Work Text:
Stiles had never been graceful, but now he moves like an athlete or a dancer––as though everything extraneous has been razored from him. Derek wants to attribute it to experience or maturity, but it seems more probable that Stiles, like the rest of them, is just exhausted.
“You want coffee?” Derek offers, standing by the ancient machine.
“The shipment came in?” Stiles asks, turning in surprise.
Derek shakes his head. “I dipped into the secret stash a little,” he explains.
“Scandal!” Stiles exclaims, clutching at his chest, his eyes wide. His hair’s a little longer than he likes it, but the long run of stormy days has left their solar cells depleted, and he categorically refuses to waste the back-up generators on his buzz cutters. Derek kind of likes the way it brushes across his forehead, but he’d never admit it out loud. “We got any left? Erica’s gonna kill you.”
“This is mostly chicory,” Derek admits. “I’m trying to make it last.”
“I miss Dunkin Donuts,” Stiles grumbles, getting up to stand by Derek at the table. “Hell, I even miss Starbucks. Whipped cream and devious capitalism in a cup. What more could you ask for?”
Derek grunts his agreement, catching Stiles’s hip as he leans forward to spoon a little of the sugar reserves into their clay mugs. Even Stiles has learned to prefer it bitter, but Derek’s sudden sense memory of his mother standing at their kitchen counter and doing exactly the same thing, one hand on his father’s shoulder, is too strong to ignore. Besides, he reasons, the chicory is pretty strong. He hands Stiles his cup.
“Hey,” Stiles says, his fingers locking around Derek’s. The sun streaming through the window is cheerful; you wouldn’t even know anything had happened, if only there had been birds still singing. “You think we’ll get through this?”
Derek can’t look him in the eye when he says, “I don’t know,” can only draw him in closer. Stiles is only twenty-two, Derek thinks. He’s supposed to have so much more than this. “We’ll try.”
“Yeah,” Stiles says, swallowing audibly, and hooks his ankle around Derek’s calf. “Yeah, you’ve always been good at being the underwolf.”
“Sure,” Derek agrees, but what he’s really thinking is he’s never been any good at all at being the underwolf, that his survival until now has been an unlikely and miraculous chain of events all thanks to other people. He doesn’t know how anyone still looks up to him––how they’re even still alive. The profound and terrible silence that now envelopes him every time he goes outside seems to threaten constantly to gobble them all up.
“We’ll get through it,” Stiles says, disentangling himself from Derek and stalking towards the desk, coffee still in hand. “Pack that stays together is okay together, right?”
“Yeah,” Derek says, trying for conviction. “Absolutely.”
-
A LITTLE EPILOGUE:
And one day––say, sixty years from now, when they get back on the grid and it turns out the apocalypse wasn’t quite as global and, well, apocalyptic as they thought it was––there’s a small house on the edge of the overgrown forest, not too far away from the first fledgling city, where they say you can go to learn secrets.
What secrets, no one will tell you, but the little smile at the corner of their mouths speaks of one thing: pack.