Chapter Text
Derek’s nervous going into the job interview, because it’s far enough from home that he’ll have to stay the night in a strange alpha’s territory, and the whole building smells of lemon and thyme instead of people or werewolves or the more layered chemical citrus of cleaning agents. Plus job interview, and he’s always been nervous for those. It doesn’t help that the guy interviewing him is ridiculously attractive, with long fingers and wide lambent eyes and hair that looks sex-mussed. Derek swallows, and answers the question about his favorite type of project to engineer.
Stilinski looks down at his notes and nods, satisfied. “And you can start the 18th?"
He’s - okay, he’s not floored, because he knew he was qualified for the job - but he’s pretty happy. “I’ve got the job?"
"Yeah, dude." Stilinski leans back in his chair, and Derek’s too happy about having the job to tell him not to call him ‘dude.’ “You’ve got the relevant skill set, and I think you’d be a good fit to our corporate culture. Starting salary’s seventy-five thousand, but we have a pretty comprehensive benefits package, and performance review after the first year. That work for you?"
"I - yes, definitely."
"Great," he says. “I’ll just go grab some paperwork from HR."
He levers himself out of the chair and, as soon as he’s out of view, Derek dives for his phone to text his mom. If he’s moving to Alameda, she needs to notify the local alpha, get permission for him to be here and set up a meeting. The company’s in McCall territory, and even the other Alameda County packs don’t know much about him, because he’s from up north somewhere and doesn’t come from one of the families and tends to keep to himself. It’s really important that Talia get permission sometime in the next two weeks, so that Derek knows whether he’ll be able to actually start his awesome new job.
Stilinski’s come back with a stack of paperwork nearly an inch thick and has only barely set it in front of Derek before the phone on the desk rings, one of those antiquated multi-line monstrosities. Stiles glares at it, then leans over and presses the intercom button and says, pointedly, “Erica?"
"It’s line three, Stiles," she says, perfectly smug.
Stilinski sighs, and releases the button. “Sorry, I have to take this. Take a look at the stuff" - he gestures vaguely - “while I do."
He picks up before Derek can reply, and says, cool and impersonal, “Stilinski."
It is with perfect, shocking clarity that Derek hears his mom on the other end. “I’m calling for a Mister McCall?"
"Since you’re calling this line, we can drop the pretense. He and his wife are on their honeymoon, I’m his second, and I’m authorized to handle things in his absence. What can I do for you? I’m in a meeting."
Stilinski sounds way more unfriendly now than he had at any point in his interview with Derek, and it makes him uncomfortable.
"Ah," Talia says, then pauses. “I’m alpha Talia Hale, and I have a beta who’d like to relocate to your territory for a new job, with your permission."
"Hale," he says, testing the word on his tongue as he looks at Derek where he’s frozen in place. “Well, since I just hired him here at Clarke, I think it’d be pretty rude not to let him live here. If you want to come to visit, email at least a week in advance, but yeah, we’re good."
He hangs up without saying anything else, and Derek waits for him to break the ensuing silence. Stilinski shoves a hand through his hair, then says, “Right, so your benefits now include running around outside Sausalito with the other wolves on the full moon, and Argent backing if you’re ever wrongfully targeted by hunters. You’ll also be provided with cologne from R&D which isn’t so much a present as a mandatory part of the dress code, because Scott’s the only one we disclose as a werewolf unless we absolutely have to." He rifles through the stack of papers and extracts two. “I’ll also grab different security forms, since you’ll be cleared for most of the projects, now."
Derek blinks at him. “Your alpha won’t object to you hiring a werewolf from a different pack?"
Stilinski smiles, all predator. “The alpha’s not the CEO. We’re from Beacon Hills, Derek. You’ll find we do things a bit differently around here."
Derek’s heard of Beacon Hills - of course he has, everyone has. His family had lived there before Kali Washington had decided to avenge an ally’s blinding and subsequent death by wiping out every hunter on the West Coast. But all that blood’s just background noise, because Beacon Hills itself churns out a whole lot of weird, even by werewolf standards. One of the old Druid families was based there, and even they could barely keep a handle on the banshees and witches and dryads that kept crawling out of the sometimes-literal woodwork in Beacon Hills. There were dark rumours that they’d helped, but those were quiet.
"I can see that," he says slowly. “Just so you know, I’m born, not bitten, and I’ve never had a lapse in front of a human, except, apparently, having my alpha phone. I shouldn’t need -"
"Let me stop you there," Stilinski interrupts. “It’s not about your control. We don’t use coercive methods on any of our human or werewolf employees. It’s a scent-blocker, because some of our clients are werewolves and some are other entities with a great sense of smell, and we’d prefer not to disclose how many werewolves are in the McCall pack or working here in general. And, if you could sign these" - he tapped a pen on the stack of papers - “and were still curious, I’ll be able to explain why."
Derek nods jerkily, and takes the pen. The first three pages, stapled together, are a job description, covering all the standards of pay and vacation time and review periods and expectations, and Derek barely skims it before he signs it. The second is a description of benefits, in duplicate, one of them noted as his to take home. It’s pretty comprehensive, though all of it more useful to a human than a werewolf. Derek fills in his alpha as beneficiary for his life insurance, and signs the copy to go to the insurer. He tucks the other copy into the folder he’d brought with him with the extra copy of his resume.
Next is the confidentiality agreement, which he reads carefully. He’s not allowed to talk about what he’s working on, he’s not allowed to talk about things other people are working on, he’s, interestingly, not allowed to talk about finished and in-production products unless they’ve been cleared by PR.
It’s restrictive, but if they do business with werewolves and other things that go bump in the night, that’s to be expected. He signs it without comment.
Stilinski’s silent through the whole process, doing something on his phone and glancing up at Derek every once in a while. It’s unsettling. Not because his new boss is younger than him; he’d been prepared for that when he applied for a job within an hour’s drive of Palo Alto, but because Stilinski’s eyes are almost beta-gold and it feels like he’s reassessing Derek. Derek tries to focus on the tax forms and ignore him.
The last form in the pile is an opt-in for the company directory, and he enters only his cell number, because he hates Facebook and prefers to leave it for pack to harass him.
He sets the pile on the desk right as the intercom goes off. “Stiles, your one o’clock is here."
They both glance at the clock on the wall, which still says it’s quarter to one. “Well," Stilinski says, “do you want to meet one of our recurring characters and go to lunch, or do you have something else to do?"
Derek hesitates, but no, he’s starting over, he can be a social person here, lunch is practically code for productive business meeting in California. “I could do lunch."
Stiles presses the button in the intercom. “Let her in, Erica. Mister Hale’s joining us for lunch."
A petite redhead strides in, face arranged in a carefully angry moue. “I don’t know why you don’t tell your bodyguard to just let me in, Stiles, it’s not like you’d ever say no."
"Derek Hale," Stilinski says, “meet Lydia Martin, mathematics student at Princeton and strangely biased against secretarial staff." He subtly emphasizes the last two words, which only draws attention to the fact that the busty blonde occupying the outer office is apparently his bodyguard. “Lydia, Derek’s our latest engineering hire, and he’s coming with us to lunch."
Lydia looks at him, cocks her head to the side as she assesses him, and then visibly dismisses him. “Fine. We’re going to Kamakura, because you really can’t get good sushi in New Jersey, and I’m going to not tell you that I’m getting the Wolf Prize, because theoretically I’m not supposed to tell people until it’s announced."
Stilinski grins broadly and rises to hug her. “Oh my God, that’s fantastic."
For brief, bewildered moment Derek wonders if it’s like a werewolf MacArthur grant, and then he remembers: prestigious Israeli math prize. “Congratulations," he says quietly.
Lydia pats Stilinski on the shoulder, and he lets her go. She looks pleased, though. “Thank you. Now come on, our reservations are for one."
Stilinski grabs his jacket and tells Erica at the desk where they’re going for lunch and that they’ll be back in an hour. She looks up at them and nods, and Derek takes a moment to try to catch her scent, curious if she’s a werewolf, too. He can smell hair product and antiperspirant and cosmetics and laundry detergent, but nothing that speaks to the woman wearing them.
It seems like pushing it, a bit, to be leaving the building barely before one and still trying to make the reservation, at least until Lydia leads them around the corner and the restaurant’s right there. The host seats them quickly and presents them with menus, and Derek stares at his. He’s never been particularly adventurous with food except how rare he’s willing to eat red meat on the full moon. When a waiter comes, Lydia orders a few things in perfect Japanese, then glances at Derek and, in English, adds a California roll and a cucumber roll, and notes that the order’s for all of them.
It’s a little annoying, to not be allowed to order, but Derek’s only had this job for twenty minutes, and Lydia’s his boss’s girlfriend or something. “So when are they presenting you with the Wolf Prize? Where’s the ceremony?”
She flicks one strand of hair behind her shoulder. “Israel in late May, as if anyone cares about finishing the semester with their undergrads.”
“Is Jackson going to need time off? Can I come?” Stilinski seems genuinely excited, and Derek plays with his water glass, just to have something to do with his hands.
“Neither of you are coming,” Lydia says witheringly. “I’m the first woman to win the Wolf Prize, do you think I want it implied I’m emotionally dependent on a man for support? You can come see me win the Fields Medal in two years.”
“I didn’t know they announced the winners so early,” Derek says, impressed but also slightly suspicious.
Lydia turns a poison smile on him. “What do you know about mathematical analysis, Derek?”
“Not a lot.”
“Then believe me when I say they don’t, but I don’t need them to, because this one is mine.” She’s disconcertingly intense, now, even for someone used to werewolves.
Stilinski reaches out and pats her hand, and Lydia sits back. She smoothes a lock of hair framing her face. The food arrives.
*
Derek flies back to New York the next day, and doesn’t even need to talk to Laura about what she’s going to do with the apartment: Cora’s there, and packing his clothes, and grins at him when he comes in.
It makes a certain amount of sense, since her modeling agency is in Manhattan and their parents’ house is in Babylon, but Derek still scowls at her, because she’ll totally have gone through his underwear drawer already.
Laura and Cora hug him in congratulations, and then help him pack his books.
Cora has already packed most of his underwear, leaving only the superhero boxers he’s had since high school. He’s pretty sure the worst part of it is that he has enough of them to last the two weeks until he starts his job.
He looks at apartments on Craigslist and the classifieds section of the San Jose Mercury News and ends up finding a house for rent, because despite the proximity to San Francisco, Alameda’s a pretty small city, without that many rental properties. It’s two bedrooms, and totally unfurnished, but he can deal with that. He’s pretty sure the place is easy walking distance to work, and it’s well within McCall territory, so he emails the landlord to talk about moving in.
There’s a family barbecue before he leaves, and he gets to talk about his new job, and since his mom already knows about Stilinski and the McCall pack, he can talk about how attractive and intense his boss is, even if he can’t talk about some of the other weirdness. His mom eventually gives up the interrogation, and everything is hugs and gentle teasing. When the full moon rises, they all pile on the too-small sofa in the family room and watch Riddick movies.
He flies out on the twelfth and goes right to his new house and puts down his bags and looks around, then grabs his overnight bag again and heads to a hotel.
The boxes of his stuff aren’t arriving for another day or two, and there’s no bed, and it smells weird. So the next morning he heads in to Oakland and gets a bed at a place where it’s all supposed to be handcrafted driftwood stuff. It looks kind of like the claws of dead things are going to be cradling him in his sleep, but it smells like ocean and polish and pot and power tools and the salesperson says it only arrived that morning and Derek says he’ll take it like a desperate man, because maybe if he hands his credit card over fast enough she’ll stop touching it. He has to get a mattress, too, which is kind of awful, and theoretically linens, too, because even though he has some stuff coming, he doesn’t have anything here.
While he’s in the department store, he gets a pot and a pan and a colander, too, and silverware, because everything in the New York apartment had been everyone’s, had been pack property, and he’s lived with pack ever since the dorms and never needed to buy things on his own.
He finds a New Age shop last, and picks up dried sweetgrass.
He smudges the whole house before the bed gets delivered, and then again once he’s set the bed up. It doesn’t make anything smell like pack, but at least it doesn’t smell like other people now, and bad things are swept away.
He walks downtown for dinner, and detours to the Clarke Security Technologies building to make sure he knows how long it’ll take to get there. It’s not a bad walk, and there’s a gym nearby, too. He’ll probably end up getting stuff for at home, so he can do hard lifting instead of relying on infinite repetition, but they’re an okay social space. He’ll have to see if he can find a community baseball team to join, since Clarke doesn’t have a team. It feels weird, to be planning some sort of life away from his pack, though he’s always known it was a possibility that he’d move away.
It’s not a new thought, exactly, that his family will stay his family but they might not stay his pack forever. He doesn’t like the thought.
He finds a German place to eat, and shops for furniture on his phone. It’d have been more convenient, of course, to order everything to arrive today, but he wanted a chance to walk the space and get a feel for it. It’s a failing for an engineer, to need the physical representation, but he doesn’t need it, per se, just likes it. Besides, it’ll give his scent a chance to settle in before more new chemical-smelling things are added.
The new bed is soft and comfortable and smells like a whole lot of nothing, but it’ll get better.
*
His stuff arrives the next day, and it smells like books and home and pack. Cora’s shoved one of her workout shirts in a box, and it smells like her. He smiles and folds it and puts it in the top of his closet.
There aren’t bookshelves, yet, to put his books on, but he piles all of them in the den anyway. He’ll set that up as an office, leave the second bedroom as a spare for if any of his pack get time and permission to visit. It’s only Thursday, and he’s got the whole weekend ahead of him, but he sets everything up as much as he can before he goes out. He likes order in his space, order that can be covered up with blankets and cushions and pack lounging on each other.
He realizes he’s picturing trying to keep order in the face of Laura-induced chaos, and promptly stops arranging things.
Reluctantly, he goes grocery shopping, because the rest of the furniture isn’t due until tomorrow. He finds a Trader Joe’s on his phone, and it’s right next to a Safeway, so he can stock up on staples. He walks, because he still has no idea what public transit’s like other than the BART, and it’s not that far. He stocks up on the basics and on piles of frozen dinners, because being an adult means eating whatever the fuck you feel like for dinner.
He has to get a cab back, because he’s gotten enough stuff that it’d be suspicious to carry the weight that far.
His place still looks like an unoccupied cave, but it’s getting there. He’ll even have a microwave tomorrow.
In the meantime, there’s a taqueria that advertises huge portions, and he eats a burrito that may actually be the same size as his head and looks at reviews of the gyms in the area. He doesn’t really like it: he’s never been solely reliant on his own judgement before. Even deciding on universities had come down to proximity to family, after all - though the fact that the Troy pack were kind of jerks had helped with that.
Derek pushes away the panic that rises at the thought of the distance: his alpha thinks this is a good idea, and it’ll be great for his career, and it’s interesting, and he’ll be meeting the local alpha soon anyway and he can deal, he can deal with it.
He goes home and works out until he’s tired, then showers and dries off with a towel that smells like New York.
The morning’s a horror and a half, because he wants to get in good habits, and it’s still a three hour difference. He drags himself upright and showers briefly and glares at the contents of his fridge and then goes out in search of coffee and breakfast. The furniture will arrive today, but no one’ll be delivering yet, not to houses.
Feeling vaguely more awake, he digs out his laptop and sits on his bed and dicks around for most of the day until the furniture gets there.
Setting up the house the way he wants it takes most of the afternoon, wearing on into evening. He doesn’t exactly have a lot of stuff, but there’s all this space to fill, now. His stomach’s what cuts him off, and he orders pizza to eat on his new goddamn couch, because that is how a couch ought to be broken in.
Saturday he finally finds a gym, and they’ve got fliers for community baseball. The season’s already well underway, but he can at least stop by or something.
Monday morning is hard, and gross, and seriously fuck time zones. He hits the gym, and there’s a smell there, faint and mixed in with all the others, that’s overwhelming in its perfection. Derek wants to follow it, maybe hit on the person it’s coming from, but he can’t tell directionality in the circulated air. He nods at the woman using the treadmill next to him when she stops, and says thanks to the guy who holds the door for him. It’s usually pretty easy to make friends as long as he can remember to actually talk. He showers and applies the cologne Stilinski had gotten him to his pulse points. When he does his left knee, his scent drops away, everything else thrown into sharp relief by contrast. It makes him feel unbalanced, but he deals with it: shoves the sense away and plays human.
At Clarke, the same woman is at the front desk, and buzzes him in when he waves. The tag just says ‘Harley,’ so he smiles at her. “Hi, I’m Derek, I’m supposed to be starting today. Which way to HR? I should probably pick up my swipe card.”
“Second floor, first door on the left,” she says, and he probably should have noticed when he was here for his interview.
He goes up and knocks on the open door, and the man at the desk looks up, a scattered expression on his face. The nameplate says Scott McCall, and it’s half-buried under loose paper and manila folders.
“Uh, Alpha McCall.”
McCall’s eyes flick to the door, and he takes three quick steps around the desk to close it. “You’re Derek, right? Did Stiles not - we don’t talk about that here, not with the doors open.”
With the door closed, Derek can’t hear anything beyond the room, just McCall’s heart and the dull thudding of the building itself. He’ll figure out why the building sounds like it has a pulse later. He’s on edge, a little, off balance, and he hates apologizing, but - “I’m sorry.”
McCall shoves a hand through messy dark hair. “No, I - Lydia’s in town, I can’t expect him to have been able to go through everything.”
Derek squares his shoulders. “Is it still okay that I’m here?”
McCall waves a hand dismissively. “Of course, that was Stiles’ call. Okay, first things first: you’ll have noticed the soundproofing. We don’t talk about anything supernatural except when there’s a closed door between us and the rest of the office. Part of that’s because not everyone who works here is in the know, part of it’s that Alyssa in IT also works for the Weird Squad and we don’t want to give her anything that’s not on Erica’s schedule. Wait, you’ve got Weird Squad in New York, right?”
“Yeah,” he says, faintly appalled that they’d willingly let a spy in if they’re doing supernatural security. “Why -”
“Don’t worry,” McCall interrupts, “we’re all safe. Stiles contracts out for the servers that we do important stuff on, and if you ever get assigned projects that she can’t see the notes for, someone’ll show you how to get around it. It’s super uncomplicated, since he had to make it simple enough for me to segregate portions of employee files. That’s also why we don’t talk pack business or werewolf stuff in general with doors open, or at staff functions that aren’t the full moon run. He mentioned the full moon run, right? Are you coming?”
“Uh, yeah, that was the plan,” Derek says. The idea of keeping someone he knows he can’t trust close to him makes him uncomfortable, a little sick to his stomach, though it’s not like he has any choice in the matter. He doesn’t run this show. “So I guess we don’t meet here?”
“No - here, I’ll give you my address.” McCall scrawls on a sticky note and hands it over. “Though actually I guess this next one is a partial eclipse, so Stiles might make that a staff party, since all of us can actually get drunk at least for a little while. But I guess the most important stuff for today is that we don’t talk wolf stuff with the doors open, and for me to show you to your office.”
McCall grabs Derek’s ID card and leads him downstairs and into a secure area. It’s nice, pretty sunny, open, with computer stations next to the work tables rather than clustered at one end, a tall blonde woman folded over coffee and something electrical with its guts spilled out that smells of plastic and ash and venom.
She stands, swipes her hands quickly on her slacks, and strides over to meet them.
“Isobel Lahey,” McCall says, “this is -”
“Derek Hale. We’ll be working together. Thanks, Scott, but I’ll show him around the lab.” Isobel grins, and shakes his hand. Derek can’t smell anything off her, not any more than he can smell anything off anyone else in the building, so the only things he can glean about her on initial observation are that she’s got killer cheekbones, a friendly smile, and an Adam’s apple.
“Nice to meet you, Isobel.”
McCall nods agreeably. “Okay. Derek, you know where to find me if you need anything. Isobel’s got something for you to start out on, and I’ll see you at the party.”
McCall leaves, and Isobel shows Derek around the lab: it’s fairly small, for the scale of operation Clarke apparently does, but it’s got good equipment, and there’s a well-stocked parts wall that includes a drawer full of requisition forms. “You can get anything you need.”
Derek raises an eyebrow at her. “Anything?”
“Anything,” she reiterates firmly. “If it’s illegal or dangerous to staff members, you’ll probably have to justify yourself to Boyd and Stiles - Vernon Boyd’s the Acquisitions department - but very nearly anything. You’re cleared, I guess - don’t tell me why or how - so I can tell you: we can get damn near any species you want of aconite, though it’s discouraged for general use because of the toxicity.”
Derek blinks. “Good to know.” He’d love to ask - what is she? Is she human or were or something else? Not being able to tell is going to slowly drive him up the wall, though at least he’ll know who the werewolves are at the full moon, and he knows Stilinski is human from the fact that he needs a bodyguard. Well, he’s pretty sure Stilinski is human. He might be.
Derek is going to lose his mind. “So what do you want me to get started on?”
Isobel shows him a perimeter breach alarm still in late design stages, and he gets started. It’s easy to sink into it, because all he can hear is Isobel’s heart and the building, and all he can smell is cleaning products.
By noon, Isobel needs to tap his shoulder to get Derek out of the zone. “Hey, you bring lunch?”
“Ah, no, I’d planned to go out.”
“Is it okay if I order sandwiches? Then I can show you the break room and you can meet other people.”
“That sounds great.”
Isobel whips out her phone and tells him it’ll be twenty minutes, and Derek stretches and goes back to work, poking at it kind of desultorily because there’s no time to get fully absorbed.
In the break room, McCall is already eating with an over-gelled blond. He smiles to see them. “Derek Hale, this is Jackson Whittemore from Sales and Marketing.”
Derek smiles back, and sits with them, even though he’s not sure what Jackson is. Definitely not human, at least: nothing human has eyes that cold. He’s not sure what any of the other people in the room are. He’s not even sure what Isobel is. It’s going to drive him crazy. There aren’t that many people, so McCall introduces him around as they trickle in: Erica he’s met already, Mark in Accounting, Alyssa in IT, whose name Derek tries not to react to, and another handful of people whose names and departments he can’t remember. They sound less like actual departments than like Stilinski found someone good at something and gave them a job title, which is both entertaining and flattering that Derek’s now one of them.
He gets through lunch without stumbling over names, mostly by dint of not calling anyone by name at all, and spends the afternoon submersed in the same project. It feels like he’s made progress on it, done good work, but he has no idea what kind of metric Stilinski and Isobel will be holding him to, so he ends the day unsettled.
He walks home, then goes for a run, wanting to learn these streets the way he knew their neighborhood in Manhattan, the way he knew their neighborhood growing up.