So, I've never actually watched the show... but the fanfiction is really compelling and I couldn't resist, so here. Forgive me for questionable canon.

XXXXX

Stiles knows a few things about werewolf noses. He considers himself basically an expert at this point, considering how much time he spends in their company. He knows that their noses are like, really super sensitive and can tell when he changes his deodorant, or when Allison switches to a different shampoo (seriously though, Scott, shut up about her hair already. It's getting creepy.) But Stiles also knows that werewolf noses, contrary to popular belief, aren't always accurate. Werewolves are people too (and doesn't that sound like something that should be written on a big protest sign at a rally somewhere,) and they make mistakes. Like, Stiles has seen Scott pull faces and wave his hands around in frustration for a good five straight minutes before he can finally name what he's smelling. No man, it's, like, kind of bitter, it's... ahhh... it's right at the tip of my tongue. Nose. Seriously dude it's so weird. Cinnamon! No... ngh... Oh! Oh! New cleaning supplies! Like, uh, uh, chemicals and dirt. God, that's terrible.

The point is, werewolf noses are very very cool, but werewolves can be very very stupid. And normally, when Stiles is talking about stupid werewolves, he's talking about Scott (in the most affectionate way, of course,) but in this story, he's talking about Derek. Stupid, stupid, very attractive, stupid Derek.

XXXXX

When Stiles was little, his house had a bit of a mountain lion problem. It was weird, because none of his neighbors had the same problem, but it was the only explanation that his parents, plus the animal control guys, could come up with. It wasn't even a problem, really. "Problem" sounds so dire, like, "you have a problem, we're sending you to rehab," or "he's your problem, you try to get him to calm down and take his Adderall," but in this case, it was more of a "hmm, where are all of these claw marks on the side of our house coming from, this is kind of a problem" sort of thing. No big deal.

Okay, sort of a big deal, because they don't exactly pay Sheriffs the big bucks, and his mom hadn't worked since he was born, and there were kind of some pretty serious gouges on the side of the house, which were seriously devaluing the property or something, and kind of expensive to keep filling in when once a month or so the mountain lion would come back and scratch them in again.

But Stiles hadn't minded. His little six year old brain had thought it was cool. It probably had something to do with all of those "a boy and his dog" books he'd been reading, but he would sometimes look out of his window at night, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Mountain Lion of Legend so that he could run downstairs and tame it and then run around with his super cool mountain lion friend that Jackson could totally never make fun of because mountain lions are really cool, okay. It would be great, just like in his books, except without the part where the dog/mountain lion died, because that part always sucked.

And the mountain lion had always felt like his, too. The claw marks always ended up underneath his bedroom window, scraping little criss crosses into the plaster there. Sure, it was a floor below his bedroom because that was how two story houses worked, but it was close enough, okay? The marks were always under his window, enough that his parents sat him down one day and asked if he was leaving the mountain lion food. Stiles wasn't, but then he realized what a totally awesome idea that would be, and started leaving bags of chips on the ground outside his window.

The mountain lion never ate them, though. It was weird, because the Stilinskis would still get churned up dirt and a clawed up house every month or so, but the little baggies would remain undisturbed, like the mountain lion had decided it was too cool for Doritos.

The Mountain Lion Problem (that Stiles maintained wasn't really a problem) carried on for years. Mornings of the Sheriff walking outside every few weeks to sigh and shake his head at the new gouges in his perfectly nice house, and nights of Stiles sneaking outside to lovingly replace the bag of chips in case the mountain lion changed its mind and decided it was hungry, (it never occurred to Stiles to try a different food because come on, Doritos were like, the best thing ever) carried on and on. It was a fact of life, as real as Stiles being hyper, and Scott being his BFF, and his mom being underground.

Until a time came when the Sheriff walked along the side of the house and mentioned offhandedly, "There haven't been any new claw marks in almost a year. Might actually be worth it to fix it up properly now."

Stiles looked at the wall too, and with a pang, realized his father was right. The mountain lion visits were infrequent enough that he hadn't really noticed them petering off, but it was true. There hadn't been any newly smashed plants or displaced dirt or scraped siding for a long time. And Stiles suddenly missed it badly.

"Probably died or something," the Sheriff mused. "Or maybe we've got some poachers out in the reserve."

Stiles missed it very very badly.

XXXXX

Laura would make fun of Derek. A lot. He would grumble something under his breath in reply, and pretend he didn't care, but it got under his skin.

Her favorite topic for teasing, back Before, was Derek's behavior on full moons.

"What kind of dumbass can't smell his way home after a run? Yikes D, somebody's missing a few screws," she would chuckle in her scratchy voice.

It wasn't that he couldn't smell his way home, Derek wanted to say, but could never quite find the words. It was that there were one too many places that smelled like Home. Was it his fault that, moon-sick and following instinct and his nose alone, he was led to somewhere that smelled like Home? No. That was perfectly normal werewolf behavior. It was just that he was led to the wrong Home.

It was uncanny, really. Two houses so rarely smell that similar. Yet it was too often that Derek found himself scratching away at a little two story in the middle of Beacon Hills proper, trying to get inside, before he realized that it wasn't his house. The family that lived there probably cooked a lot of the same food as his family, Derek reasoned. Rosemary chicken and fruit salads, and smoked beef on alternate Fridays. That, and they used an air freshener that smelled so perfectly like the woods he didn't know how they could have done it without just bottling forest air and releasing it in the house. And the family must have also had a lot of the same furniture, and used the same shampoo his father did, or...

Well, alright. Derek understood how incredibly strange it was that the little house on Greenwood Boulevard smelled exactly like Home, but it did. It did, and it was perfectly understandable that he ran there on full moons, because werewolves always move towards Home after their runs, and the place smelled like Home. Take that Laura. Besides, he always got to his real Home eventually.

Until his real Home turned black and charred, and he couldn't be in the same state with it anymore.

XXXXX

"Derek, dude," Stiles said from his spot on the couch, not moving his eyes from the TV screen, where Batman was doing that thing where he broods and wears black and oh my god, Derek is totally Batman but anyway, "Do you ever think it's weird how much time you spend at my house? Not that I'm like, hinting for you to leave, because you just got here, and the Joker hasn't even done that thing with the pencil yet, but you know you're here like, every day, right?"

"Is it a problem?" Derek asked, raising one of his mega eyebrows. Dammit, that should make him look like a douchebag, but instead he just looks handsomely aloof. Is that a thing? With Derek it is.

"Problem. Hah! Sorry, inside joke with myself. No, it's not a problem, not now that you and my dad are like bros, but I'm just saying."

Derek looked slightly uncomfortable. "I like it here."

Stiles turned to look at Derek. Batman could wait (sorry Batman,) because Derek never said he liked things. It was like the guy was afraid he'd jinx it. "Is it my fabulous heart-healthy home cooked meals?"

"No."

"My own scintillating presence?"

"...No."

"Dereeeekk. Come oooonnnn. Enlighten me. Is it the new furniture setup? Because I googled some feng shui stuff, and while I'm not sure I have the northeast corner working properly, there should definitely be some kind of sweet chi flow or something happening in here-"

"No. Just... it smells nice."

Interesting. And Batman was getting paused (sorry Batman.)

"Nice?" Stiles asked. "What does this place smell like to a werewolf?"

Derek shifted, staring at Christian Bale's unmoving face on the screen. "It smells like a lot of things. Just... kind of homey."

"That's so cute."

"Shut up."

So obviously Derek wasn't going to say anything else, he had that chiseled jaw locked up tight, so Stiles switched the Dark Knight back on. But see, Stiles had never been great at concentrating, so he got to thinking about "home," and something Isaac once told Stiles about the time Derek told him that a wolf tends to head home after a good run on a full moon. Instinct and whatnot. Which got Stiles thinking about how if his house was "home" and full moons were once a month, and werewolves had claws, and his house would get claw marks once a month that stopped around the time of the Hale house fire and holy shit. Holy shit this should have been way more obvious.

"Holy shit Derek!" Batman got paused again. (Sorry Batman.)

"What, what?" Derek looks at Stiles, startled.

"You were our mountain lion problem!"

"What?"

"Oh don't look at me like that, Der-Der-"

"Don't call me Der-Der"

"You like it. Seriously though, I totally bet that you were the one who kept scratching my poor house up!"

Derek looked sort of like he'd been caught. God that was adorable. And rare. Today was just a day for rare Derek reactions. RDRs. Stiles could be like a scientist, carefully causing and documenting RDRs... but anyway.

"I... it wasn't on purpose," Derek grumbled. "And I didn't know it was your house at the time."

"I'm not mad at you dude, just like... woah. Mountain lions are never mountain lions in Beacon Hills. It's kind of ridiculous."

Derek grunted and nodded. "Turn the movie back on."

Stiles did. With a very satisfied expression. He'd totally tamed that mountain lion after all. Who cared if it was never really a mountain lion?

XXXXX

Derek stands outside of an innocuous white door in an innocuous beige apartment building. Stiles' new apartment. Stiles living on his own. It was so weird, Stiles all grown up. Eighteen, college, apartment of his own. Not that far from home, but still. Stiles as an adult. Of consenting age. Did this make Derek's crush not creepy anymore? Immaterial. Crush it.

Derek knocks, and Stiles opens the door with that wide grin that makes him look about twelve. "Derek! Welcome to my palace! You're lucky, you get to have the full tour without Scott -he's my roommate, you've probably heard of him- getting in the way."

"I can't believe I've been living here two months and you still haven't seen the place! So weird dude. Speaking of weird, did you know that Scott has this, like, Allison shrine in his room? Now that his mom can't see his room, he has this whole wall of pictures with pictures of her, and I'm like dude, stalker behavior, but whatever. So, that's the kitchen corner, and that's the living room corner, and then there's the den corner. That door's my bedroom, that one's Scott's, that's the bathroom, you really don't want to see it, trust me- Der-Der, why do you have that weird look on you face?"

Derek has stopped listening to Stiles speaking, and he just breathes in the smell of Home. That isn't right. Stiles' house smells like Home, through some strange twist of coincidence. Stiles apartment shouldn't smell like Home. But it does.

This is a big deal. A fantastic, horrible, wonderful, shocking, terrifying deal. Because this means it wasn't Stiles' house that smelled like Home this whole time. It was Stiles. And Derek was raised in a proper werewolf family. He knows what it means when a person smells like Home.

It means a few very significant things about mates. And it means that Derek's creepy crush is totally justified, and totally more than a crush.

XXXXXX

Stiles isn't sure what the bee in Derek's bonnet is, but he decides that it is a very nice bee, because suddenly Derek is smiling, and god, that's nice.

Oh, and now he's being bodily picked up and pressed into the lumpy plaid Craigslist couch.

And getting nuzzled.

And now Derek's face is on his face and this is very very nice.