In the end, Kira and Corey did most of the heavy lifting when it came to the final fight against the Wild Hunt.

As much as they all had wanted to spend more time celebrating Stiles' rescue, the urgency of the larger situation at hand had reasserted itself with another rash of disappearances. Before long it seemed like half the population of Beacon Hills had been snatched up, whole neighborhoods of suddenly abandoned houses and busy streets completely devoid of cars. The pack couldn't afford to wait any longer to make a move.

Kira worked the lightning, highjacking the Ghostriders' primary mode of transportation to bring them to a place of the pack's choosing for an ambush. Corey popped back and forth between the realms, dragging the Ghostriders fully into their world where they could be seen, and where they could be killed. Lydia's banshee shriek seemed to stun and disorient them. Stiles guessed correctly that the Ghostriders' own weapons would work against them where mundane weapons didn't.

The fight was bloody, but it was quick. By the end of it, people had begun reappearing, fading back into existence and blinking around like they were just coming awake from a very long sleep. The Sheriff and Parrish, in their reassuringly authoritative uniforms, had rounded them all up, kept them calm, and fed them some kind of story that Derek had been too exhausted to care about before sending them all home.

It felt almost anticlimactic in a way. A good way, Derek decided. After many days of persistent disorientation and mounting anxiety, after all the damage the Hunt had done and the greater threat they had posed, it was a little surreal to realize that they had come out the other side of it without a single loss. No one was dead or even badly injured, at least not for long. This was a definitive, all-around win, and now everything could go back to the way it had been before.

A knock came on Derek's door late that night, hours after the Hunt had been dispatched and the pack had gone their separate ways to rest and recuperate. Derek levered himself off the couch carefully—the gash along his side was closed by now, but still a bit tender—to answer it.

There was Stiles, loitering in the hallway, lopsided half grin on his face and hands stuffed in his pockets.

"Stiles," Derek said, smiling helplessly. It felt so good just to see him, to have the confirmation that he was real. "What are you doing here? I thought you were helping your dad and Jordan get everything sorted out down at the station."

"Ah, you know me," Stiles said with a shrug. "Only so long I can stare at paperwork before my brain goes haywire and I gotta get out. Shredded all the incriminating forms I could stand and then staged a jailbreak."

Derek hummed, unconvinced. "Your dad kicked you out, huh?"

"Parrish, actually," Stiles admitted readily. "I'm pretty sure if my dad could have me surgically grafted onto his side right now, he would."

As disturbing as that mental image was, it still made Derek laugh. The motion pulled at his healing wound. "Can you blame him?" he asked, bracing his shoulder against the wall to take some of the pressure off his side. "He's glad to have you back." We all are, he didn't say.

"Glad to be back," Stiles said. "Even if it does mean that I'm drowning in makeup work for an imaginary illness Melissa is forging documentation for."

Derek chuckled again, swallowing back his wince. Even so, Stiles' eyes followed the reflexive motion of his hand to his side. Derek cleared his throat, pushing himself fully upright again, suddenly aware that they were both hovering in the doorway.

"So what brings you by?" he asked. "Even if you've managed to detach yourself from your dad, I figured Scott would be next in line to hover over you. He was a mess without you, you know."

"Sounds like everyone was," Stiles said. He was fighting a smile, his scent undeniably pleased. "But, uh...I just kind of wanted to...check on you. You took a pretty solid hit there."

Derek glanced down at his own torso where his hand still rested. He knew that, under the tank top, the skin there would be smooth and unbroken, if bruised for an hour or two more. Stiles knew that too. "I'm fine," Derek said. "All healed up, just about."

"Good, good."

Stiles rocked back on his heels, nodding aimlessly. His hair was stuck up on the side like someone had been ruffling it again, or like Stiles had run his fingers through it a few times. He didn't seem inclined to leave, despite having done what he had supposedly come to do, but Derek didn't mind that. After so long with only faint echoes of the real thing, having Stiles' scent so fresh and present was a little heady. Derek sort of wanted to sink into it and never come out again.

Instead he made himself step back out of the doorway and toward the couch, letting Stiles choose whether to follow. He did, shutting the door behind him. There was a moment of expectant silence as Derek sat on the couch's arm, watching Stiles meander through the loft in the same general direction. He had the restless, fidgety air to him that usually meant he had something to say but wasn't sure how to say it just yet.

"I could see you," was what he came out with.

"See me?" Derek repeated. "What do you mean?"

"During the ritual thingy," Stiles said with a vague gesture of his hand. "Through the portal as it opened up. I could see you all on the other side."

"Oh."

"At least, I could see the five of you," Stiles amended. His fingers combed through his hair, made a detour to the back of his neck, and then found their home in his pocket again. "The ones with the strongest connection to me."

Derek felt heat in his cheeks, ridiculous as that was. "Oh."

Stiles scuffed his heel along the floor, eyes on that motion instead of on Derek. "Scott said you and Malia both had a really rough full moon," he said.

"Yeah, kind of." That was an understatement, but Derek didn't know what else to say. Another beat of silence.

"Were you ever gonna tell me?" Stiles asked, just before it went on too long. Derek couldn't parse his tone.

"I—" Derek stopped himself. He sighed. "I don't know," he said, honestly.

Stiles chewed on the inside of his cheek. "Was there a reason you didn't want me to know?" he asked. "I mean, how long has it been? You never said anything at all."

Derek's hands found their way to the couch's arm underneath him, fingertips digging into the leather. "It wasn't important."

"Wasn't important?" Stiles said, incredulous. "Dude, I'm your anchor. That's kind of a big deal."

"To me," Derek allowed, unable to deny it no matter how much he may have wanted to. He was long past the point of deniability, especially with Stiles' sharp eyes on him now, cataloging his every minute reaction. "It's a big deal to me, but it doesn't have to be to you."

A werewolf's anchor was important, intensely personal, an integral part of who they were. It wasn't a two-way bond, though. The emotional connection didn't need to be reciprocated, even when the anchor was a person. That wasn't the point of it.

Stiles frowned. "What do you mean by that?"

"I didn't want to put that onus on you," Derek said, eyes downcast so he didn't have to see Stiles' reaction. The leather squeaked in his grip. "I didn't want to make you feel responsible for me, or to make you uncomfortable by my fixating on you."

"Why would that make me uncomfortable?"

Stiles sounded genuinely confused. Derek kept quiet, unable to bring himself to give voice to his reasons, his doubts. He didn't want to point out that, of the werewolves in town, the majority of them had a romantic partner as their anchor. He didn't need to.

A pair of worn Chucks appeared in Derek's line of vision, toe to toe with his own bare feet. When he looked up, Stiles was looking back at him, his face inscrutable. From this close, his scent was a warm, almost tangible thing in the small space between them, and the quiet thump of his heart was clear. His was for once slower than Derek's.

"It doesn't make me uncomfortable that you care about me," Stiles said, that heartbeat steady. "You have to know that I care about you too."

"I know you do," Derek said. They were pack, after all. They were friends, good friends even. "But…"

"Is this the part where you say something horribly noble and self-effacing about how I deserve better than you?" Stiles asked abruptly, and Derek's next words caught in his throat. "Because I really think we can just skip over that and move on to the part where I say that I care about you more than you probably realize, and that when I was trapped in that godforsaken train station, I was missing you as much as you were missing me."

Derek's mouth opened and then closed again without releasing any sound. His heart kicked in his chest, tripping over itself in its haste to double its rate. Stiles was watching his face, dark eyes mapping his expression, waiting for a response.

"I mean, admittedly, I could be misinterpreting," he said, when Derek took too long trying to process his last statement and marshal his thoughts into some kind of answer. He leaned back on his heels, shifting away, a spike of anxiety in his scent as he said, "But it's just that the way Scott made it sound, it seemed like maybe… I just never realized that I was that important to you, is all. Not that friends can't be super important, I mean, obviously they are. Malia and I are just friends now, and I'm still her anchor. I just thought—"

Before he could step out of range completely, Derek found himself reaching out without pausing to think. He caught Stiles' hand on its way to run through his hair again and Stiles froze, breath held.

"You're not misinterpreting," Derek said. At least, he didn't think so. Stiles hadn't said it explicitly, but Derek was almost certain of what he hadn't said. He grew even more certain when Stiles didn't move away as Derek stood up, pushing forward into his space. He didn't let go of Stiles' hand, and Stiles didn't pull it away.

"Yeah?" Stiles asked, voice hoarse.

His chest thrumming with an innocent sort of nerves that he hadn't felt in many, many years, Derek lifted Stiles' hand to his mouth and laid a tentative kiss to his palm. The spike in Stiles' heart rate was loud and clear in his ears, the jump of the pulse beneath the delicate skin of his wrist where Derek's fingers lay.

Stiles let out a shaky laugh, his lips tugging up into the beginnings of a real smile. "No martyrdom for the sake of my potential future with hypothetically more emotionally healthy romantic prospects then?" he asked. "Because really, I know you've got some serious issues, but so do I and I gotta tell you, that is not reason enough not to—"

"I am a lot of things," Derek said. "But I'm not noble. And I'm definitely not that selfless."

The smile bloomed into something wide and bright. "Both of those points are debatable," Stiles said gamely, "but considering they are currently working in my favor, I'm not particularly inclined toward arguing them."

"There's a first," Derek said wryly, and Stiles laughed.

The laughter faded as Derek tugged on his hand, pulling him in a few inches closer until they were almost chest to chest, but the smile stayed. So did the new notes in his scent, something spicy and sweet that felt like happiness. Stiles' free hand came up to Derek's waist, settling along the fading bruise of his healed wound, gentle and deliberate.

"You know it's almost gone, right?" Derek asked as Stiles' thumb swept over the worst of it.

Stiles shrugged. "Yeah, I know," he said. "I still worry though—anxiety's a bitch like that—and I just don't like seeing you get hurt. Any of you."

"I'm okay," Derek said, warmth spreading through him from every point of contact between them. Then, with a squeeze of Stiles' hand in his: "A bit better than okay, truth be told."

"Aw, because of little old me?" Stiles asked, batting his eyelashes innocently.

Derek quirked an eyebrow at him. "Whatever could make you think that?"

"Hey, I have it on very good authority that you were a mess without me," Stiles pointed out, swaying into him. Derek took his weight, letting Stiles rest against his chest. Stiles' hand slipped from his and came to rest at the nape of his neck instead. It felt good there.

"Maybe a little bit."

Stiles beamed at the confession. "You know, I've never been so popular," he said. "Everybody suddenly wants to hang out with me! I'm gonna have to draw up a schedule to make sure everybody gets some Stiles Time and no one feels neglected. My calendar's about to get very full."

"You'll pencil me in though, right?" Derek asked.

"I think I have a slot open in June," Stiles said slowly, pretending to think about it.

Derek shook his head, biting back a persistent smile of his own. "It's a date."