Chapter Text
Stiles clatters down the worn wood steps into the vault behind Peter, loose limbed and happy in the warm night air. He’s slightly taller and slightly broader than the last time he stepped foot in the high school, and slightly less loose-limbed and clumsy, but not by much.
Peter doesn’t mind his noise, and how much space he seems to take up swinging his arms around – He distracts him from the dark, the old pack scents of the vault.
“Please don’t fall down the stairs, Stiles. There’s no way I can carry you and the crates out of here, and I’m only making one trip.”
Stiles sees the grin on Peter’s face from behind him, through the twitch of his ears, and reaches for his shoulder. The vault is rather dark, not much moonlight bouncing down the steps, and his fingers brush across the back of Peter’s neck before catching hold of his shirt collar.
The touch makes him shiver, but isn’t particularly gentle – Stiles’ fingers fumbling in the dark remind Peter, yet again, of just how human he is.
“Can you see?”
“Not really. I left my phone in the car, do you have yours?”
Peter slows his descent on the stairs as he pulls his phone from his pocket and shakes it slightly to turn the flashlight on. Stiles’ hand slips from his shoulder roughly, the drag of his fingertips heavy all the way to his wrist, hand, until the phone is out of his grip.
“You okay down here?”
Peter watches the dust kick up around his boots in the cast of the flashlight. The bright cold swath fades out in the little cellar room, mingling with the sparse moonlight, and his voice catches in his throat.
“It’s fine. I had to come down here a few weeks ago.”
A few weeks ago, he and Stiles were rolling around on the floor of his apartment, eating and drinking and fucking – glorious, languid sex, interspersed with chocolate and wine and breaks to suck dark bleeding marks into Stiles’ delicate thighs – and talking, spilling secrets and fears and truths as fragile and delicate as Stiles’ skin.
Peter had spent the early afternoon in the vault, the trap door closed above him, adding photos to a scrapbook by the light of a miserable little LED lantern. They were silly photos, worthless snaps of the apartment, the pack, the woods around the ruin of the house. Nothing special, nothing he didn’t have a half dozen of already – but these, these all had Stiles in them. The edge of a sleeve, a book left out on the table, the imprint of him on each glossy sheet.
He wanted to call. He was going to call. He was going to put down the photo, the one with Stiles’ silhouette blackened and haloed by the glow of the plate glass windows, and march up the rickety steps into the fading light and call Stiles.
And then Stiles called him.
They were one day off a full moon, and every interrupted kiss and secret touch was burning through Stiles blood, and he was talking way too fast for Peter to track.
“Look, I’m already out, why don’t I come to you?”
“Just come home. I’m at home. Your house, I mean, not that I’m trying to move in or anything – “
That was how Stiles had first seen the pictures. Peter had dropped the half-empty paper folder of them on the coffee table with his keys, no time to lock them away in the fire safe with Stiles mouth already on his. In a lull, between rounds of fucking and kisses and sips of wine, his too-fast and too-clever eyes spotted the little package and pulled the glossy slips of paper free without any pause.
He’d wanted to see the rest, and Peter couldn’t say no. They set their wine glasses aside, and Peter led a blanket-wrapped Stiles into the spare bedroom-turned-study, to the fire safe. They held exact copies of the photobooks he had been working on in the vault – one to keep and one to see, but always stored safely, protected. He wouldn’t lose everything again, couldn’t bear the thought of it –
“The fire safe is a good idea. I should probably put copies of my – my photos of mom – in dad’s safe. We don’t have a lot of photos of her.”
Peter pulls out a book, dated 2008, and hands it over to Stiles. He has a hard time looking at these, thinking about that year, but Stiles doesn’t let him walk away.
Stiles almost drops the blanket, but he gets a hold on Peter’s arm and drags it around his own waist, putting Peter snuggly at his back, little choice but to wrap his other arm around Stiles and set his chin on the swell of the blanket around his neck, mouth much too close to the pale curve of his ear.
“two thousand eight, huh. Did these survive in the house?” He’s careful, reverent, with the pages, even though each photo is secure in its plastic slip.
“They survived because I never got to pick them up from the shop. When I went to pick up an order…a few years ago, after everything, they had this dusty old envelope, that they never bothered to throw away. Seven years, in the shop.”
“Wow. What luck, Peter, really. Is that Derek?”
It is Derek, with softer eyes and a slighter build, holding a wolfed-out toddler by the ankles and looking horrified. They go through the entire album, slowly, Peter naming names and telling stories, Stiles pulling the words from him with simple questions and quiet murmurings, as needed.
When they reach the back of the book, Stiles puts it away, in the right spot, and locks the safe back without prompting.
“Cook something for me, and let me tell you about my mom.”