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The station’s quiet, peaceful—typical of a small town—and Stiles is the complete opposite. He sticks out like a sore thumb, he knows, pacing around for the train to get here already, though probably not as much as the two highschoolers that’re going around bothering the waiting passengers.
They look a bit out of their mind, honestly. They sound like it too. He feels bad, but he’s waiting for his train and stranger danger, so he mostly ignores them along with the glances and stares he feels on him.
Except for one.
There’s one other person who sticks out like a sore thumb. A dark-haired man a little older than Stiles, muscular and fit but not a bodybuilding-obsessed kind of way. He’s not pacing around in circles like Stiles is; in fact, he’s just standing there leaning against a pillar arms crossed.
But he radiates this impenetrable energy that draws stares as well despite doing a whole lot of nothing.
Well, that and the fact that he does look like he could be a model. In a leather jacket biker kind of way.
Stiles jolts his gaze away when the man glances at him again, then peeks over again. The same cycle loops a few times. He both wishes this train would get here already and not at all. He kind of wants to stare at the handsome stranger for a little longer.
There’s something about him that draws him in. His features are sharp cliffs, his eyes are crystal clear forests. His muscles are hills and his breaths are valleys.
Firm yet gentle—that’s the atmosphere Stiles gets from him.
It calms the itch under his skin a bit.
His heart starts pounding though, when he peeks over once only to find the stranger still staring at him. Full-on staring. And he’s straightening, walking over, and Stiles wipes his clammy hands on his jeans.
“Waiting for the train?” asks Stiles with a greeting nod, only to realize after the fact that this was a train station—of course they’re all waiting for the train.
The stranger doesn’t snark, thankfully. “Mm, Beacon Hills.”
“Yeah, same,” says Stiles. Cringes at himself. “Obviously. Since it’s the only train left. Yeah.”
He earns himself an amused snort for his awkwardness, which is a huge win, especially since the faint smile softening the man’s contours gets Stiles’ heart all aflutter. He sees now up close that the man’s eyes really are crystal clear forest, jade green foliage flecked with gold sunrays around rings of brown closer to the pupils.
“Oh, I’m Stiles, by the way,” he adds. It’d suck if he didn’t at least get the man’s name. Hopefully his phone number too, though that could be found as long as he knows the man’s name.
Not that he would do that. Because that would be creepy.
“Derek,” the man replies. “Derek Hale.”
Stiles’ nose scrunches. “Sounds familiar….”
“I would remember if I met you before,” says Derek with a hint of a smirk(?)—
Oh, is he flirting? Can he take this as flirting?
Stiles licks his lips, fiddles with his keyfob like he’s been doing this whole time, because that train is slow as shit and patience has never been his strong suit.
"Would remember me walking a hole through the floor?” Stiles jokes back. (He never said he knows how to flirt.)
Derek’s eyes search his, curious. “Something like that. You do feel familiar too, though….”
He doesn’t break eye contact and neither does Stiles, until it begins feeling a little too intimate, their bodies gravitating closer and closer, a mere inch apart before they both clear their throats, blink. Look away.
But they don’t step back.
It’s as if the spell will break if they do, and Stiles sure as hell doesn’t want it to.
The fact that Derek doesn’t want it to either makes him out of breath.
That’s Stiles’ excuse for sounding breathless, anyway, when he blurts, “Your number.”
Not the smoothest, but Derek’s eyes twinkle at him and that’s all that matters. Derek just holds a hand out and Stiles passes him his phone—Derek’s brows furrow though, which has Stiles’ gut twisting.
“You can just type it in if you can’t send a text,” suggests Stiles, mostly out of hope that that’s the issue. “The cell service here is shit.”
Derek pauses, then shows him the screen. “I’m already in here.”
Stiles blinks, squints—he’s right. His number’s typed into a new message field and a contact shows up in the dropdown below it as ‘🍋🐺’.
“Uh.” The contact looks familiar yet not at all. “I dunno, um. I mean. I’m not a stalker, swear. I—”
“What’s your number?” Derek asks him, and when he types it into his own phone, he apparently also has Stiles as a contact.
Named ‘mi vida’.
He tries to hide his screen but Stiles sees it in the nick of time. It’s kind of cute actually, the way his jaw twitches in embarrassment.
Stiles doesn’t know how he knows that’s what that specific jaw twitch means. Maybe he’s gotten better at reading people’s microexpressions than he thought.
“Well,” says Stiles. “I don’t mind. If you’re stalking me.”
“I’m not stalking you,” hisses Derek. He looks confused and stressed and also hot running a hand through his hair. “I don’t— I don’t know—”
“You have me in your phone as ‘my life’,” Stiles tells him quite matter-of-fact. “Kinda gives you stalker points.”
“So do you! As…”—Derek waves his hand at the emojis with a grimace—“that. I don’t get the lemon part.”
Stiles muses on it for a second. “Lemon…. Maybe you like lemons? Or I like lemons? It does also mean sex in fanfiction, so—” He cuts off belatedly at that, and Derek just stares at him like he’s stupid.
“Look who’s winning the stalker points now,” quips Derek, voice dry.
Stiles makes a face. “Mm, I don’t know if that wins over ‘my life’ in your mother tongue—”
“Okay, stop,” Derek cuts in with a sigh. “Clearly something else is going on here….” He trails off and his gaze hones in on Stiles’ keyfob.
“What?” asks Stiles as Derek reaches in his own pockets to pull out—
Oh.
Matching keychains. A miniature baseball bat and a cute wolf plush.
Stiles snorts—it suits Derek, which Derek apparently doesn’t agree with. He finds himself looking even closer at Derek now though, as does Derek. They’re swaying closer in; Derek’s running his fingers down Stiles’ wrist and Stiles is closing his eyes, breathing in that forest, musk, and—what’s that last note? He recognizes it, he knows he does.
“You have a mole here,” says Derek, pointing at a spot on Stiles’ inner elbow that’s covered by flannel. “And here. Here. Here.”
He points out locations over Stiles’ chest down his torso like he’s mapping constellations he’s memorized by heart.
Stiles sort of just stares at him—(it’s not like he knows where his moles are, nor did he know he had so many to begin with)— until Derek stares at him meaningfully, waiting. “Check,” Derek demands.
“Uh. R-Right.”
He lifts his shirt and lo and behold, Derek got each one exactly right.
The question is what does it mean? He’s reeling, honestly, because how the fuck does a hot stranger-not-stranger that he’s felt a pull towards this whole time know exactly where all his moles on his chest are—
“I know the ones elsewhere too,” Derek tells him. Murmurs, growls. His irises flash scarlet, and Stiles’ body is clenching in parts that are much too telling.
“I know your scent,” continues Derek. He leans closer in, arm next to Stiles’ head on the pillar as he presses Stiles against it. “I know you. I know every part of y—”
“That’s it!” Stiles bursts out, hands tap-tap-tapping Derek’s shoulders in an epiphany. “Your scent! It’s forest, musk, leather, and a mix of soap and detergent! Old Spice soap. My soap and my detergent. You’re m—”
“Mine,” Derek finishes for him in a surge towards each other, lips meeting, returning, sparking—
Home, at last.
He’s home. This taste, this scent. He knows these hills and valleys, maps ingrained into him like reflex as he runs his hands over them. This warmth, safe and steady and yet blazing; Derek’s inhaling him in like it’s his last breath, Stiles is clutching his head close and tight like he’ll slip through his fingers, and—
“Seriously? You’re kidding me.”
Stiles recognizes the voice as one of the highschoolers except he knows it now; but Derek ignores them, nips Stiles’ lip, so Stiles just hums an appreciative sigh back that’s immediately swallowed.
“Hey!” A snap of the fingers. “Really? Don’t pretend like you don’t remember me now!”
Derek sucks Stiles’ tongue one last time before growling a ‘tsk’ that makes Stiles laugh as he finally draws away. He flicks an annoyed glance at the tall curly-haired teen standing there in exasperated shock while the younger dark-haired one next to him just gapes. “What,” grumbles Derek as he noses Stiles’ necks, lips leaving marks and hands tugging Stiles’ waist in.
Isaac rolls his eyes, throws his hands up in the air. “What do you mean, ‘what’? We’re trapped in some weird station full of people who don’t exist anymore and forgot everything! We don’t exist anymore. And you two forgot everything too! That’s ‘what'!”
Stiles revels in the sensation of Derek around him, against his skin. Plays with his hair as Derek scents and marks his neck until he’s satisfied and straightens. He doesn’t remove his hands from Stiles though.
“Then it doesn’t matter if we get a few minutes to ourselves, does it,” says Derek. “Not like you did anything useful and found an escape route.”
Isaac stares at him in wordless disbelief, mimes strangling him, and Stiles laughs again, which lands him on the end of Isaac’s mimed strangling as well.
“Wait, how did you two snap out of it?” asks Corey—Stiles wonders how the two of them got sent here together in the first place. “You actually remember everything now? You were deep in, just like everyone else here. We couldn’t talk to you or anyone, we were about to give up on it honestly. Is there a trick to it or something? Maybe we can, for the others—”
“Definitely not,” mutters Isaac.
Stiles shrugs. “No trick. But—” He shares a look at Derek, those soft forest eyes and well-traveled cliffs.
“We’ll always remember each other,” Derek finishes for him, “mi vida.” It’s quiet, spoken like a promise, and Stiles smiles.
Corey’s silent, but his eyes are full of wonder.
Derek scans the station, gaze shifting to where Stiles is looking—the tunnel. “Have you checked that out?” he asks with a nod in that direction.
“Not yet.” Isaac grimaces. “Feels dangerous.”
A sigh. Derek doesn’t roll his eyes but it’s a close thing as he and Stiles hop off the platform and start walking down the tracks. “Time for us to do everything, as always,” he mutters.
“I heard that,” Isaac says from behind them.
“You mean time for me to do everything and time for you to be a sourwolf,” says Stiles with a snort while scuffing lines in the dirt every so often, just in case.
Derek glances at him, amused. “‘Sexwolf’, you mean.”
Isaac groans in the back as Stiles lets out a surprised laugh. “You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”
“I’ll be anything you want me to be,” Derek whispers not so quietly in his ear.
Shivers down Stiles’ spine, warm ears. He squeezes Derek’s hand, laughs, kiss his cheek.
“Let’s get out of here already then,” he whispers back not so quietly.
Isaac’s exasperated “oh my god” echoes off the tunnel walls behind them as Derek hums in agreement.