Work Text:
Laura is literally two days from finishing her dissertation when Derek breaks into her apartment. She gets that boundaries are for other people and Derek learned whatever he knows about interpersonal behavior from Animal Planet specials, but she is seriously not fucking around.
“If you don’t immediately leave I am going to do something unfortunate and drastic,” she says before Derek even makes it down the hall. She hears him pause right outside, where the poorly lit hallway dumps into the open space of her living room. Well, it used to be open space, before Laura built herself a nest to finish her dissertation. “Seriously, babe, your hair isn’t going to be safe.”
“Don’t call me babe,” Derek says, but it’s more of a whine.
Normally, Laura finds the occasions that Derek gets sad and cognizant of his own ineptitude hilarious, but: dissertation. Two days.
“Put the hinges back in the door before you leave,” she adds absently, turning back to her laptop. The Word document that she’s using to organize her advisor’s questions is open. There’s just a row of question marks after one of his comments urging her to elaborate, which is never a good sign two days before your final copy is due. She doesn't expect Derek to appreciate how difficult things are for her right now, since Derek is getting his MA in English literature like he wants to be a barista for the rest of his life. Laura is doing science. Cytonuclear inheritance doesn’t just fucking explain itself, unlike Czeslaw Milosz.
When Laura looks up five hours later, her reading glasses slipping down her nose, the piles of journal articles she’d printed out are arranged into slightly neater stacks around her and there’s a pot of tea seven inches from her elbow, freezing cold, along with an empty cup. Derek is sitting on her bed in the adjoining bedroom, reading something with a broken spine. He has his serious business eyebrows on.
“Dinner?” Derek asks without looking up. Laura can’t actually remember the last time she ate, but that’s why she keeps boxes of Luna Bars in her cabinets instead of normal stuff like jars of pasta sauce or cans of soup.
“I’m sure as hell not shelling out for Chinese,” Laura says, which is how Derek ends up paying for enough pad see ew and crispy basil duck to kill a cow. He over-tips the delivery girl, who freezes when he answers the door and looks like she might actually have a myocardial infarction right there on the spot. Laura would tell her that that’s a bad idea—who knows when the last time someone had that carpet cleaned—but she’s trying to get in another paragraph’s worth of work while Derek is distracted.
Derek puts the bag of take-out on the approximate three free square inches of space on the coffee table and says, “Time to unplug, Trinity.”
“Did Stiles make you watch The Matrix again this weekend?” Laura asks. “Are we going to have to have a talk about standing up for yourself?” She takes off her reading glasses and put them down on the lid of her laptop as she closes it, grinning at Derek. He tries really hard to look unperturbed, but there’s a flush hovering high in his cheeks that tells her all she needs to know.
“Shut up and eat,” Derek mutters, shoving a container of pad see ew at her along with a plastic fork. He bitches for a little bit about how she doesn’t have any table manners as she basically pours a tidal wave of noodles and broccoli into her mouth.
“Whatever,” Laura tells him through a mouthful of greens. “My place, my rules. Spine up, princess.”
She knows that Derek needs her usual sort of harsh loving to get up the courage to tell her why he bothered to break into her place in the first place, so she ribs him while they eat about how much of a hermit he’s been lately (“Seriously, Mom called me the other day and asked if I’d seen you. If you don’t watch it, she’s going to call Erin in next and then you’re really going to be fucked”) and offers for the thousandth time to find him a real job (“I’ve got a friend who needs a hand at her nursery during the spring rush, and I think there’s some artful brooding you could get done in the flower beds”) before he breaks down.
“I—asked Stiles to marry me,” he tells his half-decimated container of crispy basil duck.
Laura is normally a very classy lady, but she chokes on a noodle.
“He didn’t believe me,” Derek continues, in a tone that might almost be mournful coming from someone not currently trying to drill a hole in Laura’s coffee table with his eyes.
There’s a brief moment where Laura almost laughs—Derek sometimes needs that, usually to break him out of one of his funks over something stupid and useless like how alone and lame he is—but she swallows it back because she’s his older sister and marginally has her shit more together; she says instead, “What, exactly, did you say to him?”
~
Stiles answers on the fifth ring with a listless, “Hey, Laura.”
“Hey, Stiles,” Laura says slowly. “How’s it going?” She’s never heard a person sound this depressed after a marriage proposal—even a marriage proposal as fundamentally shitty as the one Derek had reluctantly described to her as they devoured the last of their Thai food—excepting one of her college roommates, who had watched her ex-boyfriend propose to his new girlfriend on YouTube and proceeded to go out to the worst dive bar she could find and get alcohol poisoning.
To be honest, if Laura had been asked three days ago to pick the one of her siblings’ relationships that she thought was most likely to succeed far into the future, despite Derek’s magnificent attempts at self-sabotage, Derek and Stiles would’ve been the ones she’d have picked.
Of course, Laura always manages to underestimate how great Derek is at self-sabotage. It’s good to know that if it ever becomes an Olympic event, the honor of their great nation rests easily in his hands.
“Oh,” Stiles says, “you know.” He trails off for a second. “Um. Fine.”
Laura rolls her eyes and then immediately regrets it; the ceiling of her apartment depresses her. “Yeah, fine. Right. You sound peachy.”
“That’s me,” Stiles agrees. “I’m quite a peach.” He sounds like someone’s killed his dog, or told him that Joss Whedon has decided to stop producing media and go live as a hermit on top of a mountain in Southeast Asia.
Laura has the option to keep going on this depressing vein until eventually she coaxes some kind of response out of Stiles that isn’t downtrodden and enervated, but she doesn't actually have time for that; dinner with Derek had ended up taking too much out of her afternoon, even though she’d kicked him out around seven because she couldn’t take his stupid pouting face anymore, and she doesn’t have hours to devote to prying information out of Stiles.
“Out with it,” she says forcefully, and unsurprisingly, Stiles caves.
“Is Derek going to break up with me?” he asks her in a rush, suddenly breathless.
With a sigh, Laura folds down until she can rest her forehead on her laptop—which is still closed, even though her dissertation is due in two days—and spares a moment to hate the fact that she knows her brother so well that she can predict exactly what’s going wrong in his relationship with his boyfriend at any point in time.
“Stiles,” Laura says, probably muffled because of her position but unwilling to change it, “I want you to look deep in your heart and ask yourself: Will Derek ever be capable of breaking up with you?”
On the other end of the line, Stiles breathes in twice, raggedly, and then says, “I’m kind of obnoxious. And Scott says the way that I repossess people’s clothing is annoying.”
Because Laura’s family is unhealthily codependent, she knows that Derek doesn’t find Stiles’ clothes-snatching ways annoying at all. “He likes that you wear his clothes,” she tells Stiles, in case he somehow magically missed this incredibly obvious point some time in the past five years.
“I know that,” Stiles says instantly. “Wait—oh yeah, I totally knew that.”
Laura lifts her forehead three inches and then lets it fall back to her laptop with a soft, metallic thunk. “What else do you know about yourself, Stiles?” Rather than waiting, she adds, “Hint: Derek is stupidly in love with you.”
“Does that mean—Derek isn’t going to break up with me?” Stiles hedges. “I want to cover my bases, y’know, make sure I’m not missing something here.”
“Oh, you’re definitely missing something,” Laura says through her teeth. “And oh, look, I’ve just lost my ability to care about this.” She hangs up, even though she was the one to call Stiles in the first place and it’s her responsibility as Derek’s more competent sister to sort this shit out for him.
Laura turns her head so that she can better look at the bougainvillea hanging in the window. “I did what I could,” she tells it. “The situation is no longer completely hopeless.” The bougainvillea unsurprisingly doesn’t reply, although it does look a little limp, which is also unsurprising because Laura’s been watering her houseplants with cold tea and the occasional IPA since she locked herself into her apartment a week ago, swearing that she’d finish her dissertation before she tasted fresh air again.
If the bougainvillea is judging her for anything, it’s for the fact that Laura always forgets that she doesn’t like IPAs until she’s already bought a six-pack and tried to drink one, but she sighs and caves and reaches for her phone.
“Hey, Stiles,” she says when he answers. “Sorry, I dropped my phone.” She says it unconvincingly enough that if he has a shred of common sense he knows she’s lying, but Stiles is smart enough to know that he needs her advice right now more than he needs to prove how witty he is by alienating her.
“It’s okay,” Stiles decides to say.
There are probably more delicate ways to do this, but unless Laura does something drastic, Derek is going to break into her apartment again tomorrow and she really is going to murder him and use his blood to water her plants. “So, Stiles,” she says. “What are your feelings on the institution of marriage?”
“Wait, hold up, I thought you were just, like, casually sleeping with that guy,” Stiles says. “Did he propose?”
Laura gags on her own spit and has to sit up so she doesn’t drown on her sofa surrounded by a small city of source materials for her unfinished dissertation. “Ugh, no, of course not.” Unlike Derek, who’d earnestly tried to stick to a friends-with-benefits arrangement with Stiles and completely fucked it up and fallen ass over teakettle for him, Laura actually knows how to have casual sex and not have to worry about the other person suddenly springing matrimony on her.
Stiles loudly exhales. “Oh, thank god. I wasn’t really looking forward to Laura Hale: Bridezilla.”
Laura briefly considers hanging up on him again, but that’ll end up hurting her more in the end. “I meant exactly what I asked, Stiles. How do you feel about marriage?”
“What, like, my thoughts on it?” Stiles can’t actually be this stupid, which means that he’s cruising for a bruising with all of this pussyfooting around.
“Stiles,” Laura growls warningly.
“Sorry, sorry,” Stiles says, “I couldn’t resist, it’s been a long day. Whatever, I guess I’m favorable on it. I mean, love’s already a one-shot deal for Stilinskis, so it’s not like getting married is completely infeasible.” He stops speaking for a long minute; Laura can hear his breathing on the other end of the line become increasingly more ragged as he figures out what the hell she’s been trying to get him to realize for the last twenty minutes. “Oh—shit.”
“He’s pretty much the biggest failure on this side of the Mississippi,” Laura agrees.
Stiles sucks in a gasp. “I had no idea—I thought he was, like, telling me we had a shelf life or something—”
“I know, misunderstandings are your relationship’s bread and butter. I feel for you,” Laura tells him, although she really doesn’t. “Are you good now? Can you fix this? If Derek breaks into my apartment again tomorrow I’m going to cut him up into little pieces and mail them to you.”
“Sure,” Stiles says, but he gets cut off halfway through the word in his hurry to hang up on Laura and run off to find the wayward, brooding love of his life.
Laura resolutely turns off her phone, sticks it under the pile of couch cushions that have been stacked on the floor to make room on the couch for three of her ecology statistics textbooks, and opens her laptop. Two days. She can totally do this.