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“Do werewolves have fairytales?” Stiles asks one day. He’s working on a paper about the origins of Little Red Riding Hood and its many interpreted meanings for his AP English class, and he’s curious.
It’s senior year, and a lot has happened since Peter’s death — Jackson of the Black Lagoon, Lydia turning out to be some kind of wolf-witch, a series of increasingly awkward police investigations which included a brief visit by the Behavioral Analysis Unit from Quantico. Life has been one supernatural disaster after another, and they’ve barely hung on by the tips of Derek’s extremely pointy claws.
Stiles’s medication has been adjusted: his diagnosis with ADHD was changed after he switched doctors, and he’s been weened off of Adderall completely. After what Stiles can only assume was a dark period of withdrawal, his body caught up with itself and quit being tired all the time. Now he takes a mild dose of Zoloft, which his new psychiatrist rarely fiddles with. Anytime he gets an increase, he feels like he’s going to crawl out of his skin, like there’s explosion in slow motion happening on a cellular level.
It’s not entirely pleasant, and he’s grateful when his body sorts itself each time.
“Derek,” he whines when the alpha doesn’t respond. “I’m just curious, you know. My mom used to make up bedtime stories, and I want to know if you had any wolfy tall-tales to pass along.”
Derek sighs. He’s long since abandoned his train car and bought back his house from the county. The renovations aren’t done yet, but there’s now a door that the pack can put between themselves and the Argents. Stiles still isn’t sure where he stands in the pack, or if he’s even in the pack at all, but he barges in anyway. It's what he does.
“My father was the one who told us bedtime stories,” Derek says, and Stiles tries not to gape. It’s possibly the first information about his family that Derek has ever willingly volunteered. And it’s about bedtime stories. “Some of them were old — stories about the first werewolves, that sort of thing. Most of them were just the usual prince and princesses and don’t talk to strangers crap.”
He falls silent, and Stiles doesn’t push him. He fiddles with the brightness setting on his laptop and stares at the blank OpenOffice page. It’s been almost a year since he and Scott were scared off Hale land while in search of a body and an inhaler. It’s been almost a year — Derek is the pack alpha, witches and werewolves and lizard monsters are a part of his everyday life, and the war with the Argents is still brewing darkly on the horizon.
But Derek still doesn’t trust them enough to open up about the past.
---
Stiles is contemplating his paragraph on the different versions of Little Red when Scott lets himself in through the window. His dad is off doing his Sheriff thing; their relationship has been strained since this werewolf crap started encroaching on their ability to communicate. There are only so many secrets two people can keep from each other before everything starts slide away.
“What’s up, dude?” Stiles asks. He rereads the paragraph and frowns. The guidelines had said to limit the paper to five pages, but he doesn’t see how he can. This is some complicated shit.
“What did you say to Derek yesterday?” Scott demands.
Stiles swivels his chair and tilts his head. “What are you talking about?”
“You were at Derek’s house the other day,” Scott says. He runs his hand through the fluff of his hair. Sometimes he still reaches for it like he expect it to be longer. “We went by today after school to help with the upstair floors and he was acting weird.”
“Weird how?” Stiles asks carefully. He hopes that this isn’t another bout of alpha dickishness in the making; they barely recovered from Derek’s loss of control the first two times.
“I dunno,” Scott says, making a face. “He had, like, a journal, and he was writing stuff down, and he was really snappish with us. Even Boyd.”
“The only weird part of that is the writing,” Stiles snorts, thinking about all the times Derek has glared and snarled and done morally questionable violent things to those in the pack.
“I just—” Scott looks lost. “He’s upset, and we could smell you all over the living room. You’re the last person to see him before.”
“Look, Derek and I aren’t exactly buddies,” Stiles says, ignoring Scott’s skeptical expression. “Why is it my fault if there’s something wrong with him?”
“Could you just...go check on him?”
“But—” Stiles motions helplessly to his notes and reference books. It’d taken a stupid amount of pleading to convince the scheduling people to let him in an AP class; he wants to blow this paper out of the water.
“Please?” Scott pulls out the puppy eyes. “Derek ordered us away after like an hour, and we can’t go back. Erica tried and got banned by the Alpha Voice.”
Stiles sighs. If Derek’s pulling out his Alpha Whammy, it must be bad. “Sure, sure, okay,” he grumbles, already springing to his feet and shoving his phone and keys into his pocket. He grabs his backpack and shoves his work into it; maybe he’ll stop at the coffee shop on the way back and get some work done. “I’ll go deliver myself to the wolf’s den, no big deal.”
“Great!” Scott beams, the manipulative little bastard. “Let me know how it goes, okay?”
“I hate you,” Stiles mutters without heat. “I hate you so, so much.”
---
“Derek?” Stiles calls as he kicks the front door closed. He had a copy made of the key back when they, you know, installed an actual door, and he’s refused to give it up, no matter how creative Derek thought his threats were. Not that Derek seemed to try very hard to get it; for all his prickliness, he didn’t appear to actually mind when Stiles invaded the pack sanctuary. He just didn’t encourage it.
“Go away, Stiles,” Derek growls from the dining room. Stiles heads back there, passing the rebuilt staircase and once again marveling at how fucking huge the house was. Once, it had been the home of a whole pack of werewolves. Now that Isaac’s found a foster family he doesn’t hate, Derek is the only one who lives here. It’s kind of...sad.
“Nope, not gonna happen,” Stiles says with a shrug. He leans against the doorway, trying to be casual. Derek has a leather-bound journal laid out on the table, with piles of notes surrounding him. It’s a mirror image of Stiles’s desk, except with the absence of his MacBook. “You going to tell me why you chased off your pack? Again.”
“No,” Derek says, almost sullen.
Stiles makes a face at him. “Dude, I’m supposed to be the child here.” He rolls his shoulders and strolls into the room a bit more, making sure that Derek can see him move. It’s always best to treat him like a potentially dangerous animal when he’s like this, not least because it’s true. “What are you up to?”
Derek’s jaw twitches, and he spends a long moment staring at the journal with distant eyes.
“I’m trying to remember,” he says after a pause. “We lost everything in the fire, and that includes my family’s records.”
“Records?” Stiles prompts softly when it looks like he won’t continue.
“Our stories,” Derek says through gritted teeth. “Our history. Our legends, our genealogical books, our everything.”
“Oh,” Stiles says uselessly. “Is there...Is there anything I can do?” His voice is hesitant, almost timid. This is more emotionally involved than he and Derek usually get outside of life-or-death situations.
“No,” Derek says, not looking at him. “Just—Sit down and finish your paper for class. It’s due tomorrow.”
Stiles goes outside and gets his backpack from the Jeep. He sets himself up on the other end of the table, and the room is filled with the soft sound of Derek’s pen scratching across smooth paper and his fingers pitter-pattering across the keyboard.