Chapter Text
In the early days of their friendship, Scott and Stiles had made a pact not to keep secrets from one another.
Despite being the better liar, it wasn’t Stiles who had been the main violator of the agreement in recent years. It was a fact that Scott carried heavily, despite knowing that his reasons for secrecy had been more or less justified.
Before the Bite, Scott had never really been able to keep anything from Stiles, even if he wanted to. His tells were obvious, and Stiles had a third sense for that kind of thing regardless – sniffing out deception with the same keen intuition that the Sheriff had. There was never any point in lying to Stiles.
Stiles’s wide-open honesty with Scott, however, had always been voluntary. The guy would lie to just about anyone who would let him speak long enough, but Scott had always been the strange exception to that; entrusted with openness purely on merit as his rank as best friend.
Their entire relationship was built on the foundations of shared secrets. They knew everything about each other – their intimate thoughts and feelings, favourite guilty pleasures, petty annoyances, weird fetishes. Everything.
Which was why, when he finally figured it out, Scott was enormously disappointed in himself.
Stiles, after all, had been his best friend for years by that point. Their lives were interwoven at the roots; spanning back more than a solid decade – most of Scott’s life. They’d known each other and been in each other’s lives for so long, Scott could only very barely remember what life was like before him.
And, apparently, none of that meant anything. Because, for months now, he’s evidently missed the fact that Stiles Stilinski has feelings for Derek Hale…
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Stiles interrupted his awed revelation, looking at Scott strangely before switching back to the road.
Scott schooled his face into something innocuous, and shrugged. “What? I’m not looking at you like anything.”
Stiles gave him another look. “Are you serious?”
Scott continued giving him his best innocent expression, and shrugged again.
Stiles rolled his eyes long-sufferingly, and readjusted in his seat to rest an elbow against the window, his head in one hand, the other still on the steering wheel. “Fine. Forget it. So, have you at least heard from Derek at all?” he picked up their previous line of conversation.
Scott looked down at his hands, wishing suddenly that he’d never brought Derek up in the first place. He couldn’t even remember what he’d been saying – so overcome by that subtle flex in Stiles’s jaw that had given him away.
“Uh… no,” he said awkwardly, shifting in his seat in an effort to avoid his best friend’s gaze. He’d be caught out in the lie in an instant if Stiles were to get one good look into his eyes.
It didn’t work. Stiles knew all.
“Okay, seriously, could you be any more obvious? C’mon, just tell me, what did he say?”
Scott hunched his shoulders, still avoiding his gaze. “He said… he’s doing great.”
“Uh huh, and?” Stiles pressed.
“And he… he found an apartment,” Scott admitted.
Stiles’s hands clenched minutely tighter on the steering wheel. “That’s great,” he said unconvincingly. “That’s-” He cleared his throat. “I mean, good for him, right?”
Jesus Christ, how in the hell had he missed this?
“Why do you ask?” Scott asked, shifting his gaze a little to try and scrutinize Stiles’s reactions.
“What?” Stiles said, a touch too defensively. “Guy can’t be curious about an old associate who dropped off the face of the earth without explanation?”
Ah, yeah, so he was still pretty pissed about that…
Scott bit the inside of his cheek. “If you wanna hear from him so bad, why don’t you try calling him?”
Stiles sighed, and shook his head, sounding suddenly wearied. “No. I never call him unless there’s an emergency; he’d be expecting a firefight. Assuming he’d even pick up the phone in the first place.”
“You really haven’t spoken to him at all since he left?” Scott asked.
Stiles’s hand clenched on the steering wheel again. “Yeah. I sent him a text.”
“Did he respond?” Scott asked.
“I called him a dick.”
“Oh.”
Okay, so, maybe things were complicated at the moment. Even Scott could admit that Derek picking up and taking off without warning was a pretty dick move – and Scott liked to think he was a pretty conservative guy when it came to doling out judgments nowadays.
“So, he really didn’t respond? At all?” Scott asked.
“Nothing. You’d think I got his number wrong or something. Guy’s a complete wall.”
Scott pursed his lips awkwardly, searching for something comforting to say, and, ultimately, coming up with nothing.
“I mean, it’s not like we were close or anything,” Stiles conceded offhandedly. “But, you know, you save the world half a dozen times in a row together, you’d think I’d at least warrant a ‘see you when I see you,’ or whatever.”
“He didn’t say goodbye to me either,” Scott pointed out.
Stiles shot him another look, and said nothing.
They drove in silence for the next few minutes, until arriving back at Scott’s place. Stiles didn’t pull the handbrake, or even take his hand off the wheel, so Scott assumed that he wasn’t going to stick around for their usual late-night video gaming sessions like they usually did.
“See you tomorrow, I guess?” Scott said slowly, half-out of the car.
“Bright and early, Friday morning,” Stiles said, then added, with a scowl, “First period econ with Finstock.”
Scott returned the grimace, and shut the stiff door of the Jeep closed behind him, ready to finish off his homework, and maybe call it an early night.
Instead, however, Scott found himself staring up at his ceiling, replaying all the events of the past two years in his head with a brand-new perspective – trying to construct some sort of timeline for his newfound revelation, and coming up blank.
The icy, reluctant camaraderie Derek and Stiles had resigned themselves to ever since he and Scott had gotten him arrested for the murder of his own sister hadn’t exactly seemed to thaw in the intervening time since. Stiles had constantly and repeatedly voiced his opinions on Derek’s flimsy trustworthiness at any opportunity he could – accusing him of murder and deceit far more excessively than even Scott figured he deserved. Scott might have not been the guy’s biggest fan, but he’d at least given Derek the benefit of the doubt after discovering he didn’t actually kill Laura.
Then there was the fact that Stiles had never even told him that he liked guys in the first place. Not that Scott minded, or even that he couldn’t understand why Stiles would keep something that from him. It just stung to know that, even after all the secrets they’d shared, there was still such a huge part of him that not even Scott had earned the trust to know.
Scott’s thoughts followed him through to the next day, niggling in his brain like a physical itch.
“Dude,” Stiles eventually smacked him on the back of the head with an open palm, effectively yanking him out of his reverie. He glared at him indignantly, but Stiles didn’t seem to care.
“Why the hell do you keep looking at me like that?” he demanded.
“Looking at you like what?” Scott deflected, avoiding his gaze.
“Like a kicked puppy. C’mon, dude, what the hell’s going on? What’s with the pity party?”
“Nothing,” Scott mumbled.
Stiles levelled him with a sceptical stare. Before he could do more than narrow his eyes and open his mouth to say something, however, Scott was saved from interrogation by a heavy set of textbooks being slammed down onto the table across from them.
“Has anyone seen Fiona Farrow today?” Lydia demanded irritably, a curtain of long red hair falling over one shoulder as she looked between the two boys, eyebrows raised like she was prepared to fight whoever answered.
Stiles glanced vaguely around the library for a moment. “Don’t think so. Why?”
Lydia huffed, and slid the textbooks forward before taking a seat, threading her brown messenger bag off one shoulder and setting it to the side. “She was supposed to have sent me her half of our chemistry assignment by yesterday, and now, apparently, she’s disappeared off the face of the Earth. This is why group-projects should be phased out of the school system. I can’t rely on anyone else to help maintain my GPA – not this close to graduation.”
“Okay, we’re barely seniors, Lydia,” Stiles reminded her, a fond smile on his face. “And I doubt that one assignment could even make a dent in a GPA like yours. I’m pretty sure you’re single-handedly ruining the curve for everyone else as it is.”
She pursed her lips and tossed her hair happily, pleased at the praise.
Stiles scrubbed a hand over his face miserably. “God, I don’t even want to know what last year has done to mine. So much for salutatorian.”
Scott and Lydia both went still, and averted their gazes uneasily.
The last few months since the Nogitsune had been hard on all of them, but especially Stiles. They knew that. But the reminder of the incident still hurt – the loss of Allison and Aiden still raw, and recent, and far too agonising to handle with anything other than pure grief. Every reminder was like losing them all over again.
Sensing the awkwardness in the room, Stiles forced a smile to his face, and leant back in his chair. “So, you had any bright ideas for final pranks as a send-off for Coach yet? He’ll be devastated if we graduate without giving him a worthy finale,” he changed the subject lightly, face as cheerful and impish as ever.
Grateful for the injection of forced optimism, Scott snorted, and leaned back in his seat. “You’ve already heard my idea.”
Lydia rolled her eyes, and dragged an extra-thick textbook from her bag, immediately bringing it up so that the only part of her face they could see over the cover was her pale forehead.
“That was a terrible idea, Scott. For one thing, we’re above water-based pranks; those haven’t been funny since people started carrying cellphones with them everywhere they go. For another – totally uninspired.”
“Uninspired?” Scott brought a hand to his chest, deeply offended.
They bickered happily for several more minutes, undeterred by the way Lydia passive-aggressively turned her pages as loudly as she could. Eventually, she relented with an exasperated noise, and set the book aside before offering up an idea that was so frighteningly ingenious, Scott found himself seriously wondering if he should be more afraid of her.
A whispered voice caught Scott’s attention from a few tables away, and, without thinking, he inclined his head to listen in.
“Should be locked up -” they said.
For all the advantages that being a werewolf granted him, the supernatural enhancements to his senses was still probably the best. The sights, sounds, and smells were a never-ceasing wonder, but, on the downside, they could never really be turned off – only tuned out. After a few weeks of adjustment, it became pretty much second-nature to filter out all the background chatter, and not eavesdrop on conversations around him. However, every now and then, there was a voice or two that, for whatever reason, would always catch and hold his attention, no matter how much he worked to ignore them.
Surreptitiously, he glanced over to spy on the speaker, and saw a sandy-haired stranger staring directly at Stiles with a look of such absolute loathing that Scott almost started in surprise.
Even without the bias of a ten-year friendship, he knew Stiles was a pretty likable guy. Extremely annoying, without a doubt, but it was in the lovable, goofy way. He was the class clown – nobody hated him. They just thought he was a little obnoxious.
“Total bullshit,” the girl next to him agreed vehemently.
“Please,” a third voice scoffed – another guy. “His dad’s the sheriff. What did you think would happen?”
Stiles’s brows drew together, and Scott realised that, even without crystal-clear supernatural hearing, the group was still very much within earshot, if one was listening for it.
The first guy shook his head disgustedly. “I know what I saw. Creepy fucker just stood there while the masked guys slaughtered everyone in sight. People were dying, and he just watched them with this eerie fucking smile on his face. Like he was getting off on it. I mean, is he not even being investigated? Do people just not care?”
Oh, shit. They were talking about the hospital massacre. Scott chanced an anxious glance at Stiles, who had gone suspiciously quiet.
“Stiles…” he tried, but cut himself off when Stiles’s fist tightened on the table.
“It’s not like it’s the first time it’s happened. Didn’t he break that Lahey kid out of jail after he killed his dad, or whatever?” the third voice pointed out.
“Jackson Whittemore’s restraining order,” the second added.
“My buddy Carson saw him with blueprints for a bank. I think he was planning on robbing it.”
“I heard he killed Allison Argent.”
Stiles stiffened. Lydia’s breath caught sharply.
The words were like a physical punch to the gut – one that made Scott choke on his instantaneous rage. The urge to launch himself across the room and attack whoever had said them almost pushed him into a shift, and, for a moment, he forced himself to focus on the feeling of his half-drawn claws biting into the skin of his palm. In his concentration to remain human, the overheard conversation died back into the background, and he was left to watch helplessly as Stiles’s shell-shocked face turned green.
“I have to go,” Stiles said quickly, standing at once to gather his things. His hands were trembling.
“No, don’t-” Lydia touched his arm softly.
“No, I have to get out of here,” Stiles brushed away her hand, pulling his backpack over his shoulder and tucking his books into the crook of his elbow. He didn’t meet either of their eyes. “I’ll see you guys on Monday.”
Keeping his head down, Stiles cleared out of the library without another word. All three pairs of eyes at the other table widened in horror as they realised that they’d most definitely been caught out, but Stiles didn’t even look in their direction.
Scott snarled. Before he could do so much as set his gaze and tense to get up from his seat, however, Lydia’s hand shot out to keep him in place.
“Leave it,” she advised. “You won’t change anything. Stiles doesn’t need any rumours confirmed or denied right now. You’ll only make it worse.”
“They’re calling him a murderer,” he growled through gritted teeth.
“Stiles has probably called himself a lot worse in the last few months,” she pointed out sadly.
Scott sagged in his seat, the fight draining out of him, replaced immediately by the miserable feeling of complete ineptitude.
“What did I miss?” They both turned to see Isaac standing behind them, holding a plastic smoothie cup with a straw in one hand; brow quirked with confusion.
Lydia pursed her lips grimly, and Scott sighed, rubbing a hand through his hair. “Stiles,” he summarised shortly.
Isaac nodded like he understood.
“Hey, have you heard from Derek lately?” Scott asked as Isaac occupied Stiles’s vacated seat.
Isaac paused in taking a long pull from his straw, looking baffled at the non-sequitur. “Not for a week or two. Why?”
Scott looked away, shrugging. “Stiles and I were talking about him yesterday. Wondered if you’d heard anything new.”
“Nah. It’s not like Derek’s a particularly chatty person. He mostly just listens to what I have to say.”
“Sounds like him.”
“Hey, you! No food or drink in the library!” the school librarian pointed accusingly at the offending smoothie cup in Isaac’s hand from across the room.
“Oh, shit,” Isaac said, bringing the cup beneath the table, before realising how stupid it was to try and hide already-spotted contraband.
“Out!” she squawked.