Halfway back to the Jeep, Stiles decides he can’t take the silence anymore.
“Look,” he starts, “I know you guys don’t really care about all this—the article, I mean. Which is fine! Understandable. It’s just a fluff piece for a local paper nobody and nobody’s uncle reads. I get it.”
Stiles moves to let someone pass them on the sidewalk.
“But it’s… Like, it’s all I got right now, you know? Everybody else has their thing. Their next step, or whatever. Lydia’s got Boston, Scott and Allison are—“
“Moving out,” Derek says. “Yeah, he told me.”
Stiles stops dead in his tracks. A rush of cold blasts from his head to his toes like sleet scraping across frozen asphalt. He grabs onto Derek’s arm at the elbow and roughly turns him around. His own voice sounds distant in his ears—brittle and thin. “Scott and Allison are moving?”
Derek glares down at Stiles’s hand on him, then back up, his face pinched with something more leery than irritated. “He didn’t tell you?”
Stiles lets go. He drops his bag onto the concrete because it’s suddenly too heavy—a burden on his shoulders folding his ribcage too tightly around his lungs. “NO! No, he didn’t!” He scrubs his hands through his hair. “Wait, when?! And when did he tell you?”
Derek’s shoulders rise with a deep inhale and he scratches at the hair on the back of his head, eyes darting off to one side. “Last night?”
“You saw Scott last night?”
“He asked me to come over.”
A fog comes over Stiles, dyed red with anger. He snatches up his bag and shoulders past Derek, actually knocking him to the side as he stalks to the Jeep.
“I thought you knew,” Derek says, walking after him.
Stiles rounds on him, his heartbeat thundering against his sternum, feeling hot in his chest. “Nope! Apparently he told YOU first, of all of people.”
Derek stops suddenly, going rigid. “He just wanted some advice—”
“Oho, advice,” Stiles repeats, amputating Derek’s excuse like a dead limb. “You are the last person anybody should be going to for fucking advice.” Stiles hopes the message is loud and clear and knife-sharp: You, the emotionally stunted alcoholic with anger issues—
He sees the moment it lands, in a brief flash of hurt that crosses Derek’s face like a shadow. But it’s gone in a split second, a mask of bitter steel taking its place, and any spark of regret in Stiles burns away with it.
Truth stings, after all.
Derek takes a single step forward, leaning a little too far into Stiles’s space. His eyes are hard and unflinching, voice gravel. “Why don’t you go ask Scott why he came to me and not you," he snaps. "Because there’s a reason he did.”
Why is this the FIRST snippet of this fic I'm posting? Honestly, couldn't tell you. It was just stuck in my head. I'll be posting more snippets, because I need the motivation to wrap this baby up.
