A/N: Okay so I wrote two completely unrelated oneshots with 24 hours, do not get used to this strange burst of productivity, I can almost guarantee it will not last. But since I did a Merthur one, I felt the need to do a Sterek one too. =D
The started off like any other, just a regular morning: press snooze on the alarm four times for maximum laziness, roll out of bed for a shower cold enough to make him mostly conscious, throw on clothes (bless deputy uniforms for requiring no thought at all), stuff a banana in his mouth on the way out the door, spend ten minutes getting the jeep to actually start, and make it to work with two minutes to spare.
It was tradition by now for Stiles to get lost in the parking lot, even though he had only been working at the Grady County Sheriff Station for two months; it was disorientingly similar to the Beacon Hills station that Stiles was so familiar with, only with the station itself on the other side of the lot from the spaces reserved for deputies. He always went the wrong way out of habit—a relic from all those years hijacking a deputy space when he visited his dad at work—and got halfway toward the street before he remembered he was going the wrong way.
He could have just stayed in Beacon Hills and saved himself the consistent confusion. He was a very promising police academy graduate and BHPD would've been happy to have him. But that would have meant working directly under his father and, as much as Stiles loved the man, he did not want to be beholden to him career-wise. He had enough lowkey problems with authority without the added bonus of latent childhood rebellion making things spicy.
Grady County was just a few hours downstate and the force there had been eager to snatch him up when he put in his application. The station was on the large side of average, provided opportunity for advancement that didn't involve one day pushing his dad out of his job, and had plenty of new faces that had never babysat him as a kid.
Stiles came within sight of the station's front door and was greeted with his favorite of those new faces. Contrary to Scott's teasing, Deputy Derek Hale's flawless face was not the deciding factor in Stiles taking this job over the one in Beacon Hills. It was just a bonus. A very, very attractive bonus.
Derek was leaning against the side of the building, one foot propped up against the wall. Stiles thought he looked somewhere between bored and annoyed with, honestly, with that guy's poker face he could just as well be doing an internal jig of joy and no one would ever know. But considering there was a small crowd around the door and yet everyone was still outside in the unfortunate mid-summer heat, Stiles thought it was safe to assume there was no joy-jigging going on at the current time.
Stiles pushed his way through his coworkers to see what the hold-up was and found Deputy Ingol with her hand hooked into the door handle, leaning back with her full weight—a whopping 145lbs, at most, not the most efficient counterweight anyway—and looking thoroughly put out that the door wasn't budging. Sheriff Lockley had his head in his hands.
"Psst," Stiles whispered to the guy next to him whose name he hadn't managed to learn just yet. "What's going on?"
"The Sheriff locked his keys in the building last night," the guy said back, not bothering to whisper. If anything he talked louder and, judging by the way the Sheriff lifted his head to glare, he did it intentionally.
Stiles raised an eyebrow; it was probably an overly judgmental expression but, hey, he was always a little salty in the mornings. "Seriously?" he asked. "We're locked out of the station? The Sheriff locked us out of the station? That's a thing that's happening right now?"
"The only other person with a key is—"
"No, you're not getting the irony here," Stiles interrupted, fighting a losing battle against a shit-eating grin. "Sheriff Lockley. He locked us out. It's a real life pun and it is absolutely worth the inconvenience."
Stiles heard a distinct snort of amusement from somewhere behind him, but no one was laughing when he turned to look. He thought there might be a hint of a smile on Derek's face though, if he wasn't imagining it, and he mentally patted himself on the back; it wasn't easy to make Derek Hale laugh and there was a chalkboard in the break room with a running tally of the people who managed it. Stiles had three marks on there so far, more than most of the people who had worked with the man for a year or more, and he was very smug about it.
"Stilinski, if you're gonna make jokes, then you can be the one to call the locksmith," Lockley said, frowning fit to give Grumpy Cat a run for his money.
Stiles rolled his eyes and pushed through to the front of the little crowd. "I don't think that'll be necessary," he said, hip-checking Ingol to get her out of the way so he could kneel down in front of the door. "You got a bobby pin in that big bun of yours?" he asked her. She made a face at him but dug around in her hair to pull one free anyway and handed it over. "Gimme like three minutes and then be ready to disarm the system, don't stand around gaping at my skill until the alarm goes off."
Stiles ignored the vaguely scandalized muttering of his coworkers as he unbent the bobby pin, fit it into the lock, and began poking around with it, looking for the right angle and waiting for the tumblrs to give way. It took him a good few minutes of concerted effort, certainly longer than it would've taken him back in his lockpicking heyday, but he still managed to get the door open.
Ingol immediately pushed past him to enter the Sonitrol code and the rest of the staff immediately filed in after her, leaving Stiles holding the door open and waiting for the parade to pass. Several of the other deputies gave him funny looks as they passed, judgy and suspicious-like, but Stiles just smiled in that bright and oh-so-innocent way that Scott had once told him was completely counterproductive.
Sheriff Lockley stopped in front of him though, arms crossed. "Son, do we need to have a talk?" he asked sternly.
"Uh, no, sir," Stiles said, snapping to attention. "Not at all, sir, of course not."
Lockley narrowed his eyes. "Should I be concerned that you're so good at that?"
Stiles shook his head, trying to be more aggressively innocent. "Sir, no, sir. I just like to be prepared for every eventuality, sir." He barked each sir like privates did to drill sergeants in the movies, because he had no sense of propriety and no brain-to-mouth filter when he was nervous.
It's not like he'd ever broken into somewhere really illegal as a teenager. Well, okay, maybe he did, but he never got caught doing it and he never, like, did any damage or stole anything he didn't replace afterward. More than anything, he just liked having unusual skills and lockpicking had seemed like a good one to have. The youtube videos had been very helpful, but he had needed practical experience before he could formally refer to himself as a lockpick. The records room at the high school had just been practice, and no one had ever proven that the evidence locker in the BHPD station had been him.
Lockley wrinkled his nose at Stiles' Full Metal Jacket impression—not an unusual response, to be honest—but he was already too used to Stiles being Stiles to do anything more than roll his eyes and brush past him into the station. Stiles let out an exaggerated sigh of relief and heard another snort.
This time Derek was definitely smiling. He was still leaned up against the wall even though most of the others had already gone inside, only a few lingering on the sidewalk to have a quick smoke, but he pushed himself upright when he saw Stiles looking at him. He sauntered over to the door, hands stuffed in his pockets and that little smile lingering on his perfect fucking lips.
"Thanks for saving the station the $92 and two hours it would've taken to get more keys made," Derek said.
"Just doing my duty as an officer of the law, sir," Stiles said, snapping a salute.
Derek huffed another laugh; three times in a half hour, Stiles was on fire, this would probably go down in history. "Yes, you're obviously an upstanding, law-abiding citizen with no shady dealings in your past at all," Derek said, a delicate lift of his eyebrow the only indication of his sarcasm.
"Aw, come on, big guy," Stiles said, slapping the back of his hand against Derek's chest and internally marveling at how very muscular it was when it actually kind of hurt. "You didn't think it was the littlest bit cool?"
"Stilinski, I've seen you fall out of three different trees," Derek said flatly. "And you cried at that video of the little tiny deer with the bow around it's neck."
Stiles tried to rebut that slanderous claim but ended up just sort of flailing his hands offendedly because the accusations were completely true and there was no denying them. "It was just so tiny!" he finally said, helpless in the face of its remembered cuteness. "Did you see its enormous eyes? Did you?"
Derek shook his head, but he was still smiling, damn it, and that in itself was a rare occurrence. Not that Derek never smiled or anything, he was just generally a very reserved person who happened to have a serious case of resting bitch face. For him to actually smile consistently for this length of time was almost unheard of and it made something in Stiles' stomach leap around like a goldfish in a bowl. The feeling didn't go away even when Derek said, "I hate to break it to you, Stilinski, but there's nothing cool about you."
"You know, if we're at the point where it's a-okay for us to casually, lovingly insult each other," Stiles said, leaning back against the still open door with what he hoped was nonchalance, "you can probably get away with calling me by my first name."
"Fine," Derek said easily. "There's nothing cool about you, Stiles."
Derek knew his name without needing to be told. The goldfish in his stomach did an Olympic-level leap with at least three backflips and a round-off, and it stuck the landing.
Stiles pulled on all his internal reserves of confidence and shrugged. "I'm alright with that. I'm too hot to be cool anyway."
There was a moment when Derek just looked at him, omnipresent broodiness for once completely absent as that pretty mouth went slack in surprise. And then Derek was laughing. Like really laughing, with his whole body, head thrown back and long neck exposed, and goddamn it, the fucker had dimples and how was that fair? The noise actually drew something of a crowd, everyone in the station taking a moment to marvel in the sight of Derek Hale actually full out laughing like Stiles' comment was the funniest damn thing he'd heard in his life, and Stiles himself was too dazed to tell his nosy coworkers to fuck off.
By the time Derek's laugh devolved into chuckles, Stiles was red-faced and almost embarrassed but smiling helplessly all the same, feeling strangely floaty and fluttery under the full force of the incredibly bright smile Derek was sending his way.
"You're something else, you know that?" Derek said.
"Is that a good thing?" Stiles asked, hardly daring to interpret the look Derek was giving him as what it kind of sort of looked like it might be.
Derek actually bit his lip and, for fuck's sake, those dimples were going to be the death of him. "Yeah," he said. "Very good."
Stiles would've thrown caution and common sense to the wind and kissed Derek right then and there if Ingol hadn't yelled at them to shut the door and stop letting all the air conditioning out. The pink flush that rose up high on Derek's cheeks was absolutely worth it though. And the fact that, within two weeks, the chalkboard in the break room was covered in Stiles' tally marks was worth even more. He thought he was pretty justified in being smug about that.