausted arms. Sitting on the bed enjoying a snack without a care in the world while Stiles lets the oxygen stream back into his lungs is Derek, who almost snorts with laughter at the sight of his boyfriend exhausted after one round up the stairs.
“You’re all sweaty,” Derek points out. “You haven’t even gotten the heavy stuff yet.”
“Maybe the guy with the Popeye muscles and the daily workout routine could get off his ass and help lift stuff,” Stiles says while he flops onto the bed next to him. The dormitory is small, maybe as small as his bathroom was at home, but that’s okay. He and Scott will rough it up like pilgrims in one-room-schoolhouses. Scott sits himself on top of the dresser and commences his own snack break even though all he’s done in the course of three hours is lift what might as well have been the combined weight of three pillows up to their dorm room.
“I’m good,” Derek airily declines. “I think I prefer watching you do the work.”
“You just get turned on when you see me all sweaty.” Stiles singsongs smugly, snagging Derek’s shirt in his thumb to tug him closer on the bed. There are piles of dented boxes piling up in the corner and the room is decorated with nothing but the two beds and dresser that the dormitory supplies in every room, and Stiles knows that they’re all omens informing him that he’s in for a long day of endless unpacking and heavy lifting that may stretch into a hot night if he doesn’t get up and keep busy, but a second later he catches a whiff of Derek’s cologne and decides that a few minutes nuzzling Derek’s stubble won’t hurt anybody’s schedule.
“That’s because I then have an excuse to take off your clothes,” Derek admits without missing a beat. Stiles is about to yank him on top of his chest so he can screw productivity and screw Derek for a bit instead when Scott disgustedly yells, “Ewwww!” from around his water bottle. Derek rolls his eyes and leans over the bed to give Stiles a slow kiss. Scott all but runs from the room.
“It’s just too easy with him,” Derek murmurs atop Stiles’ lips, who snickers and loops his arms around his neck. The air is warm like summer always gets in August, with a promise of mugginess from September that leaves Stiles’ forehead beading with sweat and every day tinged with an air of utmost laziness. Stiles already knows what this school year at college is going to be like for him-lots of missing his father, lots of pigging out on candy bars and vending machine snacks, lots of being crammed without a breath of space, lots of all-nighters with Scott, and lots of Derek.
“We haven’t christened this dorm yet,” Stiles murmurs, already feeling breathless again after just getting the air back in his lungs after hauling himself up what was clearly a good few million steps with boxes obstructing his view when Derek starts sucking marks-actual marks that Stiles doesn’t have to hide with douchebag scarves anymore when he sees his father-into the crook of his neck. “We haven’t had sex on any flat surface in this room.”
“That sounds like a challenge,” Derek rumbles on his throat, and Stiles’ dick jumps to life.
“Nothing you and your master’s degree can’t handle,” Stiles bucks up into Derek’s hips and revels in the rewarding groan he hears skip brokenly from Derek’s mouth. He cups Derek’s cheek and kisses him soundly on the mouth. He pulls back and tries to focus on Derek’s eyes or his nose, but he’s too close and nothing but a blur of dark stubble and pointy nose, close enough that Stiles feels comfortable murmuring, “I love you,” on his lips.
“Hey, hey, hey! That’s my bed, you guys! That’s so wrong!” Scott’s hysterical voice breaks their reverie from the doorway, face petrified and hands about to drop his box of deodorant and shampoo, and Stiles bursts out laughing because he knows that this is what his life will be for the next few years, next few decades, maybe the rest of his life, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.