OMG, @demisexualhale ... first of first: Congratulation, because you deserved EVERYTHING!!
And secondly.... I’m crying here, right now, like a baby... Thank you for everything!!!! Your kindness, your inspiring attitude, your amazing stories... I’m lucky I’ve known you. <3
@demisexualhale sorry you had a rough time today. have this au that i saw you talking about after i creeped on your blog. it’s... uh. probably not what anyone involved thought it would be. but i hope you like it?
anyway.
sterek. 2k. spy au. warnings: i know nothing about spies, secret criminal organizations, or technology in general. just roll with it.
“I’ll pay you twenty bucks to hum the Mission Impossible theme while I do this,” Stiles muttered, fishing an exacto knife out of his tool belt. He fit it under the very edge of the ID scanner and, with a flick of his wrist, popped it off like a dream.
“You could pay me twenty thousand and I still wouldn’t do it.”
“Spoilsport.” Gently pulling all the wires out into the open was the easy part; it was identifying the right one to snip that was going to be the tricky part. Would it kill all organized crime syndicates to stick to one universal standard?
“Try the yellow wire. Third from the left.”
“Try?” Stiles repeated under his breath. “We’ve been planning this job for weeks and you want me to go in with ‘try’?”
He could practically hear the eye roll on the other end of the earbud. “Cut the wire, agent.”
“Manners,” Stiles snarked, guiding the exacto to the wire in question. It slid through with a gentle snick and the red light on the ID reader went out.
“You’re welcome.”
Stiles gently fit the card reader back into the wall and got to work prying open the door. “I don’t recall saying thank you,” he grunted, heaving the heavy metal back inch by inch.
“I’m sure it was implied.”
“I might be inclined if you—” Another grunt as he wedged his shoulder in the space he’d made, trying to use it to get some leverage against the protesting metal. “—helped me with this door.” Not for the first time Stiles lamented the fact that he was chosen for the field, instead of the literal werewolf. Instead, he was embarrassing himself and his very human muscles while Derek got his nerd on from the comfort of the unmarked van parked a few streets away. Life just wasn’t fair.
Stiles gave one last shove, and the door gave way with an angry screech that he was pretty sure was audible in China.
“Derek?” he hissed.
“Hold on.” Polite as always, his partner.
Stiles waited, every muscle in his body coiled tight and ready to spring. Whether that meant to fight or flee was yet to be determined. At least three times he imagined some noise that would precede his discovery, but he forced down the instinct to panic with a violent mental shove. The government hadn’t spent billions of dollars in training his ass to trust his partner with his life for nothing.
After an excruciating eternity, Derek’s voice filtered in through the earpiece. “You’re clear. Not for lack of effort.”
Stiles couldn’t help grinning. “You say the sweetest things.” False confidence was easy again now that his heart wasn’t jammed halfway up his throat. He rummaged through his toolkit for one of his most versatile gadgets: a retractable rod made of a polymer material developed by Derek himself. It was three hundred times stronger than steel but lighter than any other material of its kind on (or off) the market. It was a beautiful piece of some of the most sophisticated technology to come out of R&D, and it gave Stiles a thrill of childish joy to jam it inelegantly between door and wall to keep his escape route free.
“Speaking of which…” Derek’s voice was that special brand of pained that signaled to Stiles that his trick had hit its mark. “Let’s try to keep to aliases while we’re on the comms, all right?”
Stiles winced. He had called out Derek’s real name in a moment of panic, hadn’t he? “It’s not my fault you rejected my code name suggestions.”
The sound quality was considerably different behind the door than in the hallway. Though he couldn’t see into the space, it swallowed up Stiles’ voice in a way that suggested space… a lot of it. Stiles fumbled for the flashlight at his belt and stepped cautiously inside.
“You’re not calling me Eagle Two.”
“Well I’m not giving you Eagle One, dude. I called dibs.” He clicked on the flashlight and did a slow sweep of the room. Well. Cavern was probably a better word for it. It was big enough to swallow the weak beam of his government-issued flashlight, leaving the ceiling and far walls shrouded in shadows. “Are you seeing this?”
Derek hummed, but gave no further comment.
“Gotta admire their style, though,” Stiles continued conversationally. The whole affair was an ode to vaulted ceilings broken up by stone columns and sloping walls covered in expensive-looking tile. Whoever built it certainly had a flair for the dramatic. To his left was a small bank monitors hooked up to a lowly humming box. Stiles made his way over to it. “I mean, you gotta respect the whole batcave vibe.”
Derek snorted. It was a shock, completely at odds with his usual implacable stiffness. In his entire time working with him, Stiles had never once seen the man so much as crack a smile. And here he was, almost laughing in Stiles’ ear. “It’s an evil lair, agent. Much more Luthor’s speed than Wayne’s.”
Stiles considered the space again. It did bear an uncomfortably close resemblance to Lex Luthor’s underground lair in Superman. Much more so than any adaptation of the Batcave. Point to Derek. “I didn’t know you were a fan of the classics.”
“I’m multifaceted.”
How someone can sound so unbearably smug with only two words, Stiles would never know. “Nerd.”
“Center console. There should be a panel under the monitors.”Definitely smug.
Stiles fumbled around until he found a hidden switch. A previously unseen panel slid forward, revealing three USB slots. Stiles thumbed open the smallest pocket in his tool belt that housed the USB sticks Derek gave him specifically for this point in the job. Just to be sure, he asked, “This the one?”
“Mhm,” Derek confirmed. “You know which one’s first?”
Stiles rolled his eyes. Even if Derek hadn’t labeled them 1 and 2 in obnoxious silver sharpie, the four consecutive run-throughs Derek had forced him to listen to before letting him out of the van would have been enough to hammer the point home.
“Yes, dad,” he muttered, fishing out the first stick. “Just let me know when I need to switch them out.”
“You’ll know,” Derek replied cryptically, which didn’t inspire a whole lot of confidence, but Stiles would be damned if he admitted that out loud.
Stiles watched in interest as the script contained within the flash drive did its thing. It was another of Derek’s projects, something he’d been developing for months with the rest of his little nerd squad back at headquarters. Derek had explained a little of it back in the van. If pressed by a superior, Stiles could explain that the code was meant to create a channel between this server and one controlled by their agency, one that Derek’s team could use to read through and copy every file stored on this server. Anything else had gone over Stiles’ head.
Stiles’ skills were more hands-on and intuition based. Identifying suspicious characters? Convincing them to divulge all of their deepest secrets to him? Finding the fastest way out of any resulting shootouts or capture attempts? That was where he shined the brightest. Developing extremely complicated code to infiltrate evil corporations’ systems, do… stuff while inside them, then exit without a trace? That was Derek’s thing. Stiles was just the sneaky middleman needed to insert peg A into slot B.
The screens flickered constantly between different windows. Lines of code would appear and disappear again too fast for him to read, but based on Derek’s intermittent hums of approval in his ear, Stiles guessed they were doing their job. As the script worked, he kept an ear out for any sign of discovery.
They passed the time together in silence, both of them tense at the thought of the most important part of their mission falling through at the last second. It left Stiles alone with his senses, feeling wrong-footed for the first time since infiltrating the compound earlier in the evening. After a too-long stretch of time, activity on the screens slowed down, then stopped. All the screens were black except for one, which held a single line of green text and a blinking cursor. Stiles leaned forward to read it. When he did, he made a disgusted sound in the back of his throat.
Insert 2nd USB stick, agent. (It has the number 2 on it.)
“Told you you’ll know,” Derek’s voice was a gentle tease in his ear.
“You were so cryptic about it,” Stiles muttered, complying. “I thought it was gonna be something cool.”
“Computers are cool,” Derek replied, then lapsed back into silence.
The second stick took much less time than the first, or maybe it was just the end in sight that made it seem like it was going faster than it actually was. Whichever was true, it felt like no time until a single green line of text was displaying Installation Complete before all the screens went blank.
Derek’s voice was like silk. “Don’t forget to take the USBs with you.”
Stiles rolled his eyes. “Thanks,” he snarked, tucking the USBs back into their pocket and securing it. “What would I do without you?”
“You would be dead seven times over if it weren’t for me.”
“Fair,” Stiles conceded. It was gratifying to return the door and find it hadn’t budged an inch since he’d left it. It was rare in Stiles’ line of work that the things he set down stuck around and waited patiently for him to collect them. Granted, at this point in his career most of the “things” Stiles set aside for later were informants and enemies of the government, so a little bit of disobedience was probably to be expected. But whatever. Details.
Easing the door closed was trickier than forcing it open, Stiles soon realized. Not only was he worried about loudly protesting metal, he wasn’t sure how he was going to stop the whole thing from slamming closed the second he pulled out Derek’s rod.
Heh.
As always, Derek chimed in with the solution at Stiles’ precise moment of need.
“Retract it gradually,” Derek commanded, and Stiles complied. “Good. Now fold your jacket in half and stick it in so it doesn’t slam… Good. Now just pull the jacket out.”
Under Derek’s direction, Stiles eased the nightmare door closed. The jacket muffled the metal-on-metal impact, and when he yanked it out, the door settled back into place with hardly a complaint. Stiles made a mental note to make the whole experience sound a lot cooler in his retelling the next day.
“You’re welcome,” Derek whispered in his ear, voice dripping with self-satisfaction.
“I don’t recall saying thank you,” Stiles replied as he popped the card reader out of the wall again, grinning at the echo of their conversation from earlier. There was a prolonged pause as he bit off a length of electrical tape and carefully brought the snipped ends of the yellow wire together.
“It was implied.”
“Whatever you say, big guy.”
Stiles secured both raw edges of the wire with the tape, then confirmed that the ID reader was once again operational. He carefully tucked the bundle of wires back into their space in the wall, then returned the box to its home for the last time, good as new.
“Ready to get me out of here?”
“Always,” was the curt reply, sounding almost fond to Stiles’ delusional ears. “You’re alone on your floor, but there are two guards stationed outside the elevators to the west, same as when you came in. Your best bet is to go south to avoid them, then take the service stair up to ground level.”
“Got it,” Stiles said, already moving towards his exit. “See you soon, dude.”
“You better.”
Stiles made good on his promise, and was rewarded with a nod of acknowledgement from Derek when he threw open the van door. It was the closest Stiles had ever come to getting an honest-to-god smile from the guy, and it made something warm and gentle unfurl in his chest.
He couldn’t stop grinning the entire drive back to headquarters.
ANDI OH MY GOD you just reblogged a gifset from me and when i saw your url my heart skipped a beat like bRO CONGRATS ON THE URL YOU DESERVE IT SO MUCH AAAAB
THANK YOU SM, ISAAC 🖤 ;; I still can’t believe it, I keep looking at it to make sure it’s there lmao
follow you by bring me the horizon? (for the song thing ^^)
I’m sorry it took me so long to respond to this! Tumblr didn’t give me a notification. But, dude, thank you for introducing to me to this song because I freaking adore it.
This song is definitely Derek finally telling Stiles that he’s his anchor. He basically just puts everything on the table, explaining that Stiles has pretty much been one of the only reason he’s bothered to keep living.
And since they’re totally mates, it would literally be like losing himself if he ever lost Stiles. So, he explains it to Stiles in terms that he can understand, being human.
put a song in my ask and I’ll tell you what I’d write for it.
