Hey! Thanks for both these lovely prompts. In the end, I went with the second one (I hope that’s okay, and that you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!)
Stiles is whistling, fucking whistling. Derek pauses, shovel in hand and stares across at him unimpressed.
“What?” Stiles says, flashing him a grin. “This is fun!”
“Seriously?” Derek hisses. “We’re trying to hide a body.”
“Eh,” he shrugs. “Forgive me if I’m not tearing up over the wendigo that scratched my arm up while it was trying to kill me. Besides–” He stabs his own shovel in the ground and leans on it. “This is just like the old days, right?”
“Is it?” Derek says grimly. He forces the blade of his shovel in to the soft earth and levers out a huge chunk of soil, depositing it on the edge of the hole. The old days, he thinks to himself, bitterly. Back when Scott and Stiles could barely stand to be around him, and he was living out of the burned out shell of his family home. He can’t say he misses those days all that much. Almost everything in his life is better now. Almost.
“What’s up, Sourwolf?” Stiles says. “You look like someone stole your favorite chew toy.”
Derek flicks earth at him, and it spatters up his leg.
“Hey!” Stiles says flailing backwards. “These are new jeans.”
“Help me dig,” Derek says. “And stop wasting time.”
“It’s like I’ve travelled back in time and it’s five years ago. You wanna tell me that this is private property?” Stiles grumbles, “Or should we just skip ahead to the part where you throw me up against the nearest hard surface and smolder at me.”
Derek almost drops his shovel but he manages to catch it in time and forces himself to concentrate on the task at hand: The monotony of it, the smell of the earth, the slight ache in his back and arms. After a moment Stiles lifts his own shovel and joins back in with a beleaguered sigh.
The thing is, there is one thing that Derek misses about the old days. One big thing. One hundred and forty seven pounds of pale skin and fragile bone, to be exact, who wields sarcasm like a weapon and runs without fear into places most werewolves fear to tread. For the last three years Stiles has been at Columbia, returning to Beacon Hills only sporadically. He comes home at Christmas and for a couple weeks every summer, and on one memorable occasion, for two weeks in February because the Sheriff got shot in the arm attending a call out at a convenience store that went dangerously awry. His dad had been fine, but that hadn’t stopped Stiles catching the red-eye back home to fuss over him.The point is, Stiles isn’t here enough, and Derek misses him terribly. Painfully. Selfishly.
Almost without realizing it he’d been pinning all his hopes on Stiles returning to Beacon Hills after college, but this summer, when he’d drifted back home he’d been talking about grad school in Maryland and Derek’s heart had sunk. Stiles wasn’t coming back here, of course he wasn’t. Beautiful, brilliant Stiles was too good for this place, that was the truth of it. He deserved far more than a town as broken and empty as Beacon Hills. He definitely deserved more than digging a grave for a rabid wendigo in the dead of night eight miles out into the preserve. Unfortunately, sometimes it seemed as though experiences like that were all Beacon Hills had to offer, and it certainly couldn’t compete with college in New York, and the lure of grad school.
So that was that. Stiles was going to leave again, and Derek was going to continue on here as he always did. He was going to devote himself to the pack, and live at the apartment he moved into two years back, with it’s creaky bathroom door, and it’s view of the park, and the sea monkeys Scott’s daughter Ami had insisted on gifting him for his last birthday. And Derek will go to work at the Sheriff’s station, and meet up with Jordan and the guys on Friday evening to play poker, and Saturday nights he’ll have John over to watch the game, and he’ll definitely be fine. It’ll all be fine.
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theproblemwithstardust 