He freezes. Doesn't know what the hell else to do.
He can't picture it: Derek can't remember the last time somebody put their arms around him.
Was it Laura?
Of course it was Laura. How could he forget that? Derek has gotten pretty good at blocking things out—a little too good, it seems.
She didn't tell him she was going before she left New York. Didn't say a fucking word, just vanished. Derek had woken up one morning and she was gone. She'd known without doubt that Derek would only follow her if she had said a single word to him.
Nobody ever granted Derek’s wishes, no matter who he prayed to. The desperate pleas where he asked to go back and get a chance to fix things, they all went unheard.
Laura left to go back to the place they both wished still existed just as it had; a place they were wanted alive, not dead. It wasn't fair that it was the very same place they would be hunted down if they did return, like the rabid animals the Argent's presumed they were.
Leaving the way they did meant they hadn't gotten the chance to see if anything was left at the house. They couldn't mark graves, or grieve properly.
That same place also happened to be the place they'd been born, the place they'd grown up and called home.
Derek had never wanted Laura to face all of that alone.
The burnt down house. The nothing where there was once everything.
The thought still haunts him. One of so fucking many.
Beacon Hills is home—but it's the home Derek had helped raze to the ground with his selfishness and stupidity. Everything he and Laura had ever known, everyone they'd ever loved, it was all gone, now. Derek had taken those things away from his sister and hadn't even had the guts to tell her. Tell Laura they were all gone because of him, tell her that everything that had happened to their family, to them, was all his fault.
In the aftermath of the fire Laura hugged Derek, and had kept hugging him, over and over in those weeks and months and years that followed. She would pull him into her arms hold him tight, whenever she could sense it was all getting to be too much for him again.
Alpha.
Big sister.
But Laura only knew about some of the reasons why it sometimes felt like too much effort for Derek to keep on breathing.
He never told her about Kate.
And Derek, the fucking coward, he'd allowed Laura to hold him, feeling the flames of shame on his cheeks every time, hot as those that took the lives of his parents. His family. His pack.
Now, he remembers that last time.
“I'm going out.”
Laura stood up, walked around the two mismatched armchairs and stopped him by throwing both her arms around his neck, pulling him into her and hugging him, scenting him.
It always took him a moment to respond these days, but Derek hugged her back.
“What's this for?”
“You. Because I know whomever's bed you end up in tonight, you won't be asking for one of these.”
Oh, fuck no. Derek couldn't handle that. Did she think he was out sleeping with people? Never again, not after…
He pushed his sister off him, gently; a stark contrast to the harsh words that followed.
“Don't fucking coddle me. And fuck you, Laura—I don't sleep in anybody's fucking bed but my own.” A single mattress on the floor of the lounge of their shitty one bedroom apartment. Derek had so many shameful memories, and crawling into his sister's bed every night for the first year after the fire was one of them. “Just—leave me alone.”
Laura was the one—the only—person Derek had left in the entire world, yet his guilt was constantly pushing her away.
“Then where do you go to all these nights, little brother? You might not be clinging to me anymore, night after night, nightmare after nightmare, but you're so rarely in your own bed in the mornings.” She hadn't meant it as a dig. She was his sister and she loved him.
Maybe she thought he was making progress? Seeing people. Moving on.
Derek spent his nights waiting outside of dive bars, hanging around in back alleys and dark places, desperately trying to find scumbags he could taunt who were big enough and hard enough to at least attempt to kick the living shit out of him.
Derek hated being a werewolf, now. He wanted to get hurt and stay hurt.
“Just—out.”
Then Derek turned his back on Laura, leaving her to stand there and watch him walk away as he left her to go out looking for a fight, without looking back.
That was the last time somebody put their arms around Derek—and the last time he saw his sister alive.
It was two years ago. Derek doesn’t think he has taken a full breath, since.
Now here he is, standing in his big stupid loft that he bought for his betas—yet another pack he managed to destroy—having given away more than he should, with skinny yet strong arms wrapping themselves as far around his shoulders as they can reach.
Stiles.
“You don't have to hug back. But you can, if you want to. I won't tell,” the kid jokes. It's his way to connect, his connection to the world. A coping mechanism, Derek thinks.
He knows all about those.
“I…” he doesn't have the first fucking clue of how to handle this. Or how to admit he needs it—to himself, let alone somebody else. He doesn't know how to admit that he wants it.
But this is Stiles. The one person in Derek's life who seems, for some unfathomable reason, to give a fuck about Derek. To care about him.
Slowly, very slowly, Derek lifts an arm and awkwardly rests a hand on Stiles's upper back, feels the muscles jump slightly under the kid's baggy clothes as he tentatively spreads his fingers and finds the back of Stiles's neck.
Stiles's voice hitches just a touch as he says, “These can be on tap, you know. If you want them. Stilinski hugs are the best hugs, dude. Believe.”
And Derek finds he does believe. For the first time in forever, Derek believes there could be something good in his life again.
More confidently, now, he brings his other arm up to wrap around Stiles's waist and hugs Stiles tighter, properly, and allows himself to be hugged back.
Derek wonders how he has gone so long without this kind of closeness. Lived without this kindness.
He decides to let the 'dude' pass. Because maybe—maybe it wouldn't be so bad after all, to be somebody's dude?
Stiles's dude.
It's a fucking ridiculous moniker and yet Derek suddenly couldn't care less.
“I think I'd like that,” he whispers into the forbidden place where Stiles's jaw meets long, pale neck. "Dude."
Derek can feel Stiles's smile as the kid squeezes him harder. And, ironically, Derek feels as if he can breathe again.
.
for @greyhavenisback bc i want to hug you in person and can't <3 (unedited, forgive me!)
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