Case Studies on the Behavioral Patterns of the Western Lycan by Stiles Stilinski
Part One
Feeding
by extantecstacy
Summary: They're all jagged edges, still trying to figure out how they fit together. Derek's hang-ups aren't helping. (Alternatively, Derek never cooks for himself and the pack doesn't notice, until they do.)
It's originally Lydia's idea, but Stiles grabs on to it with the force of a dog and a chewtoy, and yeah, dog jokes are totally in right now, Stiles can't get enough of them and if he doesn't stop Scott swears to god he's going to stick his tongue right in his ear. And man, does Allison look too excited about that.
It's not even an idea, just Lydia complaining during their monthly full-moon meeting, frowning at the fast food wrappers in the trashcan and the freezer full of microwave meals and the takeout on the counter. When she opens the refrigerator, she is frankly surprised there isn't tumbleweed between the Sriracha hot sauce and jar of pickles that inhabit the entirety of the fridge.
"It is seriously unfair you can eat like this and still look like that," Lydia says and wrinkles her nose at Derek. Stiles, not good at picking up on social cues (or letting things go), opens his mouth.
"Yeah, man, how is your cholesterol not through the roof? If not for the, you know, lycanthropy, I'd say you were a heart attack on two legs."
"Shut up," Derek says and stuffs a fork of tikka masala into his mouth. The pack, Stiles especially, aren't exactly connoisseurs of Derek's facial expressions, but they can tell the difference between it's-early-why-is-your-mouth-moving-so-fast and I'm-imaging-your-face-in-a-wood-chipper. Derek is quickly leaning into your-blood-will-fill-my-bathtub territory.
"But no, really!" Stiles gesticulates wildly to prove his point, slopping peanut sauce down his shirt. "Do you just not know how to cook?" From the table, Issac's eyes widen and he makes a frantic stop gesture. Erica just smirks and smacks his hand down.
Derek growls.
"Because there's recently divorced guys, bachelors, and then you, all the way down here," Stiles says, indicating with his chopsticks where each rank.
The Terrible Three (alternately known as the Leather Lads and Lady, depending on Stiles' mood and how much it amuses him that they sound like a bad screamo band) shift uncomfortably, although Boyd doesn't look uncomfortable more so than he looks like a brick house with tree trunks for arms, but he does keep looking between Stiles and Derek with a furrow between his brows.
"Drop it, Stiles," Derek grits out, standing and stomping away.
There's silence for a moment and Stiles fidgets with his chopsticks, until Scott adds, "Does that mean I get his naan bread?"
For Derek Hale, ghosts are everywhere. Even though he has an apartment ten blocks from the school and the old house is for special training occasions only, Derek can't shake his family. Sometimes when he walks through his tiny kitchen, long and cramped like a hallway, he sees his cousins snitching tastes out of a gallon pot of soup (probably butternut squash, his mother's favorite during fall), or Peter's wife boiling water for tea, paperback held too close to her face and glasses perched on her head, or his father whistling Glenn Miller at the sink, his hands submerged to his elbows in soapy bubbles.
He can pretend, at least, that he doesn't see them as clearly as if they're still alive when he tosses a Lean Cuisine in the microwave, when familiar smells can't conjure them behind his eyelids too.
Not many people bother with his doorbell. The only people who know Derek lives here are a slew of inconsiderate teenagers who treat his apartment like their own and tend to barge in, shouting and sweating and shoving and smiling and loud, loud, loud. There's him, of course, but he has a key and no reason to ring his own doorbell. Once a dictionary salesman tried to sell him the Oxford English 20 Volume Set but Derek still isn't convinced Stiles wasn't pranking him.
So it's with a healthy amount of suspicion that he pulls the door open.
Stiles stands there, comically laden down with bags and pots. His eyes are bright, mouth slack but upturned, and a healthy flush is just blooming from the chill across his cheeks. He's bouncing back and forth on the balls of his feet and when he sees the wrinkle in Derek's forehead, he grins.
"Oi! This is heavy, move over," he says, shoving his way into the apartment, and heads straight for the kitchen. "Wow, yup," he yells back at Derek still standing in the door. "Your kitchen is as shitty as I remembered. Damn."
Derek isn't sure what to make of this.
Stiles pokes his head around the corner. "Don't just stand there! Put some of that werewolf mojo to use and carry in the rest."
"Stiles," Derek says, not quite growling, but close. "What is this?"
He throws his best shit eating grin, cheekbones highlighted by the stretch. "I'm making garlic chicken!" He pauses and scrubs a hand over his scalp. "Well, chickens. Plural. Multiple whole chickens." He disappears back into the kitchen and then all Derek can hear is the crinkling of sacks.
"Chop chop!" Stiles shouts and Derek inexplicably finds himself pulling half a grocery store worth of food from the back of the jeep. He drops them on the floor in a jumble just to watch Stiles whip around from the stove and fuss. "Don't bruise the chicken! Wait. Can you bruise a dead chicken?"
Stiles scoops the bags from the floor and in moments has everything unpacked and laid out on the counter. He stares at the rows and pulls his lower lip into his mouth in concentration. Something is missing from his mental inventory because he frowns and bites his lower lip until it starts to turn white.
"Oh! Music, right." Stiles fumbles in the pocket of his hoodie for a few moments before pulling out an iPod and holding it aloft in triumph. "Any requests? Cause otherwise it's gonna be my best of the '80s playlist and nobody wants that."
He's already scrolling through songs when Derek's hand shoots out and closes around his wrist. Stiles jumps and drops the iPod into the sink.
"What the hell, dude?"
"What are you doing," Derek bites out. If he got headaches, one would be pounding a quick tattoo behind his forehead right now. As it is, he can feel annoyance buzzing around him in a figurative cloud.
"Garlic chicken? For eating? I'm pretty sure we already went over this." Stiles rescues his iPod from the sink, turning it around and finding no damage, goes back to clicking through playlists.
Derek tries not to whine when he asks, "But why?"
Stiles picks up a knife and turns the full force of his attention on him. "Because the pack still needs bonding time? Because your fridge makes me physically depressed? Because you eat like a fourteen year old home alone for the first time? Take your pick."
Derek continues to frown at him. "The pack doesn't need to bond more."
Stiles waves the knife. "That's what you fixate on, of course." He raises one eyebrow, lips pursed and wide as he takes in Derek. He sighs heavily. "Of course they need more bonding time. It's like you're trying to put together a puzzle with pieces from a bunch of different puzzles and you can't figure out why the picture doesn't make sense. Look, Jackson just got all self-actualized and everything, but he doesn't know how to not be a dick or fit in with everyone else which is why Lydia is around all the time snarking and generally making people uncomfortable. And your dynamic trio thinks they're superior because you chose them, and they're also still a little resentful from that time we kicked their asses. Which was awesome, by the way. Throw in the granddaughter of a hunter that's tried to kill everyone, the boy-who-doesn't-want-to-be-the-wolf and you've got a Molotov cocktail of a pack. Thus! Stiles! Coming to the rescue with real food, which will seduce everyone into friendship and warm fuzzies and maybe cuddle piles."
"But-"
"There are no butts. Except for mine, because it's cute. Now go brood in a corner, I have a lot of cooking to do." Stiles waves dismissively at him.
Derek doesn't move. Stiles focuses on washing vegetables, his back to Derek. "I can feel you thinking grumpy thoughts. If you're not going to leave, you get to chop onions."
Derek huffs and moves toward the cutting board. He falls into the steady rhythm of chopping easily enough, eating through three onions, a handful of carrots, celery, potatoes, and a mish-mash of herbs his nose can't differentiate. He's just reaching for the garlic to start peeling when the door slams open and Issac, Boyd, and Erica shoulder their way in. He spares a grunt for them, shrugging at Issac when he comes into the kitchen.
Issac's nose twitches almost comically and he sniffs out the Coke Stiles brought over, gets out three, then settles on the couch and joins the Community vs Project Runway remote battle between Boyd and Erica. (Boyd loves Project Runway. Derek doesn't ask questions.)
Stiles flies through the kitchen like a hurricane. He sets up three baking dishes, washes and pats down the chickens, and stuffs them with herbs and garlic. With sure movements, he bastes the outside with butter and lemon. The rest of the vegetables are thrown haphazardly in the pans. Stiles adds a splash of chicken broth, then sets two heads of garlic next to each of the chickens.
Scott and Allison come in much more sedately just as Stiles loads the pans into the oven, the racks groaning under the weight. Scott's curly head pokes into the kitchen. "Whatcha making? Smells good."
"Garlic chicken and vegetables," Stiles responds, sauntering into the living room. Derek follows him, feeling huge and unsure.
"What about bread?" Scott asks plaintively, making wide eyes at him and turning on the full force of his McCall charm.
"No. This will not work on me."
A thought flashes across Scott's face, quick and mischievous, and Derek takes a moment to admire how amazing it is that Scott is still so open, so easy to read, that despite months of unending shit, he's still the same person when it counts. He reads the same thoughts on Stiles, affection wafting from him like the scent of warm peanut butter cookies, overflowing and bathing in it.
"You can't escape me!" Scott yells and tackles Stiles.
They go down in a tangle of limbs, Stiles whooshing air from his lungs when he hits the rug. Scott gets his fingers under his hoodie, skittering them up and down until Stiles is jerking and gasping with his whole body, kicking ineffectually at Scott.
"I give! I give!"
Scott offers one last mischievous smile, leans over, and licks from Stiles' jaw to his ear with a wet slurp.
"Gross, werewolf cooties!" Stiles sticks his tongue out, pretending to writhe and gag on the floor as Scott crawls toward Allison and sits next to her. Derek doesn't have enough chairs, so they sit on the floor under the window.
Derek starts to smile, feels it twitching at the corners of his mouth, but it's a sad sort of smile so he fights it down, heavy with a feeling he can't label.
"Well," Stiles announces. He fumbles to his feet. "If all we're going to do is turn Stiles into a human popsicle, Stiles is going to retreat to make bread."
Things are going well, the pack relaxed and meshing in a way that reminds Derek of lazy afternoons from his childhood and it feels like something is unfurling and clenching simultaneously in his chest. He can deal with it for the languid happiness in the room.
Which is, of course, when Jackson arrives sans Lydia and ruins everything. The fight they had on the way over ends with Jackson turning around and driving her back to her house so by the time he makes it into the living room, he's unpleasant and surly enough that even Boyd, who has secret stores of patience, is riled up.
"I'm loading up plates," Stiles announces stubbornly, ignoring the tension in the room. "Any special requests?"
"No potatoes," Boyd says seriously.
"You don't like potatoes?" Jackson asks in a way that might be joking, if everything that came out of his mouth didn't make him sound like a gigantic bag of dicks. "That's retarded, potatoes are awesome."
Erica is on her feet in an instant, claws out and mouth a furious slash against her skin, hair whipping like an avenging goddess. "Fuck you, Whittemore!" she snarls.
He cocks his head to the side. "What's up your butt?"
Erica makes an outraged noise, reflexively clenching and unclenching her fingers, as if she's fighting the urge to sink them into Jackson's face. "Your offensive and- and ableist language!"
"Wait, what?" he splutters, red splotches blooming defensively on his cheeks. It's obvious from his face that he doesn't know what ableist means, but Erica's reaction is enough to put him on the defense.
Allison jumps to her feet. "I'm sure he didn't mean anything by it," she says soothingly to Erica, eyes wide and face soft and sympathetic. She lets her hair fall in front of her ears, making her seem more disarming.
She flips them the middle finger. "Whatever. I don't need self-entitled douchebags anyway."
Jackson frowns, standing up to face her. "Don't be so sensitive."
Derek isn't sure what to do, frozen in his spot near the door. He's unprepared for this dissonance, lured into false comfort by their earlier companionship; although, he knows these teenagers and should have been prepared anyway. He'd caught himself stupidly thinking Stiles was brilliant for his problem solving skills. But here he is now, standing in the middle of his living room, the pack oscillating anger and hurt around him and it feels like trying to hold a handful of sand.
Stiles stomps in and out of the kitchen, delivering plates laden with food, storming through the pockets of bickering with an increasingly deeper frown and by the time everyone has food in front of them, he radiates unhappiness.
He slams his glass on the end table and glares at Derek.
"You and your emotionally constipated pack of misfit toys are going to sit down, shut up, and perform the relatively simple task of delivering food to your mouths via fork, a task so simple, many people do it everyday without giving me a heart attack at sixteen!"
The room quiets quickly, and Derek zeroes in on the rabbiting of Stiles' heart, quick and cadenced. Erica sits first, flipping her hair over one shoulder and looking for all the world as if sitting was what she was planning the whole time. The others follow suit with varying degrees of enthusiasm, except Derek, who stays standing until Stiles glares at him.
The living room echoes with the clinking of forks and not much else, until Allison tentatively offers, "This is pretty good, Stiles."
Stiles points at her. "You are my favorite. You get the biggest piece of pie."
"There's pie?" Scott looks like it is Christmas, Halo 4 is being released, and he's seen Allison's boobs all at once.
Stiles makes a face at the rest of them – part glare, part smile – but mostly twitching his features until everyone compliments the food, even Jackson.
Except for Derek, who is sullen, studying the bookcase and, Stiles can't help but to think, not eating.
"Pie for everyone, then. Except Derek. Derek's pie is being withheld on grounds of grumpiness, with additional counts of funsucking and spoilsporting."
When Derek doesn't growl back, just picks up his fork and shovels a mouthful of vegetables into his mouth, something eases in the room.
"So does this make you pack mom now?" Erica teases. "You gonna clean and do our laundry too?"
"I'm pretty sure you have to be better at cooking to be pack mom," Jackson mumbles through a mouthful of chicken.
"Low blow, dude. Low blow."
Scott wrinkles his face apologetically, if wrinkles can be apologetic. "Well, this chicken is sorta dry."
"That's why you smear the garlic on it, asshole!" Stiles balances a hunk of bread on his fork and catapults it at Scott. It flies wide and lands next to Erica, who scoops it up and puts it on Boyd's plate.
"Do you remember that one time it was just you and me?" Issac asks Derek. "I think I liked that better."
"It's Sunday afternoon," Stiles threatens, brandishing a dirty wooden spoon at them. "You have just eaten three whole chickens. Three. Just think – jesus, no, I can't even think about it right now. The point! The point being," and at this point, Boyd grabs the spoon from his hand, because the wild gesticulating is going to end in Stiles braining himself. "You all take naps and I will clean up."
Only Allison puts up a cursory complaint but it's not very forceful so she filters back into the living room with everyone else.
Derek hovers in the entrance to the kitchen, watches Stiles wash each dish by hand, humming under his breath. Derek doesn't have real plates or silverware, so it's only the cooking dishes Stiles brought and some mismatched glasses and mugs.
"I found you, Miss New Boo-tay!" Stiles bursts out suddenly, shaking his head at his own absurdity. He navigates the soapy water with ease, even gyrates his hips as he rinses the cutting board.
Derek can't stop staring. The kitchen is wrong, the people are wrong, the smells, the feelings, the circumstances – all wrong, like a note just a half step out of tune. Stiles isn't his father, all frenetic and slopping water everywhere, and the food, while edible, was a teenager's clumsy attempt, not his mother's practiced recipes.
He can hear the rest of the pack in the other room. Boyd is already snoring, and if he had to guess, Erica is using him as a recliner, picking at her cuticles and pretending to ignore the conversation. Jackson has the TV turned to the Cardinals game. He and Allison are debating teams loudly. Boyd snorts and tries to roll over when Allison shouts, "I will shoot you through the knee if you don't stop dissing Pujoles!"
The faint noises of thin paper pages flipping let him know that Issac is rooting through his bookshelf, trying to find something to read. Derek loaned him the Name of the Wind and its sequel, so he knows all too well the hangover that comes after finishing those books.
And Scott – well, he and Scott are similar, sometimes. He can feel Scott's possessive, almost proprietary attitude towards the pack. For all that Boyd is his second in name, he knows Scott is closer in spirit, in his relationship to the pack. Their contentment is his contentment. Scott is doubtlessly grinning dopily at the room, awash in affection.
Derek Hale still sees ghosts everywhere, even now in an apartment filled with people. They're fainter now, superimposed with images of Stiles with his head in the oven where once his younger sister made her first batch of cookies, Scott and Allison cuddling on the floor where his mom used to give foot massages. Two packs, two locations, but Derek is starting to realize that maybe he can have both. The reality of one pack doesn't need to erase the memories of another. It's not his family, not by any means. And today has proven they still have a long way to go, still need to smooth out their rough edges and learn each other's soft spots.
But for some reason, this feels like home.
"Booty booty booty booty rocking everywheooooops!" Stiles belts, jumping back when a glass slips out of his hands and shatters on the floor.
The ghosts are still there, will probably always be there, but when Derek inhales deeply, he smells lingering garlic food smells, teenagers, perfume, with strong notes of happiness and not a hint of ash tainting it.
End notes: Part one of a nine-part series (six main stories and three side stories, at least is what I have planned out right now!) Eventual Sterek.
This part of Case Studies was based around the idea of food and affection. Both are a kind of sustenance, tied together. When you are starving for affection, food can be either a replacement or a punishment. In Derek's case, affection and food were all tied together with pack and family and a simpler, happier time. Food is love, and protection, and connection. Food is being forced around a table with people who love you. Food is the ultimate Stockholm Syndrome.