Chapter Text
The first time it happens is at the end of a big fight with some vampire drones. A bunch of them ambushed the pack at the warehouse (or, as Stiles will always refer to it in writing, the werehouse). The werehouse used to be a Costco, a massive, empty, freestanding concrete building on the edge of town. The wolves can train there without fear of disturbing anybody or breaking anyone else’s property. It’s very useful, though it’s also become a very likely place for bad guys to find them all together. Derek bought it for Scott before he left Beacon Hills with Cora and sent him the deed in the mail like the antisocial weirdo he was.
The pack is defeating the drones easily as ever, but three of them get ahold of Stiles. Now, Stiles isn’t just the brains anymore, okay? He’s got a little brawn, at least, and he can handle himself against young vampires, who are barely stronger than they were as humans, just fine—one-on-one, anyway, but three is a lot more than one and they take him by surprise.
Two of them are holding Stiles steady and the third grabs him by the hair to bare his neck. Stiles can feel her moist, cold breath and the needle-sharp press of teeth before Derek rips her away from him and stakes her. The two holding Stiles immediately let him go in favor of running, but Derek grabs them, holds them by the collars of their polo shirts in one hand and stakes them with a quick one-two.
The fight is winding down around them. Stiles looks at Derek and starts to smile and thank him, but Derek’s expression brings him up short. He’s not wolfed out, but his eyes are blue and intense, dark and bright as a lightning storm, and laser focused on Stiles. Derek’s looking at him like he’s prey.
Why? Stiles really thought they’d moved beyond this to solid same team territory. Is he—could Stiles be turning into a vampire? He touches his throat where the vampire nipped him, even though he knows it doesn’t work like that, and he feels fine and normal, and, as expected, his hand comes back with the thinnest smear of blood.
“Derek, what—”
But before he can finish his sentence, Derek charges at him and Stiles turns and runs without a second thought. It’s useless, of course, and Stiles suspects he only makes it as far as he does, to one of the massive support pillars several yards away, because Derek lets him.
Derek catches him around the shoulders and spins him around, pressing him against the pillar. His huge hands move down, wrapping around Stiles’ arms completely and lifting him off the ground.
“Derek,” Stiles says, as calmly as he can manage, wondering now if this isn’t in response to some kind of wolfsbane. “What are you doing? It’s me, Stiles. I’m your friend?”
“Stiles!” Derek says and he starts to suffocate him.
Or at least that’s the only reasonable explanation Stiles can come up with for what he would otherwise call a kiss. If this were anyone else pressing his mouth to Stiles’, he’d say he was getting kissed good and proper. But Derek would never kiss him, so this has to be something else.
He’s not doing a very good job suffocating him. Stiles considers pulling away from his mouth to tell him so, suggest he change his technique, but Stiles doesn’t actually want to be suffocated, so instead he puts his arm across Derek’s shoulders, and threads his other hand through Derek’s hair, and opens his mouth to Derek’s probing tongue.
Yep, that’s the only reason—like he tells Scott later: it might have looked like he was kissing Derek back, but he was really just saving his own life. Derek wasn’t even kissing him, so there was no kiss to return!
After some time—Stiles really has no idea how long, but it is probably not the longest he’s ever gone with an erection and absolutely no friction to help—Derek starts slowing down with gentle, closed mouth kisses.
“Don’t—” Derek says, and kisses him again. “—do that—” Another kiss. “—again.”
Don’t do what? Stiles thinks, desperately, but Derek has a look on his face now like his brain will explode if Stiles questions him so he just says, “I won’t.”
Derek nods and steps back, setting Stiles back on his feet. Then he turns and walks out of the werehouse without another word to anybody. Cora quietly follows him, leaving the rest of them to clean all the vamp dust out of the werehouse, which they always do, actually. Fucking Hales.
Lydia and Allison mostly don’t help, either, but they order pizza, so he forgives them. It’s nice to sit on the tumbling mats after all of the fighting and just eat and talk for a while. Usually they brainstorm how to find the vampires that are responsible for all of this, or lure them out of hiding, but tonight everyone is quiet and staring at Stiles.
Finally Scott says, “So . . . how long has that been going on?”
For a split second Stiles considers pretending he doesn’t know what Scott’s talking about, but his whole body is thrumming with exactly what Scott is talking about, so it’s hard to lie.
“That? That? There is no that except what you saw happen just now. So it’s been going on exactly how long—that—happened.”
“Exactly how long Derek was kissing you?”
“He was not!”
“Um—“ several of them say, on top of each other.
“That was—not what it looked like. It was—Derek was—I know kissing and that was—“
They all stare at him. Stiles’ mouth is hanging open, and the end of his sentence is not coming out of it, but he refuses to close it, because he knows what that was. He does.
“—a threat.”
“A threat,” Scott says dubiously.
“Mm-hm.” Stiles takes a bite of pizza. “It was an action motivated by anger and violence.”
“That sounds like rape,” Lydia puts in.
Scott sits up straight and looks about a second away from wolfing out and calling Derek out for pistols at dawn. “Are you saying he rape kissed you?”
“No!”
“It didn’t look rapey,” says Danny. “It looked kind of sweet and sexy, really.”
“Please just stop talking about it! Stop thinking about it. It has never happened before and it will never happen again, so essentially it never happened. Right?”
“Not right.” Lydia pats his knee.
They all seem to accept that Stiles is a sad boy who literally wouldn’t know a kiss if it hit him in the mouth and move on to other topics of conversation.
Later, though, after he drives Stiles home on his bike (the Jeep is missing and Stiles really doesn’t want to think about what might be happening to it right now), Scott brings it up again, grabbing Stiles’ arm to keep him from going into the house.
“What was the kiss—”
“Not a—!”
“What was the threat—threatening you to do?”
“Um—not get hurt, I guess.”
Scott’s quiet for a few moments. “So he was freaked out that you almost got bitten and he reacted by . . . licking your mouth . . . and you think that means he hates you?”
“It was an accident! Heat of the moment! An inappropriate physical response to strong emotional stimulus!”
“I thought it was a threat?”
“I thought you weren’t thinking about it!”
Scott laughs. “Since when do I do what you tell me to?”
Vampires were unexpected. Werewolves versus vampires are usually the way it goes in books and movies, sure, but this is real life and werewolves at least make sense. They age and their bodies make and use energy and Deaton’s taught Stiles a lot about how their superior sight and smell and hearing work biologically and yeah: Stiles has fully processed the werewolf thing—werelizards, werefoxes, werepandas, probably—sure! Wouldn’t have surprised him.
When Stiles saw the girl on the side of the road a few weeks back, of course he wondered if she was a werewolf, even as he pulled his car over like his Dad told him never to do. She was pale and skinny, blonde hair wild and tangled down her back, wearing nothing but a white dress—seriously nothing—no bra, no panties—that was obvious, not that he let himself look—no shoes, even. It was obvious that she was either going to attack him or she really needed some help. He didn’t want to get attacked—it was Monday night after an extra long lacrosse practice and he was exhausted—but he couldn’t not help her if she had just been attacked, right?
He probably should have texted Scott where he was and what he was doing before he unlocked the door for her, though, because she immediately punched him in the temple and knocked him out.
When he came to, Stiles was striped down to his briefs and sitting on a rough wooden chair, ankles tied to the chair legs and his wrists tied behind his back. His arms had gone numb, but his shoulder blades were aching, pulled tight and pressed together.
He looked around the room. He was underground somewhere. It was dark, the only light coming through skinny, barred windows near the ceiling. It smelled like rotting wood and peanuts. Then the blonde girl filled his field of vision, smiling at him—or she might have just been baring her teeth. It was hard to tell when they were all so sharp and her forehead had such brutal angry lines.
“Ah, I wondered if you’d wake before we started. Congratulations, human,” she said, her voice unexpectedly high pitched. “You shall serve as a retribution. An eye for an eye.”
She stepped back and stood with two more girls with equally blonde hair and scary faces.
Stiles groaned. “An eye for—what—eye?”
“Derek Hale took our sister and so we take you.”
Stiles last thought before he passed out again was, Of fucking course. Only Derek could get Stiles kidnapped from halfway around the world, or wherever the hell he was now. Derek could step on a landmine on the way to the bathroom.
The vampires’ plan seemed to be to slowly bleed him to death. Why do it slowly Stiles had no idea, but it was his only glimmer of hope that he might get out of this, so he didn’t argue. They were very good at it. He knew from one late night’s research down the rabbit hole that exsanguination usually killed you in a few hours or less and whatever they did lasted from one sunset to another, making him steadily weaker—thirsty and dizzy, unable to concentrate or really fall asleep. He asked if this was how you turned someone into a vampire and one of the them replied, “Oh, no. You don’t deserve it, puppy lover,” so that was a relief.
It turned out they were keeping him in some random house on Chestnut Street, having turned the family that had lived there before into vampire drones and conscripting them to keep watch. It was the three teenagers in the family not showing up at school that made Lydia wonder if the family was involved. Scott and Allison went to the house just to get some information and ended up killing them and finding Stiles in the basement. The blondes escaped, of course.
Stiles went to the hospital and got a blood transfusion. Melissa observed him overnight and in the morning declared him lucky he came in when he did, but fully recovered. The only long-term injury of the kidnapping was his Jeep. It wasn’t at the house or on the highway where he’d pulled over or anywhere anyone had seen it. Presumably the blonde trio had it and he could only hope it wasn’t gone forever in their effort to destroy evidence.
After that Deaton explained a little about vampires. A vampire was a reanimated human corpse on the outside and one of two things on the inside: an intelligent demon or a mindless drone, with no intentions beyond what their masters, usually their demon sires, told them to do. Deaton was vague about what “demon” actually meant, but they were definitely evil bad creatures from “hell” which may or may not have been a physical place and may or may not have been connected to a complementary “heaven” which may or may not have anything to do with what it said in the Bible. Deaton was also vague on what made a vampire a demon or a drone; it had something to do, perhaps, with the strength of the human mind they had replaced.
Demon or drone, they were all really strong and really fast, and they lived forever on the blood of mammals unless killed by sunlight, decapitation, or a wooden stake through the heart. They turned into superfine dust when they died, exploding with a burst of heat and a strangely meaty smell.
“What happens to the human that used to live in the body?” Lydia asked.
“They’re dead,” Deaton said. “They’re gone.”
That definitely made the idea of killing them easier. They weren’t humans with enhanced abilities and violent instincts, like werewolves—they were monsters, full stop.
No one knew how get ahold Derek directly, but Deaton had some kind of druid phone tree that would track him down eventually.
Four days later, Derek and Cora showed up at the werehouse, very tan and very smelly. Cora’s hair was in dreadlocks. Derek’s was buzzed shorter than Stiles’ used to be and he’d gone way beyond beard into solid mountain man territory. “We were camping,” was all either of them would say. They were both still way hotter than anyone had a right to be.
“I was kidnapped and almost murdered thanks to you, Derek,” Stiles said by way of hello. “Explain yourself!”
Derek explained that he killed the trio’s sister to stop her from killing a cabin full of elementary school kids on a field trip at Yosemite National Park which, okay, Stiles really can’t fault him for even if it did put some crazy blondes on their case. Though in the six weeks since Stiles was kidnapped, they haven’t actually seen the blondes again. Even Mr. Argent can’t find a hint of where they are.
Freshly made vampires keep coming after them instead. They’re all the mindless drone type, resolutely following the trio’s orders—which is, inevitably, to attack the pack. At first they try to capture a few with every fight. They try interrogating them. The pack, Stiles’ dad, and Mr. Argent all give their best effort—good cop/bad cop, bargaining, torture—but the drones don’t seem capable of speaking much at all, never mind tell them anything useful. It’s pretty clear the trio doesn’t feel the same kind of loyalty, so there’s no leverage in keeping them alive. After a few attempts, Scott tells them to stop taking prisoners.
They always defeat the drones easily, which makes Stiles think that killing the pack isn’t the trio’s goal. Maybe their goal is to get his dad fired again because there’s yet another serial killer in Beacon Hills and no normal investigation to be made. Or maybe it’s to drive the pack all crazy with guilt because the trio keeps turning kids from their high school. Stiles doesn’t kill Noah Hacker, a freshman Stiles knew a little from track—he kills the undead remains of Noah’s body—but it sure feels like he kills him, as he stabs a stake through his brand new letterman jacket and he’s covered in the ash of Noah’s burnt up body. It was Noah’s bones and skin and heart Stiles wiped off his face.
He should ask Allison to train him on the crossbow. She spends most of her downtime carving arrowheads out of wood, which sounds like a really great way to keep his hands busy, and she gets to kill vamps from a distance. She never gets dust on her. Actually, Stiles is the only one who manages to get it all over him, but that’s—whatever, it’s fine.
In the quiet aftermath of the fight tonight, the werehouse is too hot, not enough air, and he walks outside and makes himself not look for Derek as he goes. It’s been a few days since he threatened Stiles and Derek hasn’t tried anything like that again—hasn’t touched him, talked to him, or even looked at him, really. Not that Stiles expected him to—or wanted to—or even thought about it except when he did, you know, randomly. He isn’t obsessing. That’s whatever, too—totally fine.
Stiles wonders if anyone had been surprising Noah Hacker with kisses. He wonders if Noah’s parents know he died. With vampires, it’s even odds that the demon will possess the body after it’s buried, at a morgue, or before it’s even discovered. He hadn’t heard that Noah had died at school, but at this point so many kids are missing and turning up dead that they don’t announce it anymore. If they had a memorial assembly for each of them, there wouldn’t be time for classes.
Stiles slides down the wall, his shirt riding up and the cold, rough stucco scraping against his back. It feel good, a little self-flagellation. Noah was killed by vampires who wanted Stiles dead first. It’s not hard to see how this could have been prevented.
“Hey.”
Stiles looks up to find Derek standing next to him.
“Want me to leave you alone?”
Anyone else, Stiles would have said yes. That’s scary enough that Stiles almost says yes anyway. But Derek looks so hopeful, and Stiles wants him so much, that he says, “Stay.”
Derek drops down beside him close enough that their arms are touching. Derek is always so warm.
“This is my fault,” Stiles whispers.
“No.”
“Yes! If I had just let them kill me—”
“That was never an option, Stiles—”
“If they had just gotten their retribution, they would have left! None of these people would have died.”
“Or maybe you wouldn’t have been enough to make up for their sister. Maybe they would have decided they liked it here. Beacon Hills is a beacon now, remember? And vampires have to eat.”
Stiles shrugs.
“If anything, it’s my fault. I’m the one who pissed them off in the first place.”
“Derek, no. The vamp you killed forced your hand! You couldn’t let her go after a bunch of kids. Her sisters are the ones killing everybody.”
Derek nods. “It’s their fault, isn’t it?”
“Yes!”
“It’s not your fault, is it?”
Stiles laughs and covers his face with his hands. He walked right into that one. “It just sucks. I want to find them and kill them and stop this.”
Derek puts his arm around Stiles shoulder, pulls him against his big, hard body, and presses a kiss to the top of his head. That was something no one had done to him since his mom died.
“Me, too,” Derek whispers against Stiles’ forehead. “We will.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes,” Derek says firmly.
“You know, you’re a much better at alpha stuff now that you’re a beta again.”
“It’s easier now that everyone and everything isn’t clambering for attention in my head. It’s easier to focus on what’s important.”
See? That proves Stiles’ point. If you’d asked Stiles what was important to Derek when Derek was an alpha, Stiles would have said power. And that’s part of being an alpha—a powerful pack is a safe pack and Scott’s once-in-a-million-years strength of character hasn’t hurt their reputation at all—but encouragement and confidence in the pack is part of it, too. That’s what’s really important to Derek and he’s totally fucking great at it.
Stiles turns to look at him and finds their faces very close together. Derek searches Stiles face for a moment and then leans in and kisses him. Stiles sees this one coming, but that doesn’t make it any less impossible that it’s happening. The last one wasn’t really a kiss and, Stiles realizes, this isn’t really a kiss, either—it’s comfort.
The other night Stiles leaned back and accepted all the threats Derek wanted to give him, but tonight? Tonight Stiles is going to actively take this comfort.
He pulls away from Derek, but only long enough to reposition them. He sits up until he’s kneeling, throws one leg over one of Derek’s and then presses his knee down the crotch seam of Derek’s jeans, surprised to already feel the hard outline of his cock.
“Does my penitence turn you on?”
Derek’s cock jerks at that. “Your vocabulary turns me on,” Derek growls, and captures his mouth again.
Stiles hasn’t done a lot of kissing in his life, but he’s determined to be good at it right now—for about the first two minutes. Stiles is grinding down on Derek’s thigh, which is plenty of stimulation, even through two layers of denim, as he rubs Derek’s cock with his knee, and he’s not ashamed to say he’s already close to the edge. Well, he’s a little ashamed—but Derek’s close, too, if the way he’s gasping in breaths and erratically jerking his hips against Stiles is anything to go by, and that’s so hot that he has to hope his own quick desperation is hot to Derek, too. Their kisses are sloppy now, just open mouths moving over each other.
It doesn’t occur to him that he might not want to come in his underwear until it’s too late. Derek’s eyes widen in surprise as Stiles moans out his release and oh my god, Derek isn’t close, wasn’t expecting that, and Stiles is mortified. He ducks down and hides his face against Derek’s chest.
“Oh, no, you did exactly right,” Derek says. “I’m right behind you, Stiles, so—”
He doesn’t even care if Derek’s just trying to make him feel better; he’s going to make sure that’s true now. Stiles kisses him with all of the finesse he’s got and reaches down to fondle Derek’s cock through his jeans. Stiles is going to make Derek come as soon as possible, and without a hand on his bare cock, because that’s how they’re doing it tonight.
Derek lasts long enough that Stiles is close to getting hard again himself, but fast enough that Stiles feels a little better.
Yeah! Stiles thinks, as they cool down. Both of us have jizz in our pants. I’m awesome.
“Thanks,” he says.
Derek breathes out a laugh. “No problem.”
“You’re a good friend.”
Without warning, Derek lifts Stiles off him and stands them both up on their feet, so quickly that Stiles’ head is spinning. Derek steps several feet away from him and Stiles falls forward, his balance and sense of gravity all messed up. Derek catches him around the waist.
“You are—fast,” Stiles says. He feels drunk. “Are you okay?”
“Fine. I’m just fine, buddy,” Derek spits out like the words were burning the inside of his mouth, and stalks off.
Standing alone in the back alley Stiles is suddenly very cold and very uncomfortable. He has to change his briefs before his come dries and peeling them off becomes a very painful process. It’s lucky that he’s still in work out clothes and he has clean pants in his bag.
Later that night, when Stiles is having breakfast for dinner at IHOP with Scott and Isaac, Scott says, “Soooo. Was Derek threatening you tonight, too?”
“Comforting,” Stiles corrects him around a mouthful of pancakes. He clears his throat. “So you could hear that, huh?”
Both of them roll their eyes at him.
“You know, Allison kisses me to comfort me, too,” Isaac says. “Because she’s my girlfriend and she cares about me.”
Scott nods. “Just because a kiss means something doesn’t mean it’s not a kiss.”
Stiles ignores them. They don’t get it.
The thing is, if the kissing were kissing, Stiles would be thrilled. It would be great if the kissing came with talking and cuddling and, oh, say, spending any time with Derek at all, when Scott hasn’t alpha ordered him to teach Stiles how to throw a punch or overpower someone after they pin you on your back. It would be kind of a dream come true—quite literally, thank you very much subconscious. The night he watched The Cider House Rules Stiles dreamt of going apple picking with Derek. That was all they did the whole dream—walking arm in arm through an orchard, picking apples, and talking about baking a pie.
But instead the kissing comes with nothing. The only explanation is that Derek is kissing him to make a point. Various points. That’s all it is. It’s a good idea, really, because Stiles is a teenager. Nothing gets a point across like giving him an erection.
“You’re enjoying it, though, right?” Scott says. “You’d tell him to stop if you didn’t like the—uh—threatening and the comforting?”
“Yeah!” Stiles takes a long drink of orange juice, considering. “Wait, is that weird? Am I taking advantage of him?”
“I hope so,” says Isaac.