Title: run and tell my true love (the boy I love the best)
Fandom: Teen Wolf
Pairing: Derek/Stiles
Rating: G
Length: ~500 words
Summary: Derek dreams of losing things.


Derek dreams of losing things. They're stupid things, meaningless things—one of Laura's shoes, a book that belonged to his mom, his dad's suitcase—and he'll spend the whole dream looking for whatever's missing, up and down narrow staircases, in and out of buildings that are familiar and unfamiliar. He always wakes up before he finds it.

It's not hard to figure out what the dreams are really about, not that he lets himself think about them much. But then he dreams that Stiles is lost, that Derek lost him, and he wanders through miles of woods, through the rooms of his family's house before it burned, through the endless, empty hallways of the high school, searching like a human would, searching like a wolf. When he blinks awake in the dark, sudden and jarring, his throat feels squeezed tight, like a howl wants to claw its way out, and the joints of his fingers ache from clenching them into fists.

There's a flock of crows that roosts in a copse of trees not far from Stiles's house. Derek's spooked them before—he'd heard them chattering and murmuring, and when he crossed some invisible boundary line, they'd all taken off in a noisy rush of caws. It's not dawn yet, and this time when he runs underneath them, they startle into the sky, silent except for the sound of wings against air, the creaking sway of branches.

Derek slips into the shadows outside Stiles's house. He can hear a faucet running, the hum of a microwave, the dull clink of plate and cutlery, muffled like someone's trying to be quiet. He figures the sheriff must have an early shift, and he watches him walk out the front door a few minutes later, double-checking to make sure it's locked behind him in what looks like long-ingrained habit, before he gets into his cruiser and backs out of the driveway. Derek turns his face away so that his eyes don't reflect the beams of the headlights.

He just means to wait until there's some sure sign that Stiles is okay, that he's right where he should be; Derek tucks his hands into his armpits under his jacket, fits his shoulder blade against the side of the house and lets himself lean there . . . and then he's blinking back to awareness again, and the sky is much lighter than it was, and Stiles is walking toward him in a t-shirt and track pants, one big mug cradled close to his chest and another held out to Derek. His feet are bare, and Derek notices the long, delicate bones of them, that one big toe is a little crooked, the way they're curling into the cold, dewy grass, until Stiles huffs and shoves the coffee at him more insistently. Derek has to take it or end up wearing it, and when he does, Stiles smirks, triumphant, says, like it was never any kind of question at all, "Found you."