Teen Wolf Fic: Goal-Oriented
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pollitt told me she'd guessed my story, and I offered her a ficlet in exchange. She asked for Derek learning to play lacrosse. I remembered I am bad at keeping things short.
Many thanks to Pollitt for the prompt, andiulia for beta!
Derek/Stiles. 2500 words. Not explicit.
Derek wasn't anywhere near being an old wolf, and he was bound to be able to learn new tricks.
At the AO3, or here:
Goal-Oriented
Stiles wasn't really surprised when Isaac started tagging along to what had been Stiles and Scott's one-on-one lacrosse practice sessions. Even if Isaac had chosen Derek's side, he and Scott seemed to have a particular wolfy bond. Of course, Stiles also wasn't surprised when he started getting a strong impression of black leather and lurking from the stand of trees that bordered the practice field. He never managed to actually spot Derek standing there watching them, but he figured Derek would pop into visibility at some strategic moment to say something ominous or pee on Isaac's leg and drag him away from Scott by the scruff of his neck.
Derek stayed out of sight, though, so Stiles had no grumpy but excessively-good-looking reprieve from practicing lacrosse with two werewolves, which tended to devolve into Stiles standing around watching Scott and Isaac have superpowers until they remembered he was there. Scott and Isaac would exchange guilty looks and then Stiles would get some pity-passes or do a couple of drills with them before they busted out the wolf skills again. It was adorably and maddeningly like trying to hang out with Scott and Allison--not that Stiles was about to point out that resemblance to Scott--and after a while Stiles had to pass on the madness to someone.
Stiles dawdled by his Jeep one day when Scott and Isaac had to run off to the vet clinic. He waited until they were out of sight and then he laid out the bait, like peanut butter in a mousetrap. "Hey, Derek, I have an idea about the alphas. I think I could--"
"No," Derek said sharply, right behind him, and even though getting Derek to come out of the trees and talk to him was the whole point, Stiles jumped and yelled.
He whirled on Derek while his heart was still racing, arguing on pure reflex in response to being forbidden to do something. "What do you mean, no, I didn't even tell you what--"
"No," Derek repeated, taking another step in so they were nearly nose to nose. "You aren't having anything to do with them. You're not getting involved."
"I'm already--" Stiles said, and then remembered that he didn't actually have any kind of idea or plan for Derek to shoot down; he didn't really know anything about the alphas except that Isaac said they existed, had a creepy-looking symbol, and were around somewhere. Derek freaking out about Stiles wanting to get involved was the most concrete information he'd gotten yet, and while it was kind of entertaining it wasn't actually the point of today's plan.
Derek raised his eyebrows. "You're already what, Stiles."
Stiles grinned and tossed his lacrosse stick at Derek's chest. "Winning."
Derek caught the stick automatically, one-handed. His eyebrows lowered further while Stiles backed away a few steps, letting his old stick dangle from his left hand, so he could throw a ball at Derek without being close enough to just reach out and hand it to him. Derek caught the ball in his free hand and then just stood there and glared.
"So, definitely never played lacrosse then," Stiles said, because it obviously hadn't occurred to Derek to catch the ball with the stick. Well, Derek wasn't anywhere near being an old wolf, and he was bound to be able to learn new tricks.
Derek threw the ball at him--obviously at him, not to him, hard and fast enough to sting like hell if it connected. But Stiles had learned a few things playing lacrosse with werewolves for the last week, so he netted the ball with a foot to spare before it hit his face, skipping backward to absorb the momentum.
"Come on, now you try it," Stiles coaxed, cradling the ball like he was about to throw it.
Derek looked down at his hand, still holding the stick, and then back up at Stiles. "You want to get some more lacrosse practice?"
"I want to teach you to play," Stiles corrected. "So you can stop staring at us like Tiny Tim with your nose pressed to the glass, because clearly you really want to be able to play lacrosse and that's why you just stand there and watch us like a creep instead of washing your hair or fighting alphas or whatever you usually do with your time."
Derek stood very still, his face totally immobile.
Stiles grinned. "Yeah, dude, you're totally busted on the stalking thing. Come on, both hands on your stick, and, yes, that is what she said. Stick jokes are unavoidable, so just feel free to yell out any that occur to you. It's a lacrosse rite of passage."
Derek rolled his eyes and sighed visibly, like he was so above stick jokes, but he swung the stick up into a pretty good approximation of an actual grip.
Stiles didn't hesitate before whipping the ball at him at full human speed, which probably qualified as an easy lob for a werewolf anyway. Derek's motion was almost too fast to follow, but not so fast Stiles couldn't see the awkward, unaccustomed effort of it as he jerked the stick over to net the ball.
"Good," Stiles said. "You've got like fifty percent of lacrosse right there. I assume you'll be a natural at knocking people down and hitting them with sticks."
Derek just bared his teeth and whipped the ball back, about six feet to Stiles's right. Stiles scrambled sideways for it, just barely making the catch at full extension and winding up several feet further from Derek in the process.
"Okay, well, you're going to need some work on accuracy," Stiles said. "But you've pretty much got all the fundamentals except one. Grab another ball and come over here."
Derek hesitated. Stiles could practically see him weighing the dignity of walking away against his curiosity about what lacrosse skill he hadn't learned yet. After several long seconds he shook his head slightly and turned to lean into the Jeep and grab another ball. He carried it in his hand, stick in the other, as he walked over to join Stiles, and then he raised his eyebrows: this had better be good.
Stiles grinned. "This is the best one of all, man. Cradling. We'll start out horizontal..."
Stiles stopped there and waggled his eyebrows, and Derek rolled his eyes but brought his stick up level and dropped the ball into the net.
"And now we start up the nice, steady twisting motion," Stiles said, and started working it with his left hand and letting his right hand just steady the stick. He slid his right hand pointedly up and down the shaft because, again: lacrosse rite of passage. Jerkoff jokes were pretty much unavoidable.
Derek actually frowned in concentration, watching Stiles's hands as he started up a slow, uneven cradling motion that got faster and smoother as he watched.
"And then when your wrist starts getting tired you can switch hands," Stiles explained, doing a quick flip over to cradle left-handed, so his stick mirrored Derek's, still in his right hand.
Derek glanced up at Stiles's face then looked back down at Stiles's hands and then exhaled an irritated breath through his nose, eyebrows pinching in.
"Dude, you're doing fine."
Derek shook his head, staring fixedly at Stiles's hands, and when Stiles flipped back to a right-handed cradle, Derek followed, switching to the left. Stiles could literally keep this up for hours--Finstock pretty regularly forgot to tell them they could stop after starting them on a drill--so he started jogging slowly backward, watching Derek's eyes follow him. Derek actually followed him, too, walking after Stiles in long strides that were just fast enough not to fall behind, cradling like a motherfucker and not even looking at the ball on his own stick.
Stiles grinned, stupidly proud of something that was 99% natural werewolf athleticism but also 1% Stiles getting Derek to pick up a lacrosse stick. Derek's gaze flicked up to Stiles's face and he stopped dead, stick falling still in his hands.
"What, come on, you're awesome, this is great!"
Derek glared at him for a few more seconds and then stalked over to him, getting right up in Stiles's face. "Why are you doing this?"
Stiles blinked, hands still moving automatically. "It keeps the ball in the net, it's a centrifugal force thing--"
Derek grabbed his stick, stopping it so suddenly that Stiles's palms burned against it, still twisting.
"You throw off a dozen tells every minute, but they're all different," Derek huffed. "I don't know what the hell you want. Why are you doing this?"
"Why," Stiles said, and his mouth hung open as possible answers, all equally true and incomplete and unsayable, flitted through his brain: because Scott and Isaac left together and because I want to be the one who can teach somebody something for once and because it got your hand on my stick and balls and I know how much it sucks to watch the other kids play and not be asked to join them and I think we might not all die if we can learn to cooperate and this is a start and I would do way worse things for a chance to stare at you when no one's life is in danger and I want to get some actual practice in and getting you to make a sex joke would be like finding a live passenger pigeon and on and on.
Derek's eyes bored into him and his nostrils flared, like he was trying to smell one true explanation on Stiles.
Stiles shook his head a little. "Do you actually go around just wanting one thing at a time? How can anybody do that?"
Derek's face went kind of blank with surprise, a weirdly open expression, like he did go around just wanting one thing all the time and he hadn't known wanting more things was an option.
It occurred to Stiles that there were times when he only wanted one thing. For months before his mom died, and weeks after, there had been just one wish repeating itself in his head all the time. When he first realized what Scott had become, he'd only wanted one thing. Lots of times since then he'd only wanted one thing: his own survival, his dad's safety, the strength to hold Derek out of the water for one more minute.
He didn't even have to wonder if Derek's whole life was a string of single things he wanted. It was all there in the surprise on Derek's face, even in the stern, annoyed look he got a few seconds later to cover it, to protect himself. That was mostly all Derek did--try to protect himself, and try to protect his pack. He didn't have time to care about looking like an asshole or a stalker or a jerk, he was busy just wanting to keep everyone alive. He'd come out of the woods because Stiles threatened to do something stupid and dangerous, blowing his cover because it was more important to keep even Stiles, who was human and pushy and not part of his pack by any definition, away from the alphas.
Suddenly Stiles did only want one thing: he just wanted Derek not to have to want one thing all the time. And maybe that had been down in the center of everything else he'd wanted when he lured Derek over here, because it made perfect sense all of a sudden. He wanted to make things okay, or at least not as awful, for Derek. He wanted Derek.
Stiles tugged his lacrosse stick out of Derek's hand and tossed it away, and he saw Derek's annoyed look ease up, tilting toward confused. Stiles had exactly enough time to realize that wanting one thing wasn't going to help him much if Derek didn't want him back, and then the corners of Derek's mouth tucked into something that could almost be a smirk.
Stiles couldn't resist crowing at that, throwing his arms up in victory, and Derek took advantage of his undefended position to lunge in and grab hold of him. Stiles grabbed back with his whole body, and by the time his mouth found Derek's he was pretty well on his way to climbing Derek like a tree and Derek had a hand firmly on his ass, holding him up. Derek's mouth opened under his, and the kiss started out awkward, all clashing teeth and smashed lips and tongues everywhere. They backed off a couple of inches and tried again and it went better; they found a rhythm and started working on it.
Derek was moving--Stiles was aware of that mostly in the way Derek's strides rocked Stiles against him, the way their kisses were punctuated on the downbeat--but Stiles didn't realize he had a goal until Derek set him on the hood of his Jeep. Suddenly Stiles was leaning down into the kiss, perched above Derek with his knees pressing in against Derek's ribs. They went on a while longer, all spit-slick noises and Derek's thumbs rubbing circles through Stiles's t-shirt, Stiles's fingers in Derek's hair, and then Derek pulled back and took a deep, shuddering breath.
Stiles kept still, settling his hands on Derek's shoulders and just watching him; Derek turned his face away. Stiles followed his sightline automatically, and while there was nothing there to see, at least with human eyes, it made Stiles aware of how stupidly public this was, in the middle of the afternoon on a lacrosse field in the park. They were down a winding trail, where people mostly didn't come to practice, but it still probably wasn't a great place for this.
"We should go," Derek said, tightening his grip on Stiles for a second, as if Stiles could have doubted that Derek meant together.
"Yeah," Stiles agreed. "Could you, uh...."
Derek looked up at him, eyebrows raised, and Stiles couldn't help a wide, stupid grin, almost laughing before he got the words out as he nodded back toward the field.
"Could you just grab my stick, first?"
Derek's eyes closed like he was in pain, and he shook his head as he turned away.
"Don't worry," Stiles said cheerfully, not bothering to pretend he was doing anything but watching Derek's ass as Derek walked over to the dropped lacrosse stick and bent over to pick it up. "It's perfectly normal to also want to gag me."
Derek straightened up with the lacrosse stick in one hand and the ball in the other, and as he sauntered back to Stiles he tossed the ball in the air, his eyes moving speculatively from it to Stiles's mouth.
Stiles's laugh was a mixture of delight and shock, and he could barely coordinate his arms to shove at Derek when he came over and pressed the ball against Stiles's wide-open mouth.
"That counts," Stiles gasped, when he'd closed one hand on Derek's wrist and turned his head aside enough to speak. "That totally counts. You made a sex joke about lacrosse equipment, I fucking win at life."
tw_holidays reveal, pollitt told me she'd guessed my story, and I offered her a ficlet in exchange. She asked for Derek learning to play lacrosse. I remembered I am bad at keeping things short. Many thanks to Pollitt for the prompt, and
iulia for beta!Derek/Stiles. 2500 words. Not explicit.
Derek wasn't anywhere near being an old wolf, and he was bound to be able to learn new tricks.
At the AO3, or here:
Goal-Oriented
Stiles wasn't really surprised when Isaac started tagging along to what had been Stiles and Scott's one-on-one lacrosse practice sessions. Even if Isaac had chosen Derek's side, he and Scott seemed to have a particular wolfy bond. Of course, Stiles also wasn't surprised when he started getting a strong impression of black leather and lurking from the stand of trees that bordered the practice field. He never managed to actually spot Derek standing there watching them, but he figured Derek would pop into visibility at some strategic moment to say something ominous or pee on Isaac's leg and drag him away from Scott by the scruff of his neck.
Derek stayed out of sight, though, so Stiles had no grumpy but excessively-good-looking reprieve from practicing lacrosse with two werewolves, which tended to devolve into Stiles standing around watching Scott and Isaac have superpowers until they remembered he was there. Scott and Isaac would exchange guilty looks and then Stiles would get some pity-passes or do a couple of drills with them before they busted out the wolf skills again. It was adorably and maddeningly like trying to hang out with Scott and Allison--not that Stiles was about to point out that resemblance to Scott--and after a while Stiles had to pass on the madness to someone.
Stiles dawdled by his Jeep one day when Scott and Isaac had to run off to the vet clinic. He waited until they were out of sight and then he laid out the bait, like peanut butter in a mousetrap. "Hey, Derek, I have an idea about the alphas. I think I could--"
"No," Derek said sharply, right behind him, and even though getting Derek to come out of the trees and talk to him was the whole point, Stiles jumped and yelled.
He whirled on Derek while his heart was still racing, arguing on pure reflex in response to being forbidden to do something. "What do you mean, no, I didn't even tell you what--"
"No," Derek repeated, taking another step in so they were nearly nose to nose. "You aren't having anything to do with them. You're not getting involved."
"I'm already--" Stiles said, and then remembered that he didn't actually have any kind of idea or plan for Derek to shoot down; he didn't really know anything about the alphas except that Isaac said they existed, had a creepy-looking symbol, and were around somewhere. Derek freaking out about Stiles wanting to get involved was the most concrete information he'd gotten yet, and while it was kind of entertaining it wasn't actually the point of today's plan.
Derek raised his eyebrows. "You're already what, Stiles."
Stiles grinned and tossed his lacrosse stick at Derek's chest. "Winning."
Derek caught the stick automatically, one-handed. His eyebrows lowered further while Stiles backed away a few steps, letting his old stick dangle from his left hand, so he could throw a ball at Derek without being close enough to just reach out and hand it to him. Derek caught the ball in his free hand and then just stood there and glared.
"So, definitely never played lacrosse then," Stiles said, because it obviously hadn't occurred to Derek to catch the ball with the stick. Well, Derek wasn't anywhere near being an old wolf, and he was bound to be able to learn new tricks.
Derek threw the ball at him--obviously at him, not to him, hard and fast enough to sting like hell if it connected. But Stiles had learned a few things playing lacrosse with werewolves for the last week, so he netted the ball with a foot to spare before it hit his face, skipping backward to absorb the momentum.
"Come on, now you try it," Stiles coaxed, cradling the ball like he was about to throw it.
Derek looked down at his hand, still holding the stick, and then back up at Stiles. "You want to get some more lacrosse practice?"
"I want to teach you to play," Stiles corrected. "So you can stop staring at us like Tiny Tim with your nose pressed to the glass, because clearly you really want to be able to play lacrosse and that's why you just stand there and watch us like a creep instead of washing your hair or fighting alphas or whatever you usually do with your time."
Derek stood very still, his face totally immobile.
Stiles grinned. "Yeah, dude, you're totally busted on the stalking thing. Come on, both hands on your stick, and, yes, that is what she said. Stick jokes are unavoidable, so just feel free to yell out any that occur to you. It's a lacrosse rite of passage."
Derek rolled his eyes and sighed visibly, like he was so above stick jokes, but he swung the stick up into a pretty good approximation of an actual grip.
Stiles didn't hesitate before whipping the ball at him at full human speed, which probably qualified as an easy lob for a werewolf anyway. Derek's motion was almost too fast to follow, but not so fast Stiles couldn't see the awkward, unaccustomed effort of it as he jerked the stick over to net the ball.
"Good," Stiles said. "You've got like fifty percent of lacrosse right there. I assume you'll be a natural at knocking people down and hitting them with sticks."
Derek just bared his teeth and whipped the ball back, about six feet to Stiles's right. Stiles scrambled sideways for it, just barely making the catch at full extension and winding up several feet further from Derek in the process.
"Okay, well, you're going to need some work on accuracy," Stiles said. "But you've pretty much got all the fundamentals except one. Grab another ball and come over here."
Derek hesitated. Stiles could practically see him weighing the dignity of walking away against his curiosity about what lacrosse skill he hadn't learned yet. After several long seconds he shook his head slightly and turned to lean into the Jeep and grab another ball. He carried it in his hand, stick in the other, as he walked over to join Stiles, and then he raised his eyebrows: this had better be good.
Stiles grinned. "This is the best one of all, man. Cradling. We'll start out horizontal..."
Stiles stopped there and waggled his eyebrows, and Derek rolled his eyes but brought his stick up level and dropped the ball into the net.
"And now we start up the nice, steady twisting motion," Stiles said, and started working it with his left hand and letting his right hand just steady the stick. He slid his right hand pointedly up and down the shaft because, again: lacrosse rite of passage. Jerkoff jokes were pretty much unavoidable.
Derek actually frowned in concentration, watching Stiles's hands as he started up a slow, uneven cradling motion that got faster and smoother as he watched.
"And then when your wrist starts getting tired you can switch hands," Stiles explained, doing a quick flip over to cradle left-handed, so his stick mirrored Derek's, still in his right hand.
Derek glanced up at Stiles's face then looked back down at Stiles's hands and then exhaled an irritated breath through his nose, eyebrows pinching in.
"Dude, you're doing fine."
Derek shook his head, staring fixedly at Stiles's hands, and when Stiles flipped back to a right-handed cradle, Derek followed, switching to the left. Stiles could literally keep this up for hours--Finstock pretty regularly forgot to tell them they could stop after starting them on a drill--so he started jogging slowly backward, watching Derek's eyes follow him. Derek actually followed him, too, walking after Stiles in long strides that were just fast enough not to fall behind, cradling like a motherfucker and not even looking at the ball on his own stick.
Stiles grinned, stupidly proud of something that was 99% natural werewolf athleticism but also 1% Stiles getting Derek to pick up a lacrosse stick. Derek's gaze flicked up to Stiles's face and he stopped dead, stick falling still in his hands.
"What, come on, you're awesome, this is great!"
Derek glared at him for a few more seconds and then stalked over to him, getting right up in Stiles's face. "Why are you doing this?"
Stiles blinked, hands still moving automatically. "It keeps the ball in the net, it's a centrifugal force thing--"
Derek grabbed his stick, stopping it so suddenly that Stiles's palms burned against it, still twisting.
"You throw off a dozen tells every minute, but they're all different," Derek huffed. "I don't know what the hell you want. Why are you doing this?"
"Why," Stiles said, and his mouth hung open as possible answers, all equally true and incomplete and unsayable, flitted through his brain: because Scott and Isaac left together and because I want to be the one who can teach somebody something for once and because it got your hand on my stick and balls and I know how much it sucks to watch the other kids play and not be asked to join them and I think we might not all die if we can learn to cooperate and this is a start and I would do way worse things for a chance to stare at you when no one's life is in danger and I want to get some actual practice in and getting you to make a sex joke would be like finding a live passenger pigeon and on and on.
Derek's eyes bored into him and his nostrils flared, like he was trying to smell one true explanation on Stiles.
Stiles shook his head a little. "Do you actually go around just wanting one thing at a time? How can anybody do that?"
Derek's face went kind of blank with surprise, a weirdly open expression, like he did go around just wanting one thing all the time and he hadn't known wanting more things was an option.
It occurred to Stiles that there were times when he only wanted one thing. For months before his mom died, and weeks after, there had been just one wish repeating itself in his head all the time. When he first realized what Scott had become, he'd only wanted one thing. Lots of times since then he'd only wanted one thing: his own survival, his dad's safety, the strength to hold Derek out of the water for one more minute.
He didn't even have to wonder if Derek's whole life was a string of single things he wanted. It was all there in the surprise on Derek's face, even in the stern, annoyed look he got a few seconds later to cover it, to protect himself. That was mostly all Derek did--try to protect himself, and try to protect his pack. He didn't have time to care about looking like an asshole or a stalker or a jerk, he was busy just wanting to keep everyone alive. He'd come out of the woods because Stiles threatened to do something stupid and dangerous, blowing his cover because it was more important to keep even Stiles, who was human and pushy and not part of his pack by any definition, away from the alphas.
Suddenly Stiles did only want one thing: he just wanted Derek not to have to want one thing all the time. And maybe that had been down in the center of everything else he'd wanted when he lured Derek over here, because it made perfect sense all of a sudden. He wanted to make things okay, or at least not as awful, for Derek. He wanted Derek.
Stiles tugged his lacrosse stick out of Derek's hand and tossed it away, and he saw Derek's annoyed look ease up, tilting toward confused. Stiles had exactly enough time to realize that wanting one thing wasn't going to help him much if Derek didn't want him back, and then the corners of Derek's mouth tucked into something that could almost be a smirk.
Stiles couldn't resist crowing at that, throwing his arms up in victory, and Derek took advantage of his undefended position to lunge in and grab hold of him. Stiles grabbed back with his whole body, and by the time his mouth found Derek's he was pretty well on his way to climbing Derek like a tree and Derek had a hand firmly on his ass, holding him up. Derek's mouth opened under his, and the kiss started out awkward, all clashing teeth and smashed lips and tongues everywhere. They backed off a couple of inches and tried again and it went better; they found a rhythm and started working on it.
Derek was moving--Stiles was aware of that mostly in the way Derek's strides rocked Stiles against him, the way their kisses were punctuated on the downbeat--but Stiles didn't realize he had a goal until Derek set him on the hood of his Jeep. Suddenly Stiles was leaning down into the kiss, perched above Derek with his knees pressing in against Derek's ribs. They went on a while longer, all spit-slick noises and Derek's thumbs rubbing circles through Stiles's t-shirt, Stiles's fingers in Derek's hair, and then Derek pulled back and took a deep, shuddering breath.
Stiles kept still, settling his hands on Derek's shoulders and just watching him; Derek turned his face away. Stiles followed his sightline automatically, and while there was nothing there to see, at least with human eyes, it made Stiles aware of how stupidly public this was, in the middle of the afternoon on a lacrosse field in the park. They were down a winding trail, where people mostly didn't come to practice, but it still probably wasn't a great place for this.
"We should go," Derek said, tightening his grip on Stiles for a second, as if Stiles could have doubted that Derek meant together.
"Yeah," Stiles agreed. "Could you, uh...."
Derek looked up at him, eyebrows raised, and Stiles couldn't help a wide, stupid grin, almost laughing before he got the words out as he nodded back toward the field.
"Could you just grab my stick, first?"
Derek's eyes closed like he was in pain, and he shook his head as he turned away.
"Don't worry," Stiles said cheerfully, not bothering to pretend he was doing anything but watching Derek's ass as Derek walked over to the dropped lacrosse stick and bent over to pick it up. "It's perfectly normal to also want to gag me."
Derek straightened up with the lacrosse stick in one hand and the ball in the other, and as he sauntered back to Stiles he tossed the ball in the air, his eyes moving speculatively from it to Stiles's mouth.
Stiles's laugh was a mixture of delight and shock, and he could barely coordinate his arms to shove at Derek when he came over and pressed the ball against Stiles's wide-open mouth.
"That counts," Stiles gasped, when he'd closed one hand on Derek's wrist and turned his head aside enough to speak. "That totally counts. You made a sex joke about lacrosse equipment, I fucking win at life."
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I LOVE THIS. God so good (and nnguh, that kiss. I, too, have a big, stupid grin on my face :)
Thank you!
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Thank you back! This was a ton of fun to write, and I wouldn't have without your prompt. <3
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