A/N: This is my first teen wolf fanfic you guys, so please please please review! Oh and I would love to give my beta a wonderful thank you! She is one of the most perfect human beings out there!
Disclaimer: Teen Wolf is property of MTV and all the characters of Jeff Davis. Trust me if Teen Wolf was mine, Sterek would have been canon so long ago.
Derek and Cora climbed out of the Range Rover, their shoulders slumped. They both remained silent as they pulled into a little motel on the border of Nevada and lugs in both his and Cora's bags as she checks the front office for the nearest diner and Derek unzips their bags and begins to unpack.
He isn't very focused as he begins to take out his shirt and pants, mind still wandering as he recalls all the things he'd left behind in Beacon Hills. He opens the wardrobe and begins to put them all away, remebering back to the events of the past month. Losing his Alpha status. Killing Boyd. The Alpha pack. The Darach and his affair with her. Then, he thought about the makeshift family he had left behind. Scott, Isaac, Lydia, and yes... to some extent, even Allison. Then there was Stiles. The kid practically drove him insane, but to some extent he felt more attached to Stiles than any other members of his 'family'.
Despite the kid being the source of many headaches for the werewolf, the boy was so much smarter than all of his pack put together. He admired the kid so much even, that he may have mumbled a compliment here and there. Not that Stiles would have ever heard them. He wouldn't quite equate what he had towards the kid as romantic feelings, but occasionally, he found himself wondering what it would be like to be in Lydia's place, being an object of Stiles's affection. It put sort of an ache in his chest but that was pushed aside.
He set to organizing their room for about 10 minutes. He was finally about to throw his duffel to the side, when he noticed a slight bulge in the side of the bag. His eyebrows furrowed as he unzipped the pocket and pulled out a orange and blue striped shirt. He immediately recognized the shirt from when he was first in Stiles's room when the boy tried to have Danny trace the texts coming from Scott's phone.
He held the shirt softly in his hands, rubbing over the cotton t shirt softly with his thumbs, the ghost of a fond smile tugging at his lips. He threw the shirt on his bed and a little note fluttered out of one of the folds in the shirt. Derek walked over to the note and took a deep breath before gently unfolding the scrap of paper. He expected a long winded note, but it was one simple sentence. Something that meant more from Stiles than any long winded note could portray.
Cora came into the room at that moment and looked at the orange and blue striped on Derek's bed. "Oh my god, whose shirt is that?" she says, wrinkling her nose, picking up the shirt with one clawed finger.
Derek took the shirt back from her, and gently folded it, placing it on the top of his other clothes in the dresser, gently tucking in the note along with his pants. "It's just a friend's that I forgot to give back," he says, rubbing away the wrinkles in the shirt.
Cora looks at him with an incredulous expression. For someone reason, an unfathomable reason at that, Derek starts to laugh, and he laughs hard. It is no ordinary laugh, it is a laugh that rumbles up from his chest and has him bent over and roaring with laughter. He laughs for so long that tears start to stream down his face, and if he had to take his guess, he would say it wouldn't just be from laughing.
But he kept laughing, too held up in his emotions to stop, until he ran out of air and took a deep breath, letting out a quiet giggle ever so often. Cora looks at him, both concerned and a little cautious, but he ignores it and grabs his leather jacket off the chair as he strides out the door. His sister follows behind him, a little more slowly, probably wondering what the hell is wrong with him to react like that. Outside, Derek locked the room up with his key and climbed in the Range Rover Toyota that was parked in the carpark, Cora hopping in after, still eyeing him with with a worried eye. He ignored her again only to start the motor and pull out of the parking spot, reversing out of the carpark to go and eat at the nearest diner.
Suddenly he felt that everything would be okay, in quite a long time. He hadn't had that feeling since the day he'd left for school the day his house was burnt down. He let out a contented sigh as they drove and Cora just stared at him the whole way to the diner, and while they ate, and even after she was on her bed and they were watching the small TV on the dresser. And Derek was still smiling, couldn't help it, thinking about the cousin with a bloody shirt, and had no choice but to borrow one from his least favorite cousin Stiles Stilinski.
Broody, sourwolf cousin, Miguel.
In a pocket of a pair of pants in Derek's drawer of the dresser sat a little stirp of paper written in messy scrawl. It was the scrawl of a kid in a hurry, but was written to convey a direct message.
Good luck Miguel-Stiles