Delayed Gratification

"Heeeey, Daddio!"

"Oh crap," the Sheriff rubbed his hand over his face, roughly, in preparation for the new worry lines his son was sure to be putting there during the next few minutes.

"Is that a-what-a-way to be talking to your biddy baby boy?" Stiles slurred.

"Are you drunk or drugged?" The Sheriff asked, already dreading the answer.

"I'm on Oxycodone!"

His shoulders sagged.

"And why is that, son?"

"I broke my ankle...a bit...it's a bit broke...I broke a bit of it."

"Stiles!"

"Dad? Hi dad!"

"Hi Stiles. So, I hear you broke your ankle. That sucks."

"Ugh, sure does," Stiles grunted, "and I have to have this boot thing on for six weeks at least."

"Is it plaster or a walking cast?"

"It's a big clunky boot," Stiles grumbled, "but I can take it off to wash, so there won't be that ants in the cast thing I had with my arm."

"Don't remind me."

"So, hey dad?" Stiles was all over the place, more than usual.

"Yeah?"

"I can't do the stuff for work, the physical stuff, and the people in the office signed...like a petition for me not have a desk job for the six weeks. So they're making me go home."

"Okay, that's good Stiles," the Sheriff said, his voice placatory and indulgent, "do you want me to book a flight?"

"Leave it all to Lybia," Stiles said, distractedly, just before the sound of alarms drowned him out.

"Lybia? Oh God, what buttons did you push, Stiles?"

The alarms stopped, abruptly, and a voice was scolding Stiles for unplugging something.

"Do you mean Lydia?" The Sheriff said, when the sounds had died down. "Please don't be calling me from a hospital in Lybia."

"I'm in DC, dad, remember?" Stiles was now talking to his father as if it were him who needed hand-holding through the conversation.

A tired voice in the background mumbled something.

"Really? Huh," Stiles responded, before addressing his father once more, "I'm in Baltimore, dad, remember?"

"Do I need to arrange a flight and transport to and from the airport for you?" He spoke slowly and clearly in the hope that it'd get through this time.

"Lydia's gonna drive down and fly back with me, or up. Am I up or down?" Stiles sounded distracted.

"You okay, son? It was just the ankle you hurt, right?"

"Uh-huh, broke my foot. Hey dad. Did you change your passwords?"

"Yes I did and stop hacking into my accounts!"

"It's not hacking if you just use the same cycle of passwords with different capitalisation and a dollar sign instead of the letter 's'."

"Stay out of my accounts, which one are you trying to get into, anyway?"

"None of your business," Stiles grunted.

"My business, Stiles, literally my business!"

Stiles cleared his throat and the line sounded different, like an echo.

"You want anything from the airport, or the hospital gift shop, or anything I can steal from the cab over?"

"No, I'm fine, just you in one piece will be fine."

"The ankle didn't break all the way through, so I'm technically still one piece...apart from the foot bone, that broke all the way but it's inside my foot with all the other foot bones to look after it. So many bones, so many pieces. Does one vertebra count as one piece or does your whole spine count as one piece?"

"Stiles?"

"Agh! Fucking speaker-phone, how d'you do that?" Stiles grumbled before the sound on the line was back to normal. "Yeah dad?"

"Drink some water, eat what they give you, go to sleep and do everything Lydia says when she says it, okay?"

"Okay."

"I'll see you soon."

"Does your cheek activate the speaker-phone while you're talking? Mine always does. And hold, I put people on hold and don't know until I get call waiting and it's them calling me again!"

"Stiles?"

"Rambling?"

"Yes."

"Sorry."

"Let me know flight times, tell Lydia to let me know."

"I will."

"Sleep those drugs off, son."

Stiles snorted with laughter, brightly.

"I'm on Oxycodone!"

"I know," his dad said, sighing deeply.

Derek stared at the text from Kira.

Stiles was coming home, Lydia coming with him, Kira saw Facebook talk of everything and told Lydia to pick her up on the way through New York and she'd come back to Beacon Hills too.

He knew what that was about. Every time Stiles and Lydia came home the 'What happened to Scott McCall' case reopened. Kira obviously wanted to get in on this one, as her family were with her in New York, so she had nobody to come back to.

He knew Stiles was coming home to recover from an injury, but nothing was specified, so he had to contact the Sheriff to find out that it was a broken ankle. That gave Derek something to do until they all crashed back into town. He needed to fix the elevator in his building, after putting it off for weeks, to spare Stiles from the stairs.

Because Stiles would show up. He always shows up. Even if he's not home Stiles shows up, gets in, disturbs things and leaves an illegible note before leaving.

Fix the elevator, which he was sure was just a matter of broken glass fragments keeping the doors from gliding shut. He still gives one of his 'looks' to the tenant on the lower floor, who claimed they'd broken no glass anywhere and that he was remembering them moving in with a huge glass topped table incorrectly.

They knew he knew they were lying.

Maybe he'd ask Stiles for a subtle but obvious way to get back at them. Stiles was great for subtle but obvious.

"Dude, I will give you the ultimate master-class on passive aggressiveness," Stiles said with his usual degree of animation. "Because you have the aggressive down, A+ for aggressiveness, but with my teachings you can be an even bigger asshole with a quarter of the effort."

Stiles had been directionless after Scott had vanished. He always needed a project or a mystery to solve, between returning to the mystery of what happened to Scott.

The Sheriff had insisted on Stiles going to college as far away from Beacon Hills as he could get, just to get him to let the case close for himself as it had been for the police and Scott's mother for over a year.

Derek thought of Melissa. He would fix the elevator, scowl at the tenant who broke the glass table top and thought sweeping the fragments down the elevator shaft constituted cleaning it up, and then pick up a decent lunch for her at the hospital.

He could see if she knew they were coming back. She probably knew before he did, but he needed to know that she needed no warning that Hurricane Stilinski was about to tear through her old house again.

Melissa hadn't wanted to live there alone after Scott was officially given up on. Officially meaning the officials gave up, obviously those in the know still had hope that something could be done. Melissa seemed to have convinced herself that Scott was in some supernatural parallel universe and doing okay. Stiles indulged her with a Quantum Leap fantasy he'd thought too hard about.

Derek had failed to grimace down his smile as Stiles and Lydia had created a whole 'fanfiction' over Melissa's mother's Day dinner. They managed to turn every encounter she had for the day into 'Scott in somebody else's body, saving lives and changing history for the better, but still popping in to see his mom on Mother's Day.

They were so funny that it didn't even make her cry.

After Stiles had gone into a frenzy of arm flapping, as he cast Scott as the nearby heavily pregnant woman, and then went into a scene-by-scene rerun of the episode of Quantum Leap that put the other Scott (Bakula) into the same situation.

Derek wondered how he'd even come to be there for times like that. Why was he part of Melissa McCall's Mother's Day dinner? Why did he have Thanksgiving with the Sheriff every year? How did Christmas become waking up at Stiles' house, opening presents with him and his father, then going to the Martin house for the rest of the day?

Maybe it was because he helped everybody move with minimal complaints.

He helped Argent put everything into storage before he went back to France. He helped Melissa move into her more affordable one bedroom apartment. He manages her tenants in the house, when she has them.

People must either find out what happened to Scott, or what happens in the town in general, and move on pretty fast.

Then there was the time that couple moved in, doting husband and pregnant wife, and just as the baby was due to arrive...they left. Not the usual way, the Scott McCall way. They both disappeared, all their things were still there. The overnight bag, ready to take to the hospital, the new baby supplies, keys, shoes, phones.

Stiles had come back so fast when he heard about that. He just borrowed a car from a college buddy and drove, cross country. He barely slept during his overnight motel stays and his dad got so mad and worried that Derek flew to middle America, drove Stiles back to the airport, put him on a plane the rest of the way, and drove the piece of crap car back to campus and handed the keys to Stiles' bewildered friend.

He flew home and spent the rest of Stiles' period of 'further investigation' wanting to punch him.

That car would never have made it. It was probably worth less than the gas in the tank. The cost of getting stuck on the road with no car, and all the motel rooms, would have been more than if the idiot had just got a flight to begin with.

But he was a student and money was a thing. Derek threw a credit card into his face just before he put him on the plane home. It was for emergencies, or food, and never ill conceived road trips. Derek hadn't had to pay off anything on it to date. Stiles probably needed money more times than he could keep count but he never once let Derek cover it.

Derek told himself Stiles would probably have preferred to steal a hardly-used credit card from his wallet and use that for a happy meal just to get the toy.

Derek's eyes moved to the black, plastic dragon, sitting on his dash. Stiles had sent it to him, with a note making references he didn't get about having the hiccups and suggesting that Derek's teeth had fallen out. He didn't know why he kept it. He didn't know why he gave it pride of place in his car. All he knew was that Stiles had looked delighted when he saw it.

Derek liked the idea that he looked like he got the joke.

He smirked as he glanced to the cardboard sign on the passenger seat, beside him. He'd hold it up at arrivals with pride. He'd even taken the time to write it in italic.

Idiot

"Twenty five?"

"What, you don't think I look old enough to have a twenty five year-old son?" The Sheriff said with a twinkle in his eye.

"No, I mean I didn't think twenty five year-olds could be FBI agents."

"Well, the minimum age to become a Special Agent is twenty three, though I have never heard of a twenty three year-old agent." The Sheriff conceded. "The youngest I know of was 25 and was hired for his computer science degree. They hire people with all types of experience but the typical successful candidate is around thirty one with an advanced degree."

"That's your son?"

"No, no, Stiles isn't a Special Agent right now. He's going to be, and sooner than thirty one I'd bet, but he's in the loop. That's as much as I can say."

"You can say how he passed the polygraph test with nothing but lies," Parish chimed in as he leaned through the open door.

The Sheriff looked embarrassed but it melted into pride as he started speaking about it.

"That could have had them thinking he was a psychopath rather than a gifted liar." He paused to shake his head in disbelief. "My son a gifted liar. That was the one thing I had on him, I could always tell a lie from him. I could differentiate between a lie, a half truth and the absolute truth. I guess that's why I got so mad at him when he finally told me about werewolves. I couldn't pick up the lie."

He looked at Satomi, the local alpha, and wondered if he'd handled it better if someone his age... someone who appeared to be his age had been with Stiles to back him up. She'd been a great help to Scott's pack after he'd vanished. They hadn't wanted to replace him, but they'd needed the stability of an alpha and a pack. Even Derek hadn't had an attitude about the surrogate alpha, mostly because she was a connection to his mother and their pack.

"So the FBI want him for his ability to beat a lie detector?" She asked.

"A lie detector is inadmissible in court for a reason. It's more that he demonstrated how they could be beaten. He learned how to lie to werewolves, the machine and the supernatural use pretty much the same criteria for determining if you're lying or not."

"Tell the story about his thesis," Parish came all the way into the office now.

"You're prouder of him than me!" The Sheriff huffed.

"He's impressive, I'm impressed!"

"Okay," Satomi said, "so dazzle me."

"He broke down how the polygraph could be beaten. There's a lot that those in the know who knew about that already," the Sheriff waved a hand to dismiss that part as irrelevant, "but he then demonstrated how to get a reading from somebody who knows how to beat it. He also found a way to differentiate between somebody like him, deliberately lying but being undetected, somebody like a psychopath, and a sociopath."

"He couldn't prove a lie or a truth," Parish interrupted, "but he could determine from the test if it was a certain type of person and then recommend the different avenues the agents could take."

"He's fluent in Polish now," the Sheriff said, with a fondness that softened his whole face. "He used to be able to understand it when relatives were speaking it, but he'd never be able to speak it back to them. He had pronunciation problems and his tenses were off. He also couldn't read or write a word of it. He learned Albanian after that, though I don't think he's fluent in that."

"Impressive," Satomi nodded, remembering how difficult learning a whole new language from scratch could be, "but why focus on language skills?"

"Having languages helps a lot, he thought Polish was cheating because he already knew some," the Sheriff chuckled and rolled his eyes.

"Plus GW offer the classes free of charge," Parish added, now taking a seat.

The Sheriff looked at him and then arched an eyebrow.

"You happy there? Sure you don't want my seat?"

Parish grinned and folded his arms.

"I'm comfortable here, Sheriff.

Satomi sat forward, turning the photo frame on the desk towards her and smiling at the picture of Stiles at his GW graduation.

"Even though they were never actually my pack, I still feel I should know them better," she looked back to the Sheriff. "I thought I was keeping tags on my strays, but I don't really have strays at all do I?"

"They ask after you and your pack," the Sheriff said, his face and tone as firm and sincere as they ever could be. "When we thought those hunters had come to town to cause trouble, they were ready to drop everything and mobilize for you all."

"And every time I encounter one of my...generation," Satomi couldn't help but smile as she spoke, "I present Scott's case to them. There will be somebody old enough to have seen this before. Somebody will have a story or a book, or know of a similar vanishing."

"You know he'll be trying again as soon as he gets back," the Sheriff said, with a mixtures of fondness and sympathy for his son.

"He is a friend of many of our pack on Facebook," Satomi chuckled. "As soon as we knew he was coming back our group was abuzz. As I said, we have nothing new to offer, but we are available to him should he need us."

"You may regret the offer," the Sheriff warned her, "because I won't hesitate to send him to you when he gets frustrated and starts driving me crazy."

"Oh I have a plan, Sheriff, don't worry about that," Satomi reached into her purse and withdrew a book. The cover depicted a man sitting alone in a serene but empty landscape. The title read, The Evaporated People.

It was quite a sight.

Stiles was walking slowly in a heel to toe rocking motion on a black boot, strapped on firmly with Velcro. His other foot, was in a garish neon pink and glittery charcoal sneaker.

Lydia spotted him first, gave one of her smiles...the one that means you'll wish you never got on her radar, and hung back as she lifted her phone in front of her. She was poised to take a picture. Derek realised that his scowling at her doing this played right into her hands.

The shutter sound didn't escape his notice, despite the interference of people at arrivals, and he knew the image would be everywhere within the hour. Cora would probably see it before he did.

Great.

Stiles, hobbling on his mismatched footwear, towards Derek who looked angry enough to destroy...as he held up a hand made sign that read 'Idiot'.

"Derek!" Stiles flung out his arms, almost as if he was going in for the hug, and then thrust his luggage at the glaring wolf, letting it drop to the floor before rocking his way onwards. "Where's the car? What's the car?"

Lydia clip-clopped by, wheeling her compact suitcase behind her, and flipped her hair as she followed Stiles to the exit.

"Missed you Derek," she said, carelessly.

Derek thrust the sign into the chest of the young sap with a cheap bunch of flowers, who stood beside him, and picked up Stiles' bag and dragged his feet after them. He hoped there were revolving doors for Stiles to get trapped and steel grates for Lydia's heels to get stuck in.

There weren't.

Smooth floors and automatic doors, dammit.

After much more trouble than it should have been, Derek got Stiles settled in the back seat. Lydia had been no help at all, simply sitting in the passenger seat, fastening her seat belt, and checking her make up was impeccable in the mirror.

"I've been responsible for him up to this point," Lydia had said, "most of that while he was a drugged rag doll, "think yourself lucky and don't ask me for any help."

"I drooled on her pillow," Stiles said, a mischievous smirk curling at one corner of his mouth, "her pillow made from pure Muppet fuzz."

"Chenille," Lydia corrected as she took out her phone and started swiping and tapping at the screen.

Stiles mouthed the word 'Muppet' into Derek's face as he strapped him in. Derek slammed the door, Stiles pretended his leg had been hurt again but neither of his companions batted an eyelid. Stiles fidgeted until he got his own phone from his pocket and soon mirrored Lydia's actions.

"So," Derek said after turning the key in the ignition, "how did you do it?"

"Heroically," Stiles answered, distractedly.

Lydia snorted.

"Hey, when did you take this?" Stiles was now waving his phone, displaying Lydia's photo from the airport beside her head.

"Just before we landed," Lydia huffed and shook her head.

"Oh good, there's two of you now," Derek gripped the steering wheel and clenched his jaw. "Why couldn't you have rubbed off on him, huh? Why the other way around?"

"Nobody's rubbing off on anyone," Lydia said, giving a side-eye that Derek couldn't meet.

Stiles sighed.

"All my rubbing off is done alone in my room...sometimes with the help of a chenille pillow."

"Not funny," Lydia said, tapping one last time at the screen of her phone and then putting it away. "He chased a suspect, barefoot, over cobblestones..."

"Aesthetic cobblestones, not real cobblestones," Stiles interrupted.

"Barefoot, over aesthetic cobblestones, down stone steps, up a metal fire escape, then wrestled and restrained the suspect until somebody with shoes and a car showed up to make the arrest."

"Stole my credit, made the arrest my ass, they stole my credit." Stiles grumbled.

"He was so focused on that part of it, when he got to the front stoop he didn't use it like a normal person, he stepped off it sideways, broke his fifth metatarsal and fractured his lateral malleolus on landing."

"I would have used it like a normal person," Stiles sputtered, "but there was a puppy on it! What was I supposed to do, Lydia, trample the tiny dog?"

"Stop walking? Step over the dog? Move the dog? Try to take a two foot drop as if it was a six inch deep step?"

"That's not the depth, that's the rise," Stiles mumbled, Derek was sure he wasn't the only one who heard him, though. "Seven inches."

"Seven inches in your dreams Stilinski," Lydia said, gazing out of the window and smiling.

"Why were you barefoot?" Derek had to put a stop to that line of bickering immediately.

"I was about to take a shower."

"He was at the gym," Lydia gave the more pertinent information, with a self-satisfied smile.

"Why were you at a gym?" Derek's brow furrowed.

"Because I'm no a werewolf," Stiles said with a shrug, before gesturing to his torso. "This has to be maintained."

Derek slammed on the breaks and turned in his seat to look at Stiles all over.

"This what?"

"This!" Stiles gestured to himself again, clearly taking offence.

"I still don't see it, Stiles."

Stiles flailed his arms toward Derek's face, shooing him back to his job as chauffeur.

"You're not going to see it either. No gun show for you."

"Gun show?" Derek asked Lydia.

"He does have a couple of decent pistols," she conceded with a shrug and a nod.

"Glocks! I'm packing Glocks," Stiles said with pride.

"He has a four pack too," Lydia added.

"How do you know that?" Stiles sat up and blinked at her?

"You get very free when you're on pain meds, sweetie."

Derek pulled away again. Stiles narrowed his eyes and held his phone to his ear, considering Lydia's words and carefree attention to the landscape passing them in a blur, the ringing was loud enough for everyone to hear.

"Is that on speaker-phone?" Derek wondered if his werewolf hearing was heightened somehow.

"No," Stiles said, before looking at the screen and then tapping at it again, the ring tone reducing to the expected level, "yes. What is it with the damn touchscreen?"

"It's your prominent cheekbones, honey," Lydia said with a wave of the hand, "be grateful for a bone structure so good it can operate an iPhone."

Stiles held the phone at a strange angle, so the screen wasn't touching his face but he still had it to his ear.

"You have good bone structure too, you don't have this problem," Stiles huffed.

"I don't press the phone into the side of my face either, it ruins my make up."

"What make up?" Stiles grinned and fluttered his eyelashes, "That's your natural flawless beauty, right? You roll right out of bed looking like that."

Lydia turned her attention to a nauseated looking Derek.

"I've trained him well."

"You always did like a lap dog," Derek said.

"I'll be her bitch twenty four seven," Stiles announced, just as the ring tone stopped and his father's voice answered the call. "Oh, hey dad!"

"Do I want to know?" Derek heard the Sheriff asking.

"Lydia's a goddess and there's no shame in acknowledging it," Stiles proclaimed. "Anyway, we're on our way from the airport. Derek put me in my car seat and everything."

"Are you going to the house?"

"Which house?"

"OUR house!"

"Well, to drop off the bags and use the bathroom, then thought I'd go ov-"

"Don't go to the McCall place, Stiles."

"Why not?"

"Respect? Maybe talk to Melissa first, exchange pleasantries, sit on the couch and rest your leg? Be a normal person?"

"This boot is made for walking, pops," Stiles said, tapping the clunky black boot strapped to his leg, "and that's just what I'll do."

"You wanna take it to Sinatra, Stiles? Well, we'll do it MY WAY."

"Bang, bang, you shot me down," Stiles said as he slumped in his seat.

"I've got you under my skin, son, behave. Don't aggravate Derek."

Derek failed to suppress a growl.

"Don't aggravate him any more than you already have." The Sheriff added.

"We'll go home and order pizza, that's Amore," Stiles said with a lazy sigh.

"That's Dean Martin," Derek muttered.

"Dean Martin, son, ain't that a kick in the head?"

"Ugh, Lydia, a little help here?" Stiles appealed to her, still staring, dreamily, out the window.

"I can't hear both sides of the conversation, Stiles," Lydia said, before smirking, "I don't want to go and spoil it all by saying something stupid."

"Right, I'm hanging up, no pizza for old men. Enjoy your Kale and wheat grass, I'll send it to the station with a bran muffin." Stiles cut off his father's protests and tossed his phone beside him.

He folded his arms and tried not to pout.

Lydia's phone started to ring.

"Don't let him bribe you!" Stiles started to warn her.

"It's Kira."

"Kira?" Stiles blinked and shifted in his seat. "She was on the plane with us."

Lydia closed her eyes, pursed her lips tightly and answered her phone.

"We left you at the airport."

"Some of us had bags to claim!" Kira yelped.

"How are you two the brains of any operation?" Derek snapped, stopped the car, turned around and headed back to the airport.

"I'm all foggy from the meds," Stiles blurted out the first excuse he had.

"I was escorting him," Lydia couldn't help but sound guilty, "I thought she was with us."

"Where did you think she was sitting in the car?" Derek's jaw was clenched so tightly they were sure they'd soon hear bones cracking.

"Well...you missed important things too!" Stiles sputtered. "Like you didn't even ask about this monstrosity of a sneaker on my good foot."

"Hey!" Lydia protested.

"Thank you for lending me your sneaker, Lyds," Stiles said with as small an eye roll as he could muster.

"I figured you needed a high shoe to even out your walk with the boot," Derek forced out.

"Oh, well, yeah. That was it."

"Your feet are too big for my shoes," Lydia clicked her tongue and sighed, "I won't be able to fit in that now anyway."

"Don't blame me, I woke up with it on my foot. You made the shoe sacrifice all on your own." Stiles folded his arms across his chest. "For the record, your feet aren't nearly as dainty as you like to think."

Lydia turned on him with a hiss. Stiles gave her an exaggerated hiss back, making air claws with his fingers.

"I don't know why I thought I missed either of you," Derek barked. "I have no idea why I believed you could possibly have grown up and grown out of this crap. I can't believe..."

Stiles phone rang and he help up a finger to silence Derek as he answered it.

"Stilinski."

His cheekbone activated the speaker-phone immediately.

"Sorry," the voice on the other end said, sounding flustered, "I know you're on leave. You're not on the plane are you?"

"No, it's fine, what's up?" Stiles sounded professional and serious.

"It's Slade, he's...not happy that you're not working the Baltimore City Police Department investigation."

"Well," did you tell him I can still be in the loop?"

"We told him you're out, injured, we told him you're getting all the emails and case notes. He's jus... Yes, Mr Slade, I'm just telling him now."

There was a muffled sound and a grunt before a deeper, angrier voice burst from the speaker-phone. Stiles tapped at the screen to switch back and give the illusion of privacy back to the conversation.

"Stilinski! You there?"

"Put the keypad on, your cheek will only touch the numbers," Lydia whispered.

Stiles changed the setting on his phone and held it to his head again.

"What the hell? Did you hang up on me?"

"I'm here, I'm in the car," Stiles said. "Isaiah, I'm coming back, and they're gonna keep me informed, but I'm on the west coast for a few weeks now."

"So they move you on before you get the job done? You told me you were shutting this down. You swore!"

"I am coming back," Stiles was speaking calmly and firmly, the authority in his tone was jarring for Derek, Lydia seemed to be used to it and had dropped her antagonistic facade as soon as the call came in.

"Weeks, in weeks, you're dropping this ball after all the promises, just like every other one of you guys, every other time."

"I can't play ball with a broken foot, they won't let me, but I'm not out of the game. Isaiah, please, trust the team. I trust the team."

"Your team didn't promise me. Your team didn't give me speeches. Your team didn't play me the 'all cops aren't crooked' song on the violin."

"We are going to nail them," Stiles cut in. "Remember what I told you? You remember me telling you about all the good people I grew up with back home? All the good people killed on the job? Good people killed by white ass holes with superiority complexes? You remember me telling you how scared I get for my dad, for his deputies, who might get killed on the job because of a stereotype that everybody who does their job is dirty?"

"Yeah, everybody in sleepy-ville home town is a good guy and the bad black men are going to revenge kill them for shit they didn't do. Protect your own and leave us with the same shit, as always. I damn well knew it. I don't know why I listened to you."

"You listen to me because I told you about the time a dirty cop in my dad's department tried to kill a minor in custody because he was paid off. You listen to me because I tell you we had a deputy who tried to set his partner on fire in their cruiser. That bastard was charged and sent down. They both got charged and sent down. No excuses, no cover-ups, that's what I told you we'd get for you and we will."

"Not if you ain't here!"

"I'm not the team, I'm one guy. There are actual field agents, right there for you."

"And they protect their own, you're the only one I trusted not to sell us out to save the department's ass."

"Well you're wrong!" Stiles' voice rose a little, but he still had that out of character authority that stunned Derek into silence. "I trust them. I vouch for them. I don't want the good people in that department to get a bad name, and there are good people in that department. They came to us, remember? That's how I found you, the Baltimore City Police Officers who see this shit going on called us and told us to speak to you. I am not the only one on your side, on this case, doing the work. I am so many rungs down this ladder, Isaiah, you seem to think I'm way more important than I actually am."

"You seem to think you not being around makes no difference," the anger was lost in his voice now. "I'm sorry you got hurt. I want you to go home and heal with your girl. But I'm worried they're gonna shut this down while you're gone."

"If they were going to do that, they could do it with me there," Stiles said, starting to sound a little tired.

"You there in person? No way. You can talk, boy, and you don't shut up."

"And you know now I can talk on the phone just as well. I swear, Isaiah, they will keep me updated. I'll get every note sent to me. I'll be talking to them. I'm not on vacation."

There was silence for a moment.

"You get shot or something?"

"I broke my foot and busted up my ankle," Stiles mumbled, "what's with all the big front stoops in your city? Why do your doors need to be up so high anyway?"

"You fell off a stoop?"

"There was a dog! I just caught a bad guy."

"Maybe I do have too much faith in you."

"You're a charmer, Isaiah. Now talk to the team, they're my team, it's like talking to me only with pauses. You'll get used to it."

There were some friendlier words of goodbye before Stiles ended the call and dragged his hand over his face with a groan.

"All okay?" Lydia asked, watching him in the mirror.

"Yeah." Stiles slouched down in his seat, phone resting on his chest.

They drove the rest of the way in silence, pulled over to let Kira hop in, Derek putting her huge case in the trunk, and headed back out again.

"So Kira," Stiles began, "be honest now, you think Lydia has big feet right?"

"Stiles!" Lydia glared at him again.

"What? That's it? No apology?" Kira was blinking rapidly as she looked from one to the other. "You forgot me and that's just how it is?"

"I didn't forget you, I was just distracted by the size of Lydia's feet, you can understand that, right?"

"I'm going to kill you!" Lydia fumed.

Derek smiled to himself and drove them all the way to the Stilinski house without a single scowl.