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Peter had been around the block a few times. {He’d also set it on fire once or twice, but they don’t talk about that.} He knows about these kinds of things. The problem is getting his wangst-ridden nephew and the mouthy teenager to stop being such low-level morons.
No, they’re lower than low-level. They’re positively sub-atomic. Because even atoms could take one look at this ridiculous situation and realise that something was going on between them. It was simple chemistry, for Christ’s sake.
“Okay, you know what?” Stiles’s fingers dug into Derek’s shoulder. Peter noted {the way that he always did when it came to these two: with great interest} that although his nephew’s eyes flickered into a brief show of red, Stiles appeared to neither notice nor care. “I swear to god I will shoot you if you keep moving. This is delicate work, okay?”
“Just shut up and stitch it,” Derek growled.
“Do what?” Stiles asked. “Sew you back together so no one can see your ribs anymore? Keep you from bleeding out over the couch? Come up with a way to flush that wolfsbane out of your system? Save your miserable existence so you can go back to loitering in the shadows and being the stuff of children’s nightmares? No, I hadn’t thought about it. I think I’ll just let you die because you’re such a baby you can’t even stay in one place.” Despite the words, his hands moved quick and careful along the ragged edge of the wound, tugging torn flesh back together.
“You could always just leave.”
Peter rolled his eyes from where he lounged in the doorway. Like that was going to happen. He wasn’t even surprised when Stiles proceeded to go on a lengthy rant about trust and feelings and really, you asshole, two years of me saving your ass and we’re still on about this, how can one person be so emotionally fucking constipated.
“We never could get him to hold still for shots when he was younger,” Peter mused. “Scared of the needle.”
Stiles’s eyes lit up. “Shots? Please tell me they were for rabies.”
“I hate you both,” Derek said from the floor.
Peter grinned and decided that this whole charade had gone on long enough.
~
He didn’t hang around Beacon Hills too often because although he was clearly the better-looking and more sociable Hale, everyone else seemed a bit late to get the memo. So he just dropped in every couple of months to make sure the fledgling pack was in working order and to rile up his favourite {currently only} nephew by stealing the Camaro and leaving it in increasingly bizarre places around town. Three months ago, it was the impound yard at the police station, this month, the animal shelter. All of this was just a smokescreen so that he could check in on the relationship status of said nephew because he had a {perfectly healthy, thank you} interest in other’s personal lives. But mostly because he cared.
Things were going depressingly slow. And although Peter could be very patient when the situation called for it, he thought that the faster this little loveboat moved along, the better. Derek had a right to be happy, though Peter would sooner set himself on fire than come close to admitting it. Maybe get someone to salt his remains. Not Derek, Derek would have been the one to provide the fuel for the flames. The Hale men were notorious for being unable to express so-called ‘feelings’. None of this changed the fact that Derek needed someone, and that someone seemed to be Stiles.
Okay, okay, hear him out. Derek hadn’t always had these trust issues. Peter could recall a time when his nephew had actually known how to smile, to use his words instead of his fangs. Stiles was the person that could get in between the cracked edges and smooth him back out. Derek would probably never be the same as he was before Kate, but when he was around Stiles, he... regressed. Not entirely, and not that anyone other than Peter could actually realise that it was happening, but it was nice to see the undercurrent of resigned amusement and relaxation instead of just a wall of sheer rage. Stiles was harder to get a read on, but he was such an expressive, tightly-wound ball of manic energy that it was impossible not to see the way he brightened when Derek was around. The two little bastards deserved each other. And the undoubtedly fantastic sex would mellow them both out.
Never mind that the UST was killing him. He could smell the constant want and need coming off of both of them, for Christ’s sake. It didn’t matter if it was Stiles who happened to turn in time to catch Derek shirtless, or if it was Derek who watched from the window as Stiles came in, clothes soaked and plastered to his skin from the rain, the result was always the same: the hot-spice scent of arousal, thick and cloying in the back of Peter’s throat. Derek was much better at hiding it than Stiles was, but there were some things that Peter could pick up, and they weren’t things he really needed to know about his nephew. It was enough to drive anyone insane. More insane. Point being, it was time to kick this shit into gear.
~*~
“Hey! You dickhead, get back here! What the fuck are you doing?”
Peter leaned against the door and listened to the muffled sounds of an argument with a grin. Locking them in one of the broom cupboards in the high school might not be terribly effective in the long run, but it was enjoyable as of right then. They’d already pilfered the necessary chemicals from Harris’s lab, and they could spare the time for a little fun. He’d seen the open door, the way that his two targets were perfectly in step and bickering, and had taken his golden opportunity. A little shove, a quick slam, a twist of the handle to ensure the door was locked... voila! Instant entertainment.
Well, it was fun for him, anyway.
“Enjoy your company, boys,” he called through two inches of metal. “I’ll deal with the ogre.”
Stiles’s voice tried to go both high and low in surprise and ended up cracking halfway through. “Are you fucking kidding me? Open the door!”
“Do me a favour, Derek,” Peter said, stepping away from the door. It wouldn’t hold them long, of course, but it wasn’t exactly a large space. They’d have to do a bit of manoeuvring to get into a position where his nephew could break down the door without hurting the human. Anything could happen during said manoeuvring. “Don’t defile him in a broom closet. There’s too many jokes I could make, I’d have a coronary trying to figure out which one to crack first.”
Derek snarled, Stiles fired off insults and questions in rapid succession, and Peter walked down the hall with a bounce in his step.
~*~
The Camaro’s engine thrummed as he accelerated. No wonder Derek liked this car: it was sleek, dark, and... well, snarly. Usually, those words would also describe Derek himself, but at the moment, as his nephew stared after the disappearing car with disbelieving red eyes that had nothing to do with the glow of the taillights, he was more tired than sleek and more bloody than dark. Still snarly though. Yes, Peter noted as at least four police cars flew past and converged on Derek and Stiles in the middle of the street, definitely snarly.
He imagined the look on the sheriff’s face at finding his precious son supporting a particularly hairy half-dead once-murder suspect and pressed down on the gas pedal. He couldn’t quite keep in the chuckle.
He made himself scarce for a couple of weeks after that, but it didn’t seem to do any good. When he came to return the car, Derek tossed him across the house like a rag doll. Peter came to a rolling halt against the stairs and waited for the inevitable explosion.
Three guesses as to who started it.
“I can’t believe you, you douchenozzle!” Stiles yelled. “I had to tell my dad everything! He tried to put me in therapy! Derek almost died!”
Peter cheered internally. On the outside, he was a rock. “So... you do care. I knew it.”
“Wait, you what?”
Twisting, he got an elbow against the floor and levered himself back to his feet. A rib popped unpleasantly back into place. “Well, everybody knows it, now. I can smell it all over you. And so can everyone else. You’re not that subtle, kid.”
The sight of Stiles speechless was a gratifying one, and he took a moment to be envious of Derek as he watched those full lips try and come up with a retort. No way his grumpy nephew would know what to do with those. Maybe he could offer some pointers. {Yeah, and maybe he’d get eviscerated for his trouble.} Derek’s low, prevalent rumble increased in vehemence and he dragged his attention back in time to hear Stiles gather himself up and spit out an all-encompassing ‘fuck you’.
“Hey, I offered,” he said defensively.
“To bite me!”
Peter leered. “Same thing.”
“There are not enough muscles in my body for the shudder that statement needs.”
Peter caught the pleased look that darted across Derek’s face and changed tracks. “Okay, look at it this way,” he said, shifting from foot to foot, “When you two finally decide to put us all out of our misery and fuck, you’ll have that much less to explain to your dad.”
The ensuing brawl was worth it.
~*~
{The epic beat-down that occurred when Peter dug out Derek’s baby pictures from an old safety deposit box wasn’t.}
~*~
The hostage incident wasn’t really Peter’s fault. He just saw a situation and capitalised on it. Even he wasn’t crazy enough to rope the centaurs into his little shipping crusade. Those fuckers were dangerous, and they had a tendency to hold grudges.
When the pack had sussed out the latest problem {“Centaurs? Are you fucking kidding me, centaurs?” “Shut up, Stiles,”}, Derek had decided that everyone was to split up and search different parts of the forest. Peter had been vastly unsurprised when he’d been ordered to go with Boyd and stay far away and out of trouble. Also unsurprisingly, he’d ditched the newbie as soon as possible and followed the collective e he’d come to affectionately dub ‘Sterek’.
The whole pack had split up in very different directions, and Peter would go to his grave {again} swearing that coming across Derek and Stiles in the middle of a very angry looking ring of centaurs was totally an accident. At first, he was all ready to charge in to help. Or at least to draw their attention. Or something. He would have figured it out at some point, and it would have worked because he was too damn clever to die. Before he could activate his soon-to-be-cunning plan, he took a closer look at the pair in the centre of the circle and changed his mind.
Derek, to absolutely no one’s astonishment, was growling, half crouched and claws extended. Diplomacy was not his nephew’s strongest point. What was interesting about this scene was the way that he kept Stiles close, one arm curled around the teenager’s waist, the way his eyes shone bright in challenge. How he shifted as the centaurs did, a firm and solid barrier between Stiles and the threat. The way that Stiles allowed himself to be protected, even as he raised the gun with nasty, herbal-laced bullets in a clear warning. The way he pressed against Derek, keeping a wary eye on everything that the werewolf couldn’t.
Interesting indeed. He wondered if they knew what they were doing, practically advertising their relationship with each other. They couldn’t be more obvious if they had each thrown up their hands and screamed, “Hey, you see this guy? He’s mine! Mine!” Twelve-year-olds, both of them.
Stiles caught sight of him through the trees then, and contorted his face into something that was either ‘help!’ or ‘I really shouldn’t have eaten that’. The kid needed to work on his non-vocal communication.
Peter considered the plea for help for all of two seconds before turning his back and sauntering away. Someone else would find them. This wasn’t really his problem, after all. They’d be fine. Maybe getting captured and some threats of bodily harm would bring things bubbling up to the surface.
{It didn’t.}
~*~
He started with books. There were lots of them, from libraries all over the country, and they all had to do with werewolves. More specifically, they all had chapters dedicated to werewolf mating habits.
He left them everywhere: in Stiles’s Jeep, in his locker, on the front porch, on the kitchen table, in the bathroom, on his desk in his room. All open to those very specific chapters.
Stiles thought it was Scott at first, trying to get some unsubtle advice on what to do with Allison now that they were back together. Peter watched that conversation from the other side of the lacrosse field and had almost given himself away by the horrified look on McCall’s face. Then suspicion fell on the newer werewolves, the ones Derek had turned in his ‘must surround myself with other broken people’ phase. All of them denied it. All of them shot Derek not-so-subtle glances as they did so. Clearly, Peter wasn’t the only one who saw the thing going on here. But only someone who had known Derek since birth would have caught the faint flicker of embarrassment across his face.
Finally, Derek reached for one of the books Stiles was waving around and inhaled. “Peter,” he said immediately, and Peter knew that the jig was up.
He went on the offense before he left town. Hundreds of sheets of paper, all printed with the most graphically detailed information he could find. He left them in binders, mailed them to the house, left them at the police station addressed to the Sheriff, plastered the Jeep with them, shoved pages and pages underneath the front door, wadded up and stuffed into Stiles’s pillowcase.
Maybe that would clear some things up.
~*~
Shocking enough, it didn’t. Several months went by with nothing changing except for the twisting sensation in Peter’s gut that came with too much second-hand UST and not enough ‘resolution’. It was time to take drastic measures.
“No. No, no, no, get away. Don’t even think about it.”
Stiles watched with wide eyes. “What is it?”
Derek didn’t take his eyes off of his uncle. “You don’t want to know. Peter, I swear I’ll kill you—“
Peter moved, and Derek broke off, wide eyes following the specks of dust as they floated towards the ground. “Smart boy,” Peter said. “Now, you’re going to turn, and you’re going to tell that kid right beside you that you love him.”
“Hey,” Stiles objected, “I turned eighteen last—wait. What?”
“And you,” Peter said as Stiles turned to stare at Derek, “are going to tell him that you love him back. Or I’m going to throw this on you, and things are going to get very messy.”
“What is it?”
Derek mumbled something.
“What? God damn it, normal human hearing here! What is it?”
“Highly concentrated ground aphrodisiacs.”
There was a long pause. “...sex pollen? Oh my god, are you seriously threatening us with sex pollen? What is your problem, oh my god—“
“I don’t have a problem,” Peter announced. “You do. Both of you. You’ve been dancing around each other for ages, and it’s time you did the horizontal tango to work everything out. Well, it doesn’t have to be horizontal, I guess, that wall actually looks pretty sturdy...”
“Leave,” Derek said.
“No,” Peter said, raising his hand and tensing to throw.
Stiles raised his hands. “Whoa, whoa. Okay, say we do what you want. What then?”
“Stiles!”
Peter shrugged. “Well, you know that if you don’t, I’m going to douse you with this.”
“...Fair enough.” Stiles turned to Derek, spots of colour already standing out on his pale cheeks. “Let’s do this.”
“Why?”
Stiles flushed to the tips of his ears. “Because... because if we’re gonna have sex, I don’t want you to do it because you have to. I want you to want it.” He gestured, a motion that somehow encompassed both of them with a single burst of energy. “Like, like I do.”
Derek’s lips parted, for him the equivalent of a full-on jaw drop. Peter resisted the urge to cackle in triumph, but only barely.
The dam broke and Stiles began to talk, almost at a full-on babble. “I mean, not that you should want it back or want it at all, I just thought that, you know, he’s got sex pollen for Chrissake and that would be a really terrible way to lose my virginity because you know, consent, and oh my god now you know and I’m really, really sorry, but I know how you are about the whole consent thing, and that’s the second time I’ve said that, but I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want—“
And finally, finally, because Peter was going blue in the face out of sympathy for the kid’s lungs, Derek stepped closer and cut him off with a kiss.
Peter broke into an impromptu dance complete with air-punches and was immediately grateful that neither Derek nor Stiles had broken the kiss to notice.
“I want,” Derek said, hands firm on Stiles’s arms. “Christ, do I want.”
“Aha!”
They’d clearly forgotten all about Peter for the moment because they each jumped about a foot.
Peter ignored this glaring oversight on his person. “I want it known,” he said, jabbing his fist at them and spilling dust as he went, “that I called this years ago. And that it was me who got you together. I want to make a toast at the wedding. I’m going to make a toast at the wedding. And I get to be in charge of the picture slideshow. Because this,” he waved his free hand, “is all because of me.”
“Wedding?” Stiles asked.
“Slideshow?” Derek growled.
“Consider this an early wedding present,” Peter said. He raised his hand, opened the fist the held the pollen, and blew.
Then he booked it, grabbing Derek’s keys from the counter as he went, because he had no wish to be mutilated on the spot. He all but flew down the front stairs. Eventually Derek would realize that it was just regular pollen, no aphrodisiacs added. But his nephew wasn’t known for being quick on the uptake {recent love-story being the foremost example} and Peter was willing to give them a little bit of privacy. For now.