A/N: This started as nothing more than a passing idea to go with a tumblr gifset I made (link to it is on my bio). THEN I couldn't shake it and it demanded to be written. :)
This is a complete AU and although some things will carry over from canon and be similar, others may be completely different. Everyone is human in this, there is no supernatural. All geography, land marks, cities, roads, universities and so on are completely fictitious.
Stiles is 19 and Derek is 21.
Heat rose in waves from the single strip of bleached blacktop as it wound its tortuous route amongst the dusty, sloping landscape. The rolling hills were colored with scrub growth separated in hue from the pale dust of the earth by only the barest variations of green and dotted here and there with the darker shades of low, bushy pines. The sky was almost painfully blue and the intense noon day sun painted everything in harsh, barely shadowed relief. There weren't any vultures circling overhead to complete the sense of western cliché which the desolately picturesque scene brought to mind, but Stiles Stilinski assumed that was only a matter of time, given the way things had been going thus far.
"Oh come on... come on!" Stiles coaxed his unresponsive jeep in frustration. The ancient blue vehicle was coated in dust as if trying to blend into the rocks about them. It was certainly being about as useful as a rock at the moment. Stiles hissed, sun-warmed metal all but burning his fingers as he banged the hood closed.
Staring at the engine and willing it to work wasn't getting him anywhere. The tangle of oil and dirt crusted metal and hoses was too hot for him to get his hands into it without doing serious damage, even if he had had a clue what he was doing in there. He didn't, although he had once solved a similar problem by taking a bunch of parts out and then putting them back in again. He wasn't at all sure why it had worked, but it didn't look like that was going to be possible right now. Besides, his radiator was completely empty, meaning it was probably leaking somewhere, and he didn't have anything to put in it. He may not know much about cars, but he did know that it was probably not a good idea to drive very far without coolant in this heat even if he could have gotten the car started again. He couldn't afford to completely replace the engine.
Perspiration was trickling down the sides of his face and dripping into his eyes. He wiped at it and ended up unwittingly smudging engine oil across his cheek and temple. Sighing, Stiles leaned his forehead against the driver's side window, patting the door as if commiserating with an injured friend. "It just hasn't been our week, has it buddy?" he murmured resignedly.
Pushing away, Stiles squinted under the glare, looking up and down the deserted road as far as he could see. This may not exactly be the middle of nowhere, but it felt like it. He'd already been here on the side of the road for the better part of a half hour and not a single car had passed. He couldn't just wait here and hope somebody would show up. Who knew when or if that would happen, and there was no way he could sit around idle that long anyway.
Heaving in another sigh of hot air that tasted like dust and overheated asphalt, Stiles grabbed a hat and jacket out of the mess of clothes jumbled together in the back, pocketed his keys and started walking. He unwillingly shrugged into the jacket despite the heat after a few minutes for the simple reason that he had no sunblock and knew from experience that the unforgiving sun would crisp his relatively fair skin to a cinder if he didn't cover up.
It would be great if he could just call for help, but that would require him to have a phone. He didn't have a phone because he had brilliantly left his cell on the roof of the car along with his cup of coffee when he left the shitty little motel he'd crashed at last night. All that had remained by the time he realized what he must have done and returned for them was a puddle of coffee and a broken Styrofoam cup, which was exactly his luck and pretty much a metaphor for his whole life right now.
Stiles shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and ducked his head against the glare, not caring to let his thoughts wander towards why he was out here in the first place. The matter at hand right now was finding something that passed for civilization before the unseen-but-probably-out-there buzzards got him. He'd been seeing nothing but wilderness for most of his drive since he turned off the highway hours ago, which was not encouraging. However, Stiles had a vague recollection of having passed what could have been a gas station or roadhouse of some kind a little ways back. With no knowledge of what lay ahead of him, back tracking towards that single point of possible habitation seemed his best bet. If there was someone there, they would at least have a phone he could use. He wouldn't allow himself to contemplate what he would do if there wasn't anyone there. Optimism was his friend, no matter how shitty its track record was currently.
A little ways back by car in his memory turned out to be several hours and many miles by foot. Stiles felt like he was literally roasting under his jacket. Perspiration trickled constantly down his spine, running between his shoulder blades. His shirt was soaked everywhere it was protected by the jacket, but the exposed strip down the front where the jacket hung open, and his flushed face, were dry. The arid air seemed to suck away moisture with an almost greedy thirst. Head spinning and more than a little dazed from the heat, Stiles felt like he could understand. Anything out here would be thirsty. He was. He was so terribly thirsty it hurt.
When he finally saw the dark shape of a building in the distance, he felt an overwhelming swell of relief and his lagging steps quickened. However, distances are hard to judge in the desert and it took him a lot longer than he expected to finally reach the place. He had plenty of time as he approached to see that it was in fact both a gas station and a diner.
The architecture and signage were old. More than old, they were practically ancient. The weathered, free-standing sign stuck up high into the air; it's curving, comic-book angles and arrows clearly relics of a bygone era. The building itself stood alone without any neighbors, as if dropped by accident into the middle of the desert landscape. Lettering on the sign promised gas, food and lodging. As Stiles approached, he saw that the low, squat structure had once been comprised of three distinct but connected wings forming a sort of V pattern. The gas station with its two pumps sat out front, facing the road, while a small, rusting turquoise and chrome diner jutted out to the left. The moldering, badly fire-damaged skeleton of a second wing on the right had probably once been the "lodging" part of the equation. It couldn't have boasted more than two or three rooms even in its heyday, but it was clearly uninhabitable now. Stiles had the inane thought that they should probably update their sign, although to be honest it looked like nothing here had been updated since the 1950's.
A pealing, hand-painted sign tacked above the gas pumps held the single word "Repairs" which Stiles supposed to be an advertisement of service, although put with everything else it looked kind of like a cry for help.
He would have begun to despair of finding the station inhabited, except that he could see movement out in front, under the shadow of the slanting, old-fashioned overhang that ran from the station building to the gas pumps. As he drew closer, Stiles saw that one of the station's two glass windows was broken and there was a young man in a stained white tank busily engaged in boarding it up.
"Oh my God, am I so glad to see you," Stiles enthused as he approached, voice sticking a bit around the utter dryness of his mouth. He whipped his baseball cap off, using it to fan himself as he wiped his overheated forehead, blinking owlishly now that he was out of the direct sun and in the blessed relief of the shadow cast by the station's overhang. He must have surprised the fellow because the man tensed at the sound of his voice and spun quickly towards him.
"Unless you're a mirage, I mean, but I don't think mirages usually come people-shaped..." Stiles stopped when he got a good look at the guy, his rambling train of thought momentarily broken. The dude was hot. Like, movie star hot, or so it seemed to Stiles. Tall, muscular and dark haired with just a hint of scruff around his jaw, the man filled out his well-used shirt very nicely, the worn cotton unintentionally showing off his toned body to good advantage. Equally worn, low-slung jeans rode at his hips, belt buckle visible beneath the hem of his shirt, dusty denim clad legs ending in even dustier boots. Biker boots, not cowboy boots, Stiles noted as his gaze swept up and down the man unintentionally. "Except on second thought, you could totally be a mirage," Stiles corrected himself. "Totally. I might be sun-struck right now... is that a word? Like, there's sun stroke, but I dunno what you call it when –"
"Do you want something?" the Adonis in blue jeans demanded a bit shortly, interrupting Stiles' babbling flow of speech. The man looked around with a frown, scanning the deserted road. "Where did you come from?"
"My car broke down, like, a gillion miles that way," Stiles pointed back the way he'd come. "And there is freaking nothing out here but dust and sage and invisible buzzards. I took a look, at the engine, not the buzzards, but I'm not sure what's wrong. It's out of coolant, and it would be great if that's the only problem, but the engine won't even turn over, so I don't know."
Mr. Sexy Tank Top was watching him with a flat gaze from underneath an impressive set of eyebrows. He was bronzed from the sun and perspiration glistened on his biceps and pooled in the hollow between his clavicles... not that Stiles was checking him out or anything. "So?" the man demanded when Stiles forgot to keep speaking. "What do you want me to do about it?"
Stiles' eyes narrowed just a little, getting the impression that tall dark and handsome was intentionally being unfriendly. It shouldn't be a surprise, he thought with a mild pang. The gorgeous ones always seemed to be conceited assholes. "Well, the sign over there says Repairs," he said, pointing to the worn placard he'd noticed earlier, a touch of sarcasm edging into his tone. "So call me crazy, but I was thinking maybe you could, like, fix it or something."
"That sign is probably older than you are," the stranger retorted.
Stiles made a face. "Oh, so you don't know anything about cars. Of course. Great."
"I didn't say that," the man returned, sounding a touch annoyed.
"Okay... so you do?" Stiles asked, giving the fellow a squint-eyed look, completely confused by this point. He should probably just ask to use the phone, but the truth was that now he came to it, Stiles wasn't sure who he would call. He wasn't even sure how he'd find a nearby towing service or repair shop without being able to Google for it. A place this antiquated probably had a phone book? The question would be how many decades it had been since it had been replaced.
Hot-and-Grumpy considered him for a long moment, looking Stiles' dusty, dirty, sweat-streaked form up and down. "Credit card machine isn't running; cash only," he informed laconically.
Feeling like he finally understood the other's reticence, Stiles relaxed a little in relief. Sure, everybody relied on plastic these days, but luck was with him for once. "Oh, okay, no problem. I have cash. How much?"
"Forty bucks up front to tow your car back to the station. Twenty to look at the engine; anything else, we'll have wait and see. Depends on what's wrong and whether I think I can fix it."
"Okay, no problem," Stiles agreed easily, finding the price reasonable. Every dollar was precious, but he had been towed once before and it had cost him a lot more than that. If this guy was willing to give such good rates and could fix his problem, it might be the first thing that had gone his way in almost a month. Stiles quickly dug his wallet out of his back pocket, opening it up and extracting two fairly crisp $20 bills from a surprisingly thick wad of similarly fresh bills resting in the folds of incongruously beat-up leather.
Stiles saw the man looking and quickly fumbled the wallet closed again and pocketed it, holding out the bills while kicking himself internally. He hadn't been thinking. He probably should have been more careful flashing money around like that given his situation. It would be just his luck to get mugged out here on top of everything.
The mechanic looked at him rather suspiciously, but all he did was take the offered money and tuck it away in his own pocket. "I'll go get the truck," he said, then hesitated with a thoughtful frown. "What kind of car is it? I can give you a tow either way, but if it's too computerized I'm probably not going to be able to help you with the repairs."
Stiles gave a snort. "No worries there. We're talking about a CJ-5 Jeep from like, 1980. Pretty sure computers were mostly still big as rooms back then."
Stiles saw a hint of amusement flicker across the stoic features before the man turned away and headed around the diner towards the back of the station. "Come on," he said over his shoulder when Stiles did not immediately follow. "Truck's this way."
Stiles trotted after him, somewhat reluctantly leaving the shade of the station's canopy for the blistering hot rays of the sun once more. "I'm Stiles, by the way," he introduced himself as his companion led him to an old, beat-up, rust-colored pick-up truck that had an obviously after-market tow-rig bolted on to the back.
The other man climbed into the driver's side of the truck without response.
"And you are?" Stiles prompted a little more obviously as he pulled himself up into the passenger seat, wincing at the hot, close air inside the cab.
The mechanic put the key in the ignition and shifted the truck into drive. "Miguel," he answered as they pulled out onto the desolate, dusty road.