Chapter Text
Derek stares down at his phone, rereading the text exchange for what feels like the twentieth time.
Stiles is coming to New Orleans. To stay with him. For a few weeks, anyway.
Stiles whom he has not seen since Derek left Beacon Hills. Stiles who is no longer a high school kid but a recent college graduate, no longer 17 but 22.
Derek doesn’t quite know how he’s supposed to feel about this. When he told Scott yes, give his number to Stiles, and yes, he’d be glad to put Stiles up for a few weeks while he looked for a job, it had seemed easy enough. Stiles used to be pack, sort of. And it was a favor to Scott. And Derek has the extra bedroom. What was the harm?
Now, looking at Stiles’ texts and his flight information and realizing he has to go pick him up at the airport in a few days, it’s all overwhelming.
*
The night before Stiles flies in, Derek walks down the street to the little dive bar on the corner. They serve food, too, the kind of Cajun comfort food that comes in big batches: seafood gumbo, dripping with shrimp and crab; red beans and rice, spicy and filling; jambalaya made with chicken thighs and Andouille sausages, shiny with grease. On weekends, crawfish etoufee and shrimp creole. In the spring, huge batches of crawfish boiled with red potatoes, corn, so spicy that your fingers burn when you eat it.
Derek asks for a double order of jambalaya with extra French bread and a beer. The waitress is a girl named Katie, a tiny UNO student with a ring through her septum and a cascade of beautiful art deco tattoos that begin around her neck and run down both arms to her fingers, and she doesn’t bat an eyelash at the huge order. Derek is a regular, and he always tips 25%.
“You got it,” she says, flashing him a smile.
The last time Derek had seen Stiles was in Mexico, when he’d fully shifted for the first time. Before the shift, when he’d thought he was dying, the kid had looked back at him in the doorway of the temple, and Derek hadn’t been sure he was going to keep going, wasn’t sure the kid was going to walk away.
If it had been a movie, he wouldn’t have. Wouldn’t have left.
But life wasn’t a movie, and in the end, it hadn’t mattered, anyway. Stiles and Derek should have both known Derek would be fine—if they’d learned anything together, it should have been that Derek never died. Terrible things happened to everyone around him, and a lot of times it was his fault, but Derek always walked away, no matter how dire it looked.
Derek sighs, draining his beer even though it isn't actually going to make him feel any better, and the waitress catches his eye over the bar and gestures that she’ll bring another one. There's a reason he tips her 25%. She is an excellent waitress—and she's quiet, maybe a little sad. Derek likes her.
Tomorrow night, he’s going to pick Stiles up at the airport, and everything he’s been running from for the last five years is going to come crashing back in.
And of course it’s Stiles. Of course. He’d always been the one to push, to pop up, to just fucking be there, when Derek’s own betas might have left him alone.
He snorts, nods a thank you to the waitress when she drops off another beer. His betas. What a fucking nightmare that had been. Two dead, two fled. That was his legacy as an alpha. Giving it up to save Cora was the best decision—in a lifetime of bad ones—that he’d ever made.
And now he shows his throat to Scott fucking McCall, of all people. But thank god, really. Scott lets him remain nominally in the pack, checking in occasionally when he makes his twice-yearly trips back to California to check on his properties and meet his accountant. Most alphas wouldn’t accept a beta who was gone permanently, who showed no interest in moving back or serving the pack. Derek just needs enough of a connection to a pack to evade omega status—even if he really is a lone wolf in everything but name. Scott seems to get it, though. He never pushes, never questions.
He’s a good alpha, in all honesty, better than Derek could ever have been.
“Food okay?” Katie asks, popping by his booth.
Derek looks down at his plate, nearly licked clean. “Always,” he says, offering her a small smile.
“Good,” she says. “You want dessert? There’s Cajun bread pudding back there tonight.”
Derek frowns, considering. The food here is great, but it’s a bar and grill—dessert is not usually an option. He lays a hand on his belly, round and full, just barely brushing his thighs.
She smiles, drops a hand on his shoulder and squeezes as she leans over to take his plate, the kind of casual touch that Derek had to learn to accept as part of Southern hospitality when he moved here. “You won’t regret it. Promise.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Of course I am. Be right back.”
She’s right. The bread pudding doesn’t disappoint. He’d never even had the stuff till he moved to New Orleans, but it’s one of his favorites now. Soaked in whiskey and drowning in butter, made with French bread, it’s sweet and rich and just a little too much—a lot like the city itself.
Derek loves it here. He’d picked New Orleans somewhat at random. After Mexico, he’d just wanted out. Out of Beacon Hills, out of California, out of the supernatural. He hadn’t known a soul in New Orleans, and he’d craved that anonymity. Not that it had lasted long—New Orleans, reeling with all of its eclectic charm, had sucked him in and made a local of him. Now, five years later, he can’t walk down his street without seeing a neighbor he knows, sticking his head into a local business he frequents regularly.
In one aspect of his life, though, he has maintained secrecy in New Orleans. No one knows he’s a werewolf, and Derek likes it that way. He recognizes the irony in all of this. He moves to a city so famous for the supernatural that tourists can take “ghost tours” and buy gris gris bags and voodoo dolls to take home with them, and he—an actual supernatural being—moves here to pretend he isn’t.
Then again, maybe it works because New Orleans just tolerates weirdness real well.
Katie drops the bread pudding off, an enormous bowl of the stuff, and delivers a cup of strong chicory coffee as well, even though he didn’t ask for it. She sets down cream and sugar, too.
Really, she’s a good waitress. You have to be, working in this city—it takes its food industry very, very seriously.
Of course, that’s probably been a contributing factor to the fifty or so pounds he’s gained since he’s lived here.
Derek stirs a generous amount of sugar and cream into his coffee, running a contemplative hand along the curve of his belly. New Orleans is definitely partially to blame; it’s a city that thrives on food, alcohol, and pleasure. No one bats an eyelash at indulgence; vice is a byword. But he’d be lying if he said his getting fat was entirely a matter of geographical circumstance. The other factor—probably a much larger one, to be honest—was that it was comforting. The food itself, sure, but also the way it made him feel, made him look. A little less threatening, a little bit less like a weapon, like a killer.
He still looks strong—he’s a 250 pound, six foot tall werewolf, so yeah. His upper body is still built, even. But he’s also carrying a noticeable belly, a softness at his cheeks and jawline, his pecs, even his upper arms.
He takes the last bite of bread pudding and sits back with a sigh. It just feels good, being this full. The anger that used to be his anchor melts away, and his wolf rests easy like this, warm and sated, lazy.
So if he were the kind of guy who saw a therapist—and hi, not really able to do that when you can’t explain that you’re a werewolf and that pretty much has everything to do with all of your issues—they would probably tell him that as coping mechanisms go, eating himself into a food coma most days is not the healthiest of options. But fuck it. Werewolf healing being what it is, he’s not exactly worrying about diabetes or heart disease. In the grand scheme of Hale Responses to Trauma—which includes Peter’s murderous rampages, Malia’s feral years, and Cora’s hightailing it all the way out of the country—getting kind of fat seems fairly mild, all things considered.
That night, back in his little second story apartment—uptown, on a parade route, with a balcony, it’s truly a prime piece of real estate—he wonders what Stiles will think when he sees Derek, sees how much he’s changed. Derek isn’t ashamed of his size. Most of the time, he’s much more comfortable at this size than he ever was back in Beacon Hills. All the same, his cheeks burn a little at the thought of Stiles seeing him for the first time in so long and seeing the big belly he has now.
The kid had a crush on him back then. It had been painfully obvious. If any of that sentiment is still lingering now, five long years later, Derek figures his new body will probably ruin it.
It’s for the best, of course.
*
By the time the plane lands, Stiles feels like he’s about to vibrate out of his seat. He didn’t take his Adderall—had thought maybe he’d be more likely to sleep during the flight if he didn’t take it. That, as it turned out, had been a massive mistake. He still hadn’t slept, and he’d been about to crawl out of his skin, as well.
The guy sitting beside him looks actually, physically pained by Stiles’ presence.
Stiles makes a valiant effort to quit tapping his hands on his thighs, but it’s probably too little, too late. He can’t help all the twitching; he’s nervous.
Stiles has never been much of a plan ahead kind of guy. He flies by the seat of his pants most of the time, and he’s cool with it, usually. It’s that kind of decision making that got him here, though, getting ready to file off of a plane into a city he’s never seen to crash in the spare room of a werewolf he knew in high school .
At least you can’t say that his life is boring.
He has no idea what to expect from Derek. He’s actually a little shocked that Derek is willing to put him up, in all honesty. When he’d floated the idea of New Orleans to Scott, sort of on a lark, Scott had immediately mentioned Derek. Stiles had known, of course, that Derek lived there, but he had sort of forgotten. He hadn’t seen Derek in years, hadn’t thought of him much beyond The Source of All His Adolescent Longing for most of the interim.
Scott had been a little cagey when he’d given Stiles Derek’s number. “He’s different,” he kept saying, sort of cryptically.
“Bad different?” Stiles had asked, feeling a little concerned. Derek hadn’t been all sunshine and light to begin with.
“No, no. Just—no, he’s good. Just different.”
“Thanks, Scott, real helpful, bud.”
*
Louis Armstrong International Airport already feels remarkably different than Northern California. There’s an actual brass band playing near the luggage turnstile, and all around him are unfamiliar accents and the smell of Cajun food. People—presumably tourists—are wearing Mardi Gras beads even though it’s July and Stiles is pretty certain that Mardi Gras happens in February.
When he walks out the door from Arrivals and into the Louisiana night, he’s hit with a wave of air so still and humid that it’s nearly dripping. It’s almost midnight, but it feels like it must be ninety degrees, and the smell of swamp and cypress is everywhere.
He spots the Camaro easily, though, one familiar thing in a sea of the unknown. It’s idling at the curb, directly in front of a sign that reads “No Parking.” So some things never change, apparently.
Stiles shoulders his backpack and tugs on his suitcase, heading toward the Camaro. The driver’s side door opens, and—wow.
So yeah, Derek is different, all right. About fifty pounds of different. He still looks like him—just sort of like the carnival mirror version of Derek Hale. In the two seconds it takes for Stiles to plaster a smile on his face and raise his hand in a wave, he composes about a dozen different possible texts to Scott, all of which boil down to some version of “When you say different, you mean got seriously fat? Thanks for the heads up, bud.”
Because really? It’s not like it matters that Derek isn’t a walking wall of muscle anymore, but it would have been nice to get that memo before he’s confronted with the knowledge all at once. Especially since Stiles is…uh. Well. Not unfond of big guys. And Scott knows this. Stiles had officially come out toward the end of his freshman year of college, and after that he’d dated a string of lumberjack types with varying degrees of muscle-to-pudge ratio. And Scott met most of them. If he didn’t notice a trend, he’s just fucking blind.
Of course, it’s Scott. He may just not have fucking noticed.
Stiles snaps to attention as Derek walks around the front of the Camaro, and Stiles decides to go for the hug instead of the handshake. It’s probably going to be awkward either way you cut it—how can it not be when you reunite with the object of your sexually frustrated high school affection after half a decade? So if it’s going to be weird regardless, Stiles might as well take the opportunity to get close to Derek, right?
Right—but it’s definitely awkward. Stiles throws his arm out, catches Derek in a bro-hug, which Derek very gingerly returns.
“Hey, man,” Stiles says, pulling back after a moment and stepping back to get another look at Derek. He’s dressed in jeans, boots, a black t-shirt—so pretty much the same wardrobe he’d had in Beacon Hills, even though it’s hot as fuck here. And those jeans. For fuck’s sake, Stiles isn’t sure how Derek got into them, they look tight as hell across his thighs, and they’re fastened under his belly, which that black t-shirt isn’t exactly camouflaging.
“What?” Stiles realizes Derek has been talking, and he’s been gawking at the poor man. The poor, sexy, scruffy fucking man who has an actual beard now, and how the hell is Stiles supposed to live with this man for the next two weeks? It is literally his high school crush, only better, because it’s High School Crush + Newfound Big Guy Kink = Derek Hale. What the fuck is Stiles even supposed to do with this?
Derek gives him a funny look and jerks his head back toward the trunk. “Okay if we put your stuff in the back?”
“Oh. Yeah, sure. Okay.” Before Stiles can move, Derek has reached down and grabbed his suitcase, leaving Stiles to trail along behind him to the back of the Camaro.
Goddamn it. Seriously. All the text messages to Scott. He’s going to blow up his phone. Bros don’t do this to one another.
It’s going to be a long fucking summer.