Title: but we would both surrender
Fandom: Teen Wolf
Rating: PG
Length: ~2400 words
Content notes: Aftermath of emotional trauma.
Author notes: Set post 3.24. Thanks to sheafrotherdon for reading over this for me!
Summary: Derek had never been a fidgeter, but the whole drive over, Stiles could see him out of the corner of his eye: staring out of the window and twisting the ring round and round on his finger.

Derek had never been a fidgeter, but the whole drive over, Stiles could see him out of the corner of his eye, staring out of the window and twisting the ring round and round on his finger. And just to clarify, or reiterate, or whatever you wanted to call it when Stiles was sitting at a stoplight and thinking all of this to himself while Derek sat silently next to him—none of this had been Stiles’ idea.

"Go undercover!" the others had said. "We blew our cover but they don’t know what you two look like!" the others had said. "You can pretend to be new customers and they’ll never figure it out!" the others said.

To which Stiles had pointed out that they were all fucking nuts, that being most of the way to a Master’s degree in Communications didn’t qualify him to deceive a couple of rusalki in their den, and that since he and Derek had been dating a grand total of two months he didn’t think they’d be able to pull off the whole pretend-married thing effectively.

Stiles’ flawless logic had been somewhat undermined by the fact that their pack had never been the model of a healthy democracy.

"Think of it as a fact-finding mission," Lydia had said as she’d printed them off a set of terrifyingly-convincing fake IDs. If she ever decided to give up the whole tenured-by-thirty plan, she’d probably make a fortune in identity theft. "The two of you go in, pretend to be all lovey-dovey—"

Derek wrinkled his nose at that.

"—check that there are no additional wards or regular security systems we’ll need to disarm, make sure there are only two of them, leave. It’s hardly rocket science, Stiles."

"Super easy," Stiles said, looking down at the driver’s licence Lydia handed him. "Because nothing says easy to me like swanning into the lair of some super-powered water zombies with a hate on for single guys and pretending to be happily hitched to Derek." He was Miles P. Ramsbottom, according to the licence, which meant Lydia still hadn’t fully forgiven him for what had gone down last Thanksgiving.

Derek was Jack Stirling, which was patently ridiculous because who would ever believe that a guy called Jack Stirling, who looked like a colleague of James Bond, would ever marry a guy called Miles P. Ramsbottom?

"That’s the spirit," Lydia said in that absent way of hers which meant she’d already mentally dismissed him from her presence. She turned back to her laptop, frowning at the astrological chart she called up. "Remember, we need to know the ward patterns as soon as possible if we’re going to banish them before midnight. Oh, and don’t forget these." Without looking up, she reached into her tote with one hand and pulled out a little baggie which she tossed to Derek. "I had to tell the guy in the pawnshop that my fingers swell up a lot if I have too much salt, and I guessed your size, Derek, but it shouldn’t matter too much for the sake of a couple of hours."

"Really?" Stiles said, looking from his hands to Lydia’s. Even with her nails precisely manicured and painted a wicked shade of red, Lydia’s hands could never be described as anything other than dainty. “Really? Just how much salt did you tell this guy you eat?"

"Stiles," Derek said, digging the rings out of the baggie and dropping one into the palm of Stiles’ hand before brushing past him. "Come on, we need to get going."

"A pawn shop wedding ring," Stiles sighed as he jammed the thing on his finger and headed out the door, Derek already down the stairs. "Always knew I was destined for a grand romance."

Stiles should have known right from then that something was wrong. Derek wasn’t a Chatty Kathy at the best of times, whatever, but the way he didn’t make eye contact with Stiles once as they let themselves out of Lydia’s apartment building and got into Stiles’ car—that was something new. One of the things that had given Stiles the nerve to fist his hand in Derek’s t-shirt and drag him under the mistletoe in the first place had been that every time he’d looked up at Derek lately, Derek had already been looking at him. Derek might not have wanted to say something, but he hadn’t been able to look away.

And now the car was silent and Derek was fidgeting next to him and there was a too-small gold band digging into the ring finger of his left hand, a constant reminder of the two rings sitting in a box on the dresser in his dad’s bedroom five miles west of them. His mom hadn’t wanted to be buried with them, had said she’d leave them for when Stiles met the right one and Stiles—

Stiles hadn’t slept properly in two days because he’d already been pulling an all-nighter on his thesis when Scott had called him and asked him to drop everything and come back from Berkeley right then because something was eating guys’ small intestines. Stiles hadn’t slept and he was trying his best to remember the protection incantations he hadn’t needed so much in the last two years and Derek was still turning that ring round and round on his finger, so what the fuck, Stiles figured. He could take a few moments to be a drama queen, and he jerked the wheel sharply to the right, pulling into the parking lot of a closed-down mattress store and killing the engine.

"What?" he and Derek said at the exact same time.

"No, no way!" Stiles said, "don’t you give me any whats!"

Derek squinted at him. "You just asked me the exact same thing."

"That’s different!" Stiles said, poking him in the shoulder. "Because it’s me asking you."

"Asking me what?"

"What? I’m—" Stiles blinked and paused to regroup; sometimes he really liked the way Derek could throw him off balance, the push and pull that meant things were never boring between them, not after seven years of slowly growing friendship and two months of this. Sometimes, though, it could just be plain old disorienting. "What’s up with you?"

Derek had that terrible, blank look on his face, the one he’d worn so often for the first few years Stiles had known him. "Nothing."

"Oh no, no," Stiles said, "you don’t get to do that to me!"

"Answer your question?"

"Get weird on me! Like, this is a weird thing we’re being asked to do, I get that, and the next time Scott calls me while I’m in the middle of a chapter I’m telling him to just go True Alpha his way out of this shit." Stiles folded his arms. "And I get this is probably not how you wanted to spend your Wednesday evening, pretending to be married to me when so far this, this whatever with us has mostly been conducted over Skype, but again, this wasn’t my idea! And like, so maybe this is weirding you out because you’ve got commitment issues but it’s not like I’m asking you to do anything beyond have my back when we do this and then maybe make out some before I drive back to the city, okay? So whatever you’ve got this built up to in your head, can you just cut it out? Because I don’t like you being mad with me for something I haven’t actually done."

Derek stared at him, then looked down at his lap. He’d stopped twisting the ring around on his finger but now he splayed out the fingers of his left hand; the ring caught the light of a nearby street-lamp. "I’m not—" His voice cracked and he stopped, tongue darting out to wet his lips before he continued. "When she came back, I had dreams. You remember that, right?"

Stiles felt his breath catch. He didn’t have to ask who Derek meant—Kate Argent, trying to claw her way back from the grave, working her way into Derek’s dreams the way Peter had once used Lydia. Those had been a hellish few weeks, Derek less and less able to stay awake and a cure seeming more and more out of reach. Stiles remembered it, all right: sitting on the sofa in his dad’s house, Derek’s head slowly coming to rest against Stiles’ shoulder even as Derek fought sleep desperately, heavy eyelids fluttering and face frowning. He remembered the look of set stubbornness on Lydia’s face, on Braeden’s, as they’d worked their way through stacks of ancient spell books; the set of Scott’s shoulders as he’d paced the hallway, phone pressed to his ear as he conferred with the Argents in France.

Stiles remembered all of that, and he’d known that Derek had dreamed, but he’d never known about what. Stiles had figured that Derek must have spoken about the dreams with the therapist his dad had insisted Derek start seeing before he could get his deputy’s badge, but he’d never wanted to ask too closely. He’d seen Derek’s face when he’d been on the borderline of sleeping and waking, the moments of startled panic, and Stiles knew he could be a thoughtless asshole sometimes but it wasn’t like he tried to be deliberately cruel.

"Yeah, I remember," Stiles said.

"She was trying to confuse me," Derek said softly, "show me things that could have happened or might happen. Some of them were... bad. They were bad. But some of them were happy, like maybe she thought she could get me to give in if I wanted to believe what I was seeing was true."

"Your family?" Stiles asked.

"Sometimes." Derek lifted his head and looked forward through the windscreen, at the vacant store and the parking lot and the tree line beyond them. "Sometimes it was you and me. You were... sometimes you were just listening to me, and sometimes we were back in that pool and you were holding me up. And then sometimes it was you and me, and we were older and you were wearing the ring I gave you and it was good."

Stiles stared at him, felt his jaw drop slightly. "Derek, this was more than six years ago."

Derek dropped his head back against the headrest, closed his eyes and sighed. "And?"

“And? So it was six years ago and you never mentioned this to me, you never once said—"

"What? You wanted me to tell a seventeen-year-old that he was the one person I felt like I could trust? That I’d hallucinated being married to him?"

There, Stiles had to admit Derek might have had a point, but he rolled his eyes anyway. "No, but I feel like somewhere over the last six years or so, you might have said hey, Stiles, so there’s this thing you should know."

"I never wanted you to feel... obligated," Derek said, eyes still closed. He sounded very tired.

Stiles had always wondered what it felt like to boggle, but now he knew. "What, to marry you because of something you saw while you were being mind-whammied by your abusive ex?"

Derek’s jaw worked. "It would never have been an issue, it just threw me a little when Lydia gave me the rings, that was all, okay? I don’t expect anything from you, it just reminded me. That’s all. It’s fine.”

"Oh my god," Stiles said slowly, because everything else he wanted to say just then was really obscene and he felt like Derek might take that the wrong way. "Derek. Look at me."

Derek turned to look at him, and very slowly, telegraphing every movement, Stiles leaned in and kissed him. It was the kind of soft, slow kiss they hadn’t had much time for yet—the kind that spoke of care more than passion, and when Stiles put a hand on Derek’s forearm, he could feel the fine tremors running through him. By the time that Stiles finally pulled back, Derek was breathing like he’d just run for miles and yeah, no way were they going to scope out the rusalki tonight.

“I don’t feel obliged,” Stiles said. “I’m with you because I really like you, dude. Like, an embarrassing amount, please ask my roommate just how much I talked about you even before Christmas because she wanted to ban me mentioning your name. And we’re still right at the beginning of things, so honestly yeah, I’m okay that this”—he waggled the hand with the ring on it—“isn’t for real yet. But hey, note the ‘yet’? You don’t want me to feel forced to do something, I’m down with that, but don’t decide for me what I really do want either. Because remember, I’m the one who kissed you first.”

Derek’s mouth twitched slightly, something that might have been the vaguest hint of a smile. He took a deep breath. “Yeah, I remember that.”

“Right there in Melissa’s kitchen, while she wolf-whistled and Scott told us to get a room,” Stiles said, feeling more than a little smug. As first kisses went, it had been a pretty spectacular example of the genre, he thought—there’d been some face holding, some tongue action, and Stiles had even got to grope Derek’s ass a little. Stiles’ dad had rolled his eyes a lot and sighed on the walk home. It had been totally worth it.

“Stiles—”

And yeah, that was definitely a little smile threatening to peek out there. Stiles was awesome. “C’mon,” he said, leaning in again to kiss Derek briefly before he turned the car back on. “Let’s get out of here. You text Kira, tell her she and Erica can go pretend to be the happy married couple.”

“Oh?” Derek said, tugging his phone out of his pocket. “What are we going to do?”

“I was thinking first a pizza, then a nap,” Stiles said. “And I have my laptop with me, so technically I can get some work here and I don’t have to head back to Berkeley til tomorrow afternoon. You want to go spend some time pretending to be the happy non-married couple that eats pizza together while one half of said couple bitches about the lit review that never ends before falling asleep on the couch?”

“No olives on the pizza,” Derek said, which Stiles took to mean that he was fine with that—and the ring on Derek’s finger mightn’t have been a promise, not yet, but the smile on his face? Stiles was pretty sure that was.