Sergeant Spacewolf, aka Grumpybrows McFang, aka Derek "Don't Call Me Dude" Hale was hands down the most interesting person on Beacon Station, so it wasn't Stiles's fault that he was maybe kind of sort of a little tiny bit almost approaching obsessed with him.

"Obsessed" wasn't the word Stiles used, of course. That came from the man in charge of the entire Beacon Station's security, Major John Stilinski, when he caught a then-sixteen-year-old Stiles lurking around the corner from Derek's quarters. Which he was only staking out because he was pretty sure the recently rescued alien had something to do with the weird crap going on with Scott.

And he hadn't even been wrong! Derek totally had something to do with it. He just hadn't been the mastermind. Or a co-conspirator. Or a henchman. Or anything remotely incriminating at all, other than another victim of his crazy uncle's cracked scheme for vengeance.

Stiles felt justified in his suspicions because Derek had been sketchy as hell back then. Simultaneously, he would never, ever stop feeling guilty now that he knew why Derek had isolated himself.

But anyway, Stiles's dad had latched onto "obsessed" despite Stiles's perfectly good explanation, and hadn't let go of it since. Even though his continued use of it was just honestly so uncalled for that it really cast doubt on the Major's objectivity and suitability for his job, in Stiles's opinion.

Because he was a terrible best friend, Scott didn't agree. Neither did Stiles's dad, who overheard Stiles's review of his performance and smacked him in the back of the head for it. Then brought it (or them, as in both Stiles's totally not an obsession and Stiles's totally accurate assessment of the security situation) up every single time he saw Stiles for a month. Because he was a terrible father.

Okay he was a great father, Stiles couldn't have asked for a better father, he loved his father—

But none of that was the point.

The point was, it wasn't Stiles's fault that the first time he and Derek actually properly met was a total disaster. Just because Derek, like Stiles's dad, had found him poking around somewhere he technically wasn't authorized to be, and just because that somewhere was the suite of rooms Derek shared with his believed-to-be-but-not-actually-it-turned-out comatose Uncle Creepy—Derek had reacted badly. Overreacted, Stiles had felt at the time, but again with the hindsight full of regret.

That encounter had pretty much set the tone for everything since. Even after Stiles was 83-92% responsible for saving Scott and Derek from a trauma-crazed Peter Hale when he tried to send them all out an airlock along with the actual target of his maniacal (and, yeah, kind of understandable) revenge. Stiles might've even looked the other way if only it hadn't been for the significant collateral damage in the form of innocent lives.

The violent death of Kate Argent, who'd been born there but left years before, had rocked Beacon Station to its core. Having it compounded by the violent death of her murderer Peter Hale, taken in as a disfigured alien refugee in a vegetative state, pretty much sent the entire station plummeting out of orbit.

Beacon was a research station and the base of operations for several companies of explorers. There hadn't been more than two, maybe three attacks by less friendly and/or sentient groups in all of Stiles's life. People got injured on missions or accidents, people got sick—his own mom, when Stiles was young. But nothing so bloody and premeditated.

Derek got a lot of backlash for being the one to put Peter down, despite it being totally justified. And a lot of people who'd dismissed Stiles's conspiracy theories started buying into them even though he became the staunchest defender of all things Derek Hale. Stiles was pretty sure he couldn't really be blamed for that.

Also not Stiles's fault: the airlock door jamming shut and leaving the two of them tethered to the exterior wall of section 3a with suits rated for four hours and about the same amount of oxygen to sustain them against the vacuum of space.

Derek might have thought it was, and been exceedingly (rudely, even!) vocal about it, but it was not. Stiles's. Fault.

Entirely.

Not entirely Stiles's fault. Barely his fault at all, in the grand scheme of things. Even in a less grand, more modest scheme, he really only held the tiniest little portion of the blame. And really, the only part that he could in any way, shape, or form be blamed for was his own stuckedness—stuckness? the way in which he was stuck—and not Derek's at all, so he didn't know what Derek was yelling at him for anyway.

"—told you three times you didn't need to come out here! I told you not to come out here! And now look!"

Oh. Derek was yelling at him for that. That one little thing that maybe was actually his fault after all. But he had just—he had just wanted to spend some time with Derek. And Stiles wanting to check the shielding for embedded space rocks had been a great excuse, even though Derek hadn't bought it because Derek was an overly suspicious, paranoid person. Spacewolf. It wasn't like he had any legitimate reason to think Stiles was lying to him.

(The fact that Stiles had actually been lying was an entirely illegitimate reason and also irrelevant, in his opinion.)

Derek hadn't stopped ranting just because Stiles had figured out why he was ranting. "I can't believe I let you talk me into letting you come along."

Stiles didn't remember a whole lot of letting on Derek's part; he'd activated his own spacesuit and pretty much shoved his way out before Derek could stop him. But correcting that would probably just make Derek even grumpier, so he kept it to himself.

"I should've just shut you in the airlock on a security override the second you showed up."

"Or just beat me out the door," Stiles offered cheerfully before he could stop himself. "Then once it closed it would jam and you wouldn't have even had to do anything special."

There might've been worse things he could've said, but that choice was bad enough to get him a death glare from the guy who already had resting murder face. Even though Stiles had received his share (which, from his careful statistical analysis, was unfairly a lot higher than everyone else's share) of such glares, and knew that Derek was (probably) not actually going to kill him, it still set his heart racing. And not just because it might be the day that Derek finally snapped.

The thing that kept getting Stiles into trouble, aside from his mouth constantly forming words that he knew were a bad idea, was that he thought Derek Hale was pretty much the hottest man, human or alien, on Beacon Station. And since Derek looked angry on a good day, and Stiles wanted to jump on his hopefully compatible enough spacewolf dick on all the days, it inevitably led him to the realization that he found Derek hotter the angrier he got.

So maybe he provoked Derek a little more than was necessary. Or kind. Or likely to actually get him a glimpse of the mystery dick. But he couldn't seem to help himself, and Derek had made it clear from the get-go that Stiles didn't have a shot with him anyway, so it wasn't like he could ruin his non-existent chances. He just found reasons to hang around Derek, fabricated or otherwise, and contented himself with basking in the glory of Derek's unfairly attractive eyebrows of rage.

He really hadn't meant to make things worse when Derek was already upset, though. The situation they were in was... not great. No one had answered their distress signals or comm hails yet. It had only been a few minutes, true, but that was a few minutes too long to be reassuring.

They were tethered to the station to stop them from drifting off into space, and that part was fine, but it was also not the most helpful thing to have going for them. Because the nearest airlock was a trek of about half an hour across the surface of Beacon's outer walls, and their tethers wouldn't reach that far. If it came down to that, they'd have to unclip and take their chances. If they didn't get back in or hear from a rescue team in the next three hours or so, that was a choice they'd have to make.

Derek's worry was justified, basically. And really, the only thing keeping Stiles relatively unconcerned about the whole thing was that he was refusing to think too hard about it.

So pushing Derek's buttons at that particular moment might've been a bad move, and he anticipated a surlier-than-usual reaction to his statement. Deserved it, even. But he wasn't prepared for the anger to twist into disgust, or for Derek to turn away from Stiles like he couldn't even bear to look at him anymore.

Nor for Derek to say, dismissive instead of attractively (and justifiably) snappish, "I don't even know why I bother with you, sometimes. You can't take anything seriously for even a single breath—not that you ever stop talking long enough to breathe. Not this, not my job, not even your job. If you don't care about the mission, why are you here?"

That hurt.

Part of it was shock, because as gruff and grumpy as Derek got, he'd never been cruel before. He got angry at Stiles, like all the time, and exasperated and frustrated and all sorts of other low- to mid-level expressions of displeasure, but writing him off? Stiles had sort of taken for granted that Derek would always tolerate his shenanigans at least enough to return to a baseline of grudging resignation. It was just what they did.

They might not be friends by most definitions, exactly, but Derek was one of the people Stiles cared about most and Stiles was one of the few people Derek interacted with at all. So that was kind of a relationship, wasn't it? They had something, even if it wasn't quite the thing Stiles—rarely ever, barely enough to mention—daydreamed about.

Everyone on Beacon Station who didn't know about Stiles's (super chill not at all pathetic or desperate) crush on Derek thought they were better entertainment than comedy holos. They had an odd couple, frenemy sort of vibe going and Stiles played it up since it was the best he could get, but... It had never occurred to him that Derek would ever be done with it.

Done with him.

It felt like the time one of the exploration teams had brought back a pet from the kaniman homeworld that, despite being supposedly domesticated, broke loose and decided to try cracking Stiles's chest open with its head.

As if that weren't enough to make Stiles defensive, on top of all that rejection was the sting of familiarity. Stiles had had the same argument with his dad, when he was younger and less proficient at wrangling his runaway thoughts. He'd been kind of a fuck-up as a kid, and when he'd been getting to be not a kid and still hadn't pulled his shit together enough to figure out what he wanted to do, well, it had led to some tense times in the shared Stilinski quarters.

But once he actually found a career that interested him? He fucking rocked it. (And not just because it was extraterrestrial mineralogy.) He took pride in his work, even if he didn't treat it like a solemn duty the way Derek apparently thought necessary. Yeah, he had fun. He loved what he did and he loved proving to himself and everyone who'd ever doubted him that he wasn't really a failure after all.

Having Derek question that—not even questioning it, outright denying it—was the shitty icing on an already shitty cake.

"Really, Derek. That's the game you want to play, 'let's examine Stiles's motivations'?"

His anger was hypocritical. If anyone had the right to do that, it was Derek, whose motivations Stiles had questioned non-stop for months until the truth came out in its over-dramatically bloody way. Turned out that the whole time, Derek had just been traumatized by the group of psychotic xeno-collectors who'd killed most of his family and tried to capture him for the super duper illegal slave rings they called 'zoos.'

Chris had sworn up and down that he had no idea what his sister had been into, and the tribunal believed him. Stiles did, too, for what it was worth. Eventually. Once he was satisfied that Derek flinched away from the man no more or less than he flinched away from everyone else in the weeks after Kate and Peter met their ends.

But even if it wasn't completely righteous, Stiles's indignation flared. He'd lived his whole life on Beacon Station, and whether or not it was a purposeful or serious enough life to live up to Derek's standards, he'd bet his entire moon rock collection that knew more about the station and the people who lived there than Derek did.

When Derek turned back, his face had softened to apology. He knew he'd crossed a line, and he tried to defer, to say, "No, Stiles, of course—" but Stiles wasn't about to be so easily appeased.

"Let's see. Why am I here, why am I here. Well, I was born here, so I guess you can start with blaming it all on my dad. I mean, Mom had some fault in that too, but since she got that incurable disease from her work for Beacon Station's mission, which I don't care about, it would be kind of pointless to hold that against her anymore.

"I did almost get sent back to Earth after school, since I hadn't earned a commission yet and I wasn't a qualifying dependant of my dad's anymore. But you can blame Warrant Officer Deaton for me sticking around, he made the argument to command that I should be allowed an extra couple months due to extenuating circumstances during the last few years.

"Like my ADHD, and needing to take care of my dad when he got hurt on that away mission, and I feel like there's something else, what was it? Oh, that's right. Your asshole spacewolf uncle decided to kidnap my best friend!"

"Stiles." Derek grabbed him by both arms, but it wasn't violent. He looked as heartbroken as Stiles felt, and that was enough to knock him from his emotional rampage. Turned out that making Derek feel awful just made Stiles feel more awful, not less. "Stop, please. I'm sorry. I didn't mean..."

"I know."

Derek was still looking at him with those big, sad eyes that only made an appearance when he was worried he'd done something wrong. They hadn't shown up at all when Derek had been trying to deal with all the crap that came his way when he first arrived at Beacon Station, even though he obviously blamed himself for it.

People had two competing theories—okay, Stiles had two competing theories—as to why. Either Derek hadn't felt safe enough to let his guard down enough to show that kind of sympathy, which was probably true, or his angry eyes overpowered his guilty eyes, which was also probably true. So maybe not conflicting, as such. More like compoundingly sad.

The eyes had started becoming a thing after the conflict resolution went down, when Derek wasn't being hunted but instead trying to prove he deserved a place. It had taken Stiles's dad giving him a job for the haunted look to stop showing up every time he made a minor mistake, and by the time a few years had passed, Derek rarely ever pulled out the sad eyes.

But there they were, puddling at Stiles, and Stiles couldn't handle it.

"It's fine. Really. I was kind of asking for it. We're fine, dude."

Though Derek's face twisted in a grimace, he didn't respond with his usual admonition. Instead, he shook his head and said, "You weren't—I just never know what to do with you, Stiles. How I'm supposed to react to some of the things you do."

For a long moment as his cheeks heated up with a blush, Stiles bemoaned the technology that made their helmets so amazingly transparent. "Look, I'm sorry if I weirded you out with the whole, you know, massive teenage crush thing. I swear I'm over it."

"What."

"Okay, mostly over it, but I didn't think you'd call me on that. That's really fucking insensitive, dude."

"No, I mean—" Derek's eyebrows were so furrowed it looked like they were trying to eat each other. "What? You didn't have a crush on me."

That surprised a laugh out of Stiles, which felt like it eased the tension a little. Even if it was mostly embarrassed shock. "Super did. And I wasn't, like, even a little bit subtle about it. How did you miss that?"

As Derek stared at him, mouth working but no sound coming out, Stiles forgave how see-through the helmets were; it meant he could see the play of the safety lights over Derek's scruffy cheekbones with every movement of his jaw. Seriously, there could not have been a hotter humanoid anywhere in the galaxy.

Non-humanoids weren't really Stiles's thing, so he couldn't judge there.

Finally, looking a little flushed under the stubble that Stiles was having impure thoughts about for definitely not the first time, Derek glanced down at his hands. They were still wrapped around Stiles's upper arms, and while he loosened his grip, he didn't let go entirely.

"I didn't think you thought of me that way. As a potential... You told Scott I was the most beautiful thing you'd ever seen."

Stiles had said that. When he was sixteen and struggling between his suspicions that Derek was evil and his damn near daily morning wood over the guy. Plus bonus boners when he was observing (not stalking, thank you very much Major Stilinski) Derek and Derek decided it was a great time to strip down to his tactical pants and work out. For hours.

He hadn't known Derek had heard that, and he also wasn't sure why he was bringing it up now. "Yeah, that's not really helping your case. And you say that like it's a bad thing! How could you have overheard that and not known I had a crazy juvenile crush on you?"

"Because you called me a thing, Stiles! Not a person, a thing. Like you thought I was some piece of art for a museum or..."

His voice cracked and twisted, and Stiles's heart broke even before the whisper came out because he got it. He got it. And he hated so much that he'd made Derek feel like that, no matter how accidental, for so many years.

But Derek finished the thought, even though it sounded like it hurt him to say even more than it hurt Stiles to hear. "Or an animal for a zoo."

"Derek." He wiggled free of Derek's hold just so that he could reverse it. "Dude. Der. Spacewolf McGrowly. Sergeant Snarly."

"Stiles," Derek growled warningly when Stiles made to continue, but he looked and sounded like he was fighting a smile.

Grinning back at him and counting it as a win (and proof, however tenuous, that Derek had really loved all his stupid nicknames all along), Stiles repeated, "Derek. I'm sorry your life is as tragic as your eyebrows. But I was a dumb kid. I really didn't mean anything sinister by it. I just meant that, like. Even when I was pretty sure you were trying to bring Beacon Station crashing into some planet's orbit or something, I recognized that you were hotter than the sun."

"So you... had a crush on me. When you thought I was trying to kill everyone you cared about." Derek still didn't sound convinced.

Stiles rolled his eyes so hard his neck cracked a little. "No. When I thought you were trying to kill everyone I cared about, I mourned for the fact that my horny teenage ass would never meet whatever spacewolves have for dicks—and yeah, I know there's something there, I've seen that bulge."

As was so often the case, Stiles hadn't actually meant to say that. He hadn't realized he was saying it until it was out and Derek's eyes were wide and Derek's whole face was red. Since it was too late to take it back, all Stiles could do was confess everything and hope that he'd run out of oxygen or drift out into the void or something before they got rescued and he had to face the consequences of his words.

"The crush has only been since I've actually gotten to know you. And I lied before, about being over it. I'm, like, stupid in love with you."

"Oh." Derek's voice was small, but his eyes were big. And he looked at Stiles the way Stiles had always felt himself looking at the very sparkliest of mystery rocks that came back with away teams. That was probably a good sign.

"Stiles!" His dad's voice crackling over the comms in his suit was a good sign about other things, but Stiles couldn't help but resent it. Could they not have waited, like, five more minutes? "Son, can you hear me?"

"Yeah, Dad. What's up?"

His dad's relieved laughter made up for interrupting the moment. Stiles hadn't really had time to panic, too distracted by everything about Derek to let himself face all the potentially terrible things about their situation. He'd even distracted Derek from it for a while there, so he didn't feel too bad. But his dad had clearly had time to worry, and that wasn't good for him.

"Derek's with you, right? Are you two all right out there?"

"We're fine, Major," Derek answered for him.

He sounded like himself again, just on the border of gruff, so Stiles let up his reassuring grasp. But Derek stopped him before he could move away too far, briefly tugging on Stiles's wrist and then holding out his hand. His eternally expressive eyebrows lifted in hopeful challenge. Stiles couldn't reject that face! Not that he ever would've wanted to. He took Derek's hand in his and beamed.

Squeezing Stiles's hand, Derek asked, "What happened?"

"Some sort of energy surge knocked out power to the whole section. We haven't been able to get it back online yet, but Lydia figured out something to reroute the scanners and comms so we could track you down. We've got a team headed to you from the 3b airlock, should be there in about half an hour. Either they'll bring you back with them or we'll get your doors working again by then."

"Sounds great. We're totally fine to wait out here. We'll just hang around. Not like we've got much of a choice, you know. Talk to you later!"

Stiles shut off his outgoing comm signal with that super subtle farewell and waited while Derek did the same. Then he pulled Derek closer—which had the added effect of pulling himself closer to Derek, because zero gravity was awesome that way—and asked, "So... Now that I've laid my vulnerable heart at your feet, is there anything you wanna say back?"

"Hm. Let me think about it." Derek smirked at him.

Stiles recognized that smirk. There were suddenly a whole lot of memories that took on a new meaning in light of that smirk being directed at Stiles at that very moment.

"You do!" Stiles crowed in delight. "You've totally been hot for me this whole time! You just didn't know what to do about it other than being a jackass all the time!"

"Not the whole time," Derek said, which was totally not a denial. "You were a dumb kid for a while, remember? And really, I'm a jackass? You're one to talk, have you ever passed up an opportunity to annoy me—hey!"

Stiles had shoved him. Not that hard, but hard enough for his feet to lose their tenuous gravitational connection to the outside of Beacon Station and send him drifting away. It had also knocked Stiles loose, and they moved in tragically different directions until Derek managed to grab Stiles's tether to pull them close again. Still floating through space, but it didn't really matter. They were tethered, and a team was on the way, and they had at least twenty minutes to kill.

He made his move.

"Stiles. You're wearing a helmet. I'm wearing a helmet. You can't—"

"Just watch me. Look, they squish. If we can just squish them enough in the right ways..."

Kissing in the spacesuits turned out to be a no go, despite Stiles's best—and they really were his best, he was dedicated to that project—efforts. Derek even stopped protesting after the first few minutes and let Stiles squash his helmet this way and that, trying to contort their faces together.

But when they were finally rescued from certain and very near death (with over two hours of air each), Stiles barely waited for the airlock light to go off before he disengaged his suit with one hand and Derek's with the other for good measure, because Derek was taking way too long. As soon as both their bubbly helmets had retracted into the generator rings, Stiles was on him. He had no chill and that was fine because Derek's hotness would've melted it anyway.

He had to remember that line for sometime when he could use it; which he couldn't, with his lips occupied by trying to meld themselves with Derek's. It was a futile effort but boy was he going to keep trying until lack of oxygen killed him.

"Stiles!"

...Unless his dad killed him first.

Totally worth it, though, for the way Derek's stubble scraped against him and Derek's tongue worked its way hot and forceful into his mouth, and—

"Mieczysław Stilinski!" his dad roared.

The small chamber caught his already impressive bellow and threw the echo around them like a badly calibrated station-wide broadcast. Stiles would've been happy to keep going, because he was a fully commissioned adult and his dad didn't get a say in his (newly discovered) love life, but Derek flinched back. Stiles glared at him for taking away his new favorite toy, but quickly saw the error of his ways at glared at his dad, instead.

"Oh my god, what?"

"What? What? Don't you take that tone with me, young man, we are well past the bounds of what and into I'm sorry for everything I've ever done wrong in my two decades of reckless, brainless life, and if I want to see two more years I'm going to march my ass to quarters—alone, Stiles!—and not leave for a week."

"Nope. Nuh uh. No way. Sorry, Daddio, no can do. See, me and the ridiculously gorgeous love of my life have just sorted our shit out after literally years of agonizing pining. So I'm happy going up to my quarters, I promise I am, but it's not gonna be alone. And we're definitely not leaving for at least two day-cycles."

"I should quarantine you both. Separately," his dad muttered, but his heart wasn't in it.

That's why Stiles risked getting within smacking range to peck his dad on the extremely disapproving cheek. "I know I'll always be your darling baby boy, but I really am all grown up now. I've even been an officer for, like, three years. So my boyfriend, yes that's right I said boyfriend, and I are gonna go do private grown-up things in private now.

"Besides, think of all the paperwork you'd have to do if you shoved us both in quarantine. Plus the extra security shifts, and then their admin leave while your budget stretches to pay for their therapy..."

"For fuck's sake, Stiles," his dad groaned, burying his face in his hands. "Yes, okay. Whatever, just stop talking and get out of my sight before you give me an aneurysm once and for all."

Obeying that order was the easiest thing Stiles had ever done. Even if he had to half drag Derek, who was busy being mortified because Stiles's dad was kind of sort of technically Derek's boss and things would probably be weird for them for a while.

Whatever. Stiles had more important things to worry about, like finally figuring out what a spacewolf dick looked like and how many times he could make it come.

(Awesome and a lot, it turned out.)