A/N:

This is an entirely unsolicited response to You Could Taste Heaven Perfectly by zoemathemata (find it on AO3). The author noted that there might be a porny epilogue, but that was over two years ago. So I did that thing I do, where porn accidentally happens (eponymously!). Boom, 4.7k words of fucking. In the most romantic way, of course. Because I'm classy like that. But then, my amazing friend and beta scienceofobsession (who, bless her generous heart, is both a brand new mother and not even in this fandom) pointed out that it needed feelings and background, and coherency… And thus angst was born (lol, both my own and Derek's), and a tiny bit of plot, and 8k more words. So now I present to you this behemoth in lieu of a simple pwp.

(Science has a busy life, only part of which is dedicated to making me a better writer, so I had to go out in the world and find new betas. Actually, bootsnblossoms found them for me: domachenkov, neverwhere and dragonlover44 generously stepped up to the plate with valuable insights, and you may thank them all that this isn't a complete mess.) Thank you to zoemathemata for her kind (and very prompt) permission to dabble in her world. You need to read Taste Heaven (7k, T) first, to give you context.

***If you're unfamiliar with daemons, Teen Wolf or need a quick summary of Taste Heaven, please see notes at the end.

Weaving through the discomfort he so stoically attempts to disregard, he can still feel Nisi's frustration with him, even though the bond is weak, attenuated with distance. She's angry. Impatient. And hurting. She's hurting, but not coming to him for mutual solace. She's choosing the pain. (Just as he once had. But that is something he tries to never think about.)

Both Derek and his daemon have been frayed for days, nerves a raw network on the outsides of their skin. Everything is too much, overwhelming. Which has actually been pretty much a constant state in Derek's life for the past ten years. He thinks it should be easier to handle by now. But Nisi leaving him like this hasn't happened since…. Since.

When she left today, she was both sneering and mournful, so miffed that Derek's head had evidently taken up permanent residence in his ass (her exact words).

He knows when she reaches her destination. Through the anemic resonance of their bond, he feels the sudden lift of her spirits, the warm current of contentment, subdued excitement. Guiltily, he surreptitiously hoards the faint echo of her relaxing, as if the stress built up between now and the end of yesterday's visit could at last be released.

Derek sits silently in the straight-back chair in his bedroom. His gut swoops like some crazed bat, and he counts each agonizing minute of her absence, watching his claws emerge and contract, leaving behind small tears in his jeans, the pungent aroma of blood visceral on the occasions when he grips too hard.

There it is, the shudder of pleasure as unseen hands rest on the nape of his neck. Derek stifles a humiliating whine. Nisi's thrum of bliss, safety and inclusion conflict entirely with Derek's isolation, confusion and fear.

He's a voyeur to his own daemon, surely distinguishing him as a cultural singularity: an acclaim he'd never have voluntarily sought. Attempting to bury his withering shame, he assuages the pain of stretching with those ghostly fingers, sifting through his feathers, scratching along the join of his wings. His beak cards through warm, soft fur, and, for this stolen moment, Derek belongs.

It is the same the next day. And the next. Nisi shows a modicum of sensitivity and only leaves him when none of the betas are around to witness it. But leave she does, snarking when Derek tries to ask her to stay.

So Derek waits in his room. Shoulders and spine rigid, knees spread and feet planted firmly. He's a survivor, he'll survive this. And yet, with the pure physical pain of the strained bond, even from two miles away, he can feel comfort and relaxation. Laced like tiny treasures in his maelstrom of misery and discomfort are moments when he feels a touch, when he imagines the soft coos of his raven as she's cosseted, the tiny rattling purr he'd heard from Sofer that night. He grinds his teeth against the stretch, pretends to hear Stiles' voice, talking to both of them in the tone he uses for Sofer: teasing and loving and intimate.

Derek endures.

And Nisi comes back. Every day, she comes back to him. Her tongue may be more acerbic, but her eyes shine a little brighter and her feathers are glossy and groomed.

They share so much, however, wolf and daemon, that neither can be content or pained in isolation from the other. And so their nerves are volatile webs laid on the wrong side of the armour of their feathers and fur.

It doesn't matter, Derek thinks.

They have weathered worse than this.

It's Pack Saturday. A full week now since Derek had been kidnapped and rescued. He chews on the inside of his cheek, absently watching and analyzing his pack as they train. Lydia has a surprising advantage over the wolves, since her daemon Penwyn, an enormous male orangutan weighing nearly 300lbs, can literally pick her up and sweep her through the trees if she needs a quick escape. Which he has just done. Right now, Boyd and Erica are chasing her, laughing. Although Pogo, Boyd's spectacled bear, is also arboreal, he doesn't have the ability to swing from tree to tree that Penwyn does. Erica is half-shifted and growling in tandem with her leopard Mennalphy, both of them bounding off tree trunks as they run.

Scuffling and crashing just out of sight distinguish Scott and Isaac, the overloud crepitation as they roll around in dry autumn leaves informing Derek that they're wrestling. Their laughter and low-voiced smack-talk is interrupted by random and irrepressible howling. Scott's border collie daemon joins in and Isaac's Keelin howls as well. A lemur howl has always sounded like air escaping from a balloon to Derek; and although it usually makes him smile, at least internally, today his face is set in a permanent scowl.

Seated on the newly-rebuilt porch, shoulders hunched inside his leather jacket even though the day is unseasonably warm, Derek keeps his clenched fists between his knees and one eye warily on his daemon. Nisi is as sassy as Derek is sullen, and she soars over the clearing around the house, cawing nonsense just to be heard. He is still jittery, on edge from the trauma of the week before, avoiding sleep when he can, because it's plagued by nightmares of a hunter determined to hollow him into a soulless and biddable weapon by keeping him forcibly apart from his daemon. Nisi's daily excursions aren't helping either.

It is a crisp afternoon in November, and the pack are all healthy and safe. Derek tells himself he has no reason to be so unsettled and anxious. He works his tense jaw from side to side and glares at Stiles, who is on the far side of the driveway, talking to Allison as she sets up a new target for crossbow practice. Allison's albatross waddles confidently by her side as they move back towards the small table they've set up to hold various weapons.

Stiles' daemon can only be inferred by the slight bulge under his shirt, held steady by one long-fingered hand. The other arm gesticulates wildly as Stiles argues some point, and Allison dodges the flailing with the grace of years of experience, a sweet, calm smile on her face.

As if he can feel Derek's stare, Stiles abruptly stills and glances over. Derek immediately looks away, swallowing hard. He doesn't know what to make of Stiles and Sofer. Last week Sofer had been paramount in his rescue. When he first saw the reclusive daemon in his cell, he marveled that she was so tiny. No bigger than a cat, she seemed too delicate to have tunneled through so much earth to reach him. And then she had touched him, without hesitation, offering nothing more than comfort while he tried to recover enough strength and equilibrium to stand and fight.

He's still trying to absorb this shift in his world-view. Except for his parents and siblings, Derek has never touched another's daemon outside of a sexual relationship, even then it was awkward and uncomfortable. He expected the taboo act to feel wrong, like the jolt of a 9-volt battery on his tongue. But it hadn't.

He's mulled over it ceaselessly following the rescue, hunkered down in the safety of his den. He considered how naturally Sofer's skull had fit into his palm, how the cold wriggle of her nose against his neck had been so easy to accept. How when he held her in his hands, his heart felt a little bit warmer. How he could feel, through her touch, Stiles' deep concern and desperate desire to get him safely back.

He'd been profoundly sick when Sofer finally reached him, after two days of missing Nisi so much he could scarcely stand or think straight. His stomach was in freefall and he'd been panting through his mouth for so long, fighting nausea, that his lips were cracked and dry; but the rest of him was filmy with cold sweat. When he finally stood, Sofer patiently quiescent in his trembling hands, his balance was iffy at best. It was hard to think in a linear fashion, every faltering beat of his heart crying Nisi, Nisi, Nisi.

Holding Sofer actually helped, rather than merely being inoffensive, allowed him to manage until he finally reached Nisi, fluttering feebly in Stiles' hands, trying to get to her human. Her caws for him were thin and utterly wretched, and still echo in his nightmares. To comfort himself, he replays the moment he finally got to hold Nisi close, stroking over dulled feathers with a fierce and gasping kind of gratitude, world shrinking to the pinprick of Nisi's gleaming, frantic eyes. He remembers Stiles remaining right there, holding onto Derek's arm just above the elbow, steadying him, a bulwark against the rest of the world while he reconnected with his daemon.

That night, they wound up in the same bed. Exhausted, and more than pleased to have the soft, warm presence of Sofer against him, intensifying the heartening feedback between Nisi and himself, Derek simply gestured at Stiles to climb in. The cozy, indiscriminate tangle of human, werewolf and daemons they'd formed had felt soothing and safe and right.

They'd need to talk about this, Derek had thought. But not right then.

And, Derek being Derek, he had managed to avoid talking about it for a full week at this point. Nisi drops out of the sky like a rock and lands, deliberately clumsy, on his shoulder, curling one claw just inside the collar of his jacket, deeply enough that he knows she's drawn blood. (Nisi knows it too, the brat.) Then she nips at his ear, closing down hard and twisting. Derek jerks back and swats at her. "Stop it, Nise!" he grits out. "What're you doing that for?"

Nisi flaps upward to dodge his hand and then lands on his other shoulder. She ruffles all her feathers and thrusts her head forward until one blackcurrant eye is only about an inch away from Derek's own. "You know what it's for, Sourwolf. For being such an idiot."

Derek grabs her beak and waggles it to and fro a few times. "I'm not being an idiot," he protests, quietly, because it doesn't behoove the Alpha to be seen arguing with his own daemon.

"Are," Nisi counters, and her raucous raven-cackle draws Stiles' attention from the weapons table. Derek hunches his shoulder and turns a little bit, hiding his face from Stiles' curious expression. Nisi continues, with brutal honesty, "You're a child and a coward, and I know you're just as unimpressed with you as I am right now."

Derek growls at her, although he knows it is an empty threat and so does Nisi. "Look. It was a – . All the touching. It was just a... moment of trauma. It doesn't really mean anything."

Nisi snorts and yanks an errant curl, getting a little nasty in her frustration. "That's bullshit and you know it, Der. You liked it. You liked touching Sofer, you liked smelling Stiles and her in our bed. And I know you can feel it too, you muscle-bound pessimist: how good it is when I'm with them. Why do you refuse to come with me when I go?"

Derek starts chewing the inside of his cheek again. There's a sudden gust of wind, and he watches orange and brown leaves tumble over dead grass. Stiles is wearing a green and blue flannel that catches the breeze and flaps wildly behind his back until he turns around to fasten a few buttons, laughing. "It's not that," Derek says quietly, figuring his betas are too busy to listen in. "It's. Stiles is young, okay? And he didn't really have any kind of choice. He just did what any decent person would do." Derek doesn't mention that his acquaintance with decent people has been few and far between for many years. "It wasn't a. Not a. Like, a deliberate come-on, you know?"

Nisi, who learned this trick from Laura, has always been able to encapsulate in a single look what an idiot she finds Derek to be. He doesn't like it any better now than he has the hundreds of other times she's done it. "Yeah. And you're shutting him down and hiding out because, why?"

Derek growls again, annoyed. Nisi knows why he is avoiding Stiles; she is just enjoying making him feel even worse. Nisi has recovered from their ordeal somewhat faster than Derek, possibly because she is making daily visits to Stiles' house to snuggle with him and Sofer, then smugly reporting the details of these encounters to Derek in an irritating and unending stream.

Stiles hasn't spent the night again, of course, because of school, so this is the first day he's been back. He texted a few times following the kidnapping and rescue, but Derek ignored the messages, since they had nothing to do with research or pack business, but rather were tentative overtures like, How are you holding up? and Do you need someone to talk to? Which answers were obviously Fine and There's nothing to talk about.

There might also be an element of shame in Derek's avoidance. Stiles has always ruffled Derek's composure, and Derek never knows what to make of his own wayward response: a two-pronged zinger of irritation and inappropriate lust. How Derek previously dealt with it was through sheer rudeness and physical domination, which always ratcheted up the tension between them in a disturbing yet unsettlingly satisfying manner. And the worse Stiles behaved towards him in return, the more Derek liked it.

But as he looks back now, all he can think is that all those interactions were a terribly poor payment for Stiles' rescue: both of him and, somehow more importantly, of Nisi. Derek can think of no one else he'd have chosen to hold and comfort his traumatized daemon than Stiles and Sofer; can't even fathom anyone else doing so. In exchange, Stiles has a long history of Derek pushing him into walls, cuffing the back of his head, and insulting his intelligence and his skills. Derek doesn't mean any of it, but he's aware enough to know that Stiles can't read his mind.

Derek's been an ass, and Stiles has saved him more than once. Two hours in the pool looms reproachfully in his memories.

A lot of it is that Derek simply doesn't know how to relate anymore. When his family was brutally murdered, burned in their beds by an entirely psychopathic Kate Argent, he at least was left with his sister. Later, when they lived in New York, Laura had pushed him to get out there socially. But even with a few years between them and the tragedy, he couldn't make himself do it. Clearly he couldn't read anyone's character: look how devastatingly wrong he'd been about Kate. He couldn't trust his own judgement, and the price for learning that lesson was so agonizingly steep that he just arranged his life so that he'd never risk it again.

It seemed a simple dialectic to Derek: if he didn't bring anyone into his life, they couldn't betray or hurt him. If he didn't love anyone, then they could never be used against him. And, he amended several years later, standing over Laura's bisected corpse, if he never let anyone into his heart then it wouldn't be broken when they left. He felt like the sum of his experience was losing people he loved, losing them because he miscalculated a situation or misjudged the people he allowed in his life.

Having to kill his Uncle Peter hadn't helped, cementing in Derek's mind that he couldn't trust. He couldn't trust, and if he did, people all around him were going to be savagely hurt, at the least.

He's been Alpha of his own little pack for a couple of years now, and has learned to carve out some emotional space for his betas. But the feelings he has for them are based on responsibility and protective vigilance, rather than affection and kinship. He is even more distant from the humans in his pack: Allison, Lydia and, in the beginning, Stiles.

When Stiles began to worm his way under Derek's defenses (something that happened near-immediately), he'd responded by coming out swinging, viscerally terrified that everything he'd scrabbled to build out of literal ashes would be endangered again. Afraid that opening his heart would mean catastrophe, because years of traumatic experience supports that conclusion.

It makes Nisi crazy. "You're a cringing old man, Sourwolf," she'd snap at him, tweaking his ear or pecking his chin. "You're so full of bitterness and fear that I'm amazed you can even function at all. You don't think I know how much we've been hurt? Why can't you see that the answer is to find good people. Not to hide away for eternity. It's gonna kill us, Der."

Nisi's unflinching take on reality is something she learned from Laura and Dahanain. Mostly, Derek loves it, loves that Nisi's personality was sculpted from admiration of the person they'd loved best. When they were young, Derek and Nisi had always followed their future alpha and her daemon around with big, fascinated eyes, watching as Laura grew and learned, always best at whatever she'd tried, seemingly effortless.

Now, when Nisi speaks, Derek hears Laura in her tart tone, her wicked humor, the cadence of her speech. It's simultaneously bittersweet and reassuring.

Over the years, Nisi and Derek have had more acrimonious confrontations about the walls he has built around his heart than any other topic, and Derek feels even more shame over having such a conflict with his daemon. Your daemon represents your soul, goes the popular aphorism. What does it mean about Derek that his daemon thinks he's a repressed bonehead? What does it mean about him, that even his daemon doesn't want to support him? Nisi has been berating him on the topic more and more this past week, angry that he won't admit to their need, that he perceives it instead to be their greatest weakness.

So after the kidnapping, confusion and self-loathing prevent him from talking to Stiles about what happened, about how they've touched each other's daemons without discomfort. About the one night they spent together, peaceful and content, cuddled up with each other and the other's daemon.

And now, every day since, Nisi goes on a Stiles/Sofer visit, glaring at Derek for being a coward before she takes to the air. Her leaving hurts, it really does: it's too far. But Nisi barrels through her end of the pain because she's mad at him for being so resistant and so blind. And Derek grimly suffers through his own, hiding in his house, tense and sick and guilty until she returns and he can bury his hands under her feathers again, mute from anger and shame.

The difference between them is that Nisi's agitation gets soothed, Sofer's little pink tongue rasping along her beak feathers, and Stiles' deft fingers scratching along the back of her head, until she comes home half-stoned on all the touching and affection.

It's debilitating and disorienting, how torn apart he's feeling these days, and Nisi's evidently finished dealing with it. She hops to his other shoulder and shrieks in his face, pecking hard at his chin. "You're gonna send everyone home after this meeting and Stiles is gonna stay, and you're gonna fix this, Derek. You're making us feel awful, and I'm tired of it."

She flaps off before he can answer, circles the clearing once and then lands gently on Stiles. She flamboyantly nuzzles her beak behind his ear before bending to poke it into the neck of his hoodie, doubtlessly ranting to Sofer about her idiot human.

Allison stiffens in surprise when Nisi lands on Stiles as if it's something that happens all the time, and then turns with lifted brows to Derek, who pointedly ignores her mimed question. Lydia and Penwyn have returned from the woods, and he can feel both their eyes shifting thoughtfully between him and his traitorous daemon.

End Notes:

In Taste Heaven, Derek is kidnapped and separated from Nisi (his raven daemon), which causes him a great deal of pain and despair. Nisi makes it to Stiles and Sofer (Stiles' daemon, a reclusive fennec fox), telling them what happened. Stiles comforts (and touches!) Nisi while they get to Derek and effect a rescue. Derek, Stiles and their daemons crawl into bed together at the end, but do nothing more than fall asleep.

If you are unfamiliar with His Dark Materials, just know that people have animal companions called daemons that are physical manifestations of their souls. They come into the world with them and then die with them. Daemons can be any kind of animal, which often reflects their human's character. It is taboo to touch another's daemon unless you're lovers. Killing a daemon kills its human and vice versa. There's a short little primer over on LJ if you'd like.

If you're new to Teen Wolf (*waves at my Sherlock friends*), just know that Derek (about 25) is a broody, gorgeous (omg, so gorgeous), muscley, angsty Alpha werewolf with a pack of teenage betas comprised of both weres and humans. Stiles is a human: he's young (although I'm putting him at 18 just for the sake of underage tagging) and spastic and dorky and we all love him to pieces. Werewolves' eyes flash colors (Alphas' are red), they're very into scent and scenting, and having a mate is a thing. Also they can hear other people's heartbeats, use it to tell if they're lying, and sniff out emotions such as lust and fear. There. I think I've covered it.