A/N: So this chapter is going to be painful, almost as much as (if not moreso) the last one. But chin up! Next chapter has some serious feels. And chapter 11 has something that most of you have been looking forward to... and some stuff you definitely haven't. ;) FYI, things start to move into a condensed timeline here. This chapter and next move a little more quickly than I feel they realistically should have, but a lot had to happen between Thanksgiving and Christmas, so a slight suspension of disbelief may be required here.
Stiles was certain he had never been more miserable in his entire life, and that included the day that Lydia had told him a snow cone had a better chance in hell than he did with her. He spent two solid weeks hating himself because it rapidly became clear that he had unintentionally and irrevocably severed the tie that had invisibly bound he and Derek together from their first meeting.
He'd been preparing himself for an onslaught of text messages, of call after call until he finally mustered the courage to answer. He hadn't at all expected to not hear from Derek once. Not a text, not a call, not even an accidental butt-dial. He'd been mentally composing his apology and his excuse in his head, fine-tuning the entire thing until he thought he might have a chance at getting Derek to forgive him. After two weeks, he had to acknowledge that he would never have a chance to use it, and Derek clearly had no desire to give him an opportunity to earn that forgiveness.
The first time he saw Derek after Thanksgiving break was over, he was pretty sure he knew what it felt like to have his heart ripped out. Derek had been walking with a petite brunette and both were laughing, that incredible smile beaming at him from a mere twenty feet away. When Derek's eyes had lifted from the girl's and landed on his, the smile had frozen in place, turning into something glassy and sharp. He resumed talking to the girl and when he'd passed by Stiles, who had come to a dead stop in shock, he shifted his shoulder just enough to skim by without grazing Stiles. It had been easily the worst moment he'd experienced since starting college.
"You're not even listening, are you?"
Stiles blinked, coming out of his Derek-induced reverie, and tried to focus on Scott. "You were saying something about Allison. Right?"
Scott sighed, rolling his eyes. "I was talking about the vet clinic I'm volunteering at. The doctor said I had real promise. That's not even close to being about Allison."
"Hey, it's not like it's not a safe bet when I have to take a guess," Stiles said with a shrug. "But congrats on the thumbs-up from the doc."
Scott frowned at him. "You could say it with a little more enthusiasm."
Stiles pasted an outrageously cheery, clearly fake grin on his face. "Way to go, future Dr. McCall!" he boomed, but it was hollow, and they both knew it.
"You know, this isn't exactly what I was thinking when I mentioned we hadn't seen each other in forever and should hang out," Scott pointed out as he sank into the back of the tiny loveseat shoved in-between Stiles' and Eli's beds.
"What?" Stiles protested. "We're hanging out, aren't we?"
"Yeah, and you're spending the entire time moaning and sighing and being completely miserable," Scott accused, though his voice was soft and sympathetic.
The words speared into Stiles' gut, deflating him like a balloon in the aftermath of a toddler's birthday party. "I can't help it, Scotty," he mumbled, eyes drifting closed. "I fucked up. I fucked up so bad. He'll never forgive me."
Scott was quiet; there wasn't any kind of encouraging response he could give to that, and they both knew it. Scott had learned the entire story when he'd gotten back from Thanksgiving break and he and Lydia had had to hold an intervention for their friend, who had spent the entire week holed up in his dorm room and drunk out of his mind. Stiles resented the pitying expression on Scott's face now; it was one thing to know how badly he'd ruined everything, and quite another to have it confirmed via Scott's (admittedly non-judgmental) face.
"Did you ever tell him why it's so important to you to not give up on finding your soulmate?" he asked, and Stiles groaned.
"It doesn't matter," he sighed. "It doesn't excuse what I did."
"Maybe not, but I think you should talk to him anyway," Scott replied firmly.
Stiles flopped onto his back, staring up at the ceiling. "Even if I thought I'd be able to get the words out, Derek would never listen to them," he whispered, a quiet finality in his voice. "I have to learn how to let him go."
It was the same thing with Lydia. "You're going to kill yourself with all this moping," she said in exasperation the day Stiles dragged himself to her apartment and flopped on her couch, bemoaning his entire existence. "You love him. He loves you. Fix this shit already, Stiles."
"Why did I even begin to think you might show a little bit of sympathy and compassion?" he groused, misery forgotten for a brief moment as he scowled at the beautiful redhead.
She made a face. "I was sympathetic and compassionate months ago. Now I'm bored with your drama, which, might I remind you, is all self-created. If you don't do something about this, I will." It was not an idle threat, which Stiles recognized.
It didn't stop him from chickening out every time the opportunity presented itself. For someone who mostly had classes on the opposite side of campus, Derek seemed to be in his space all the damn time, and Stiles despised the way his heart soared and crashed within a millisecond of each other every time he laid eyes on the other man. He was beginning to wonder how people survived heartbreak without having some other form of cardiac failure.
It didn't help that every time he laid eyes on Derek, Derek's gaze was nearly immediately drawn to him. Stiles didn't know if Derek was purposely torturing him by showing up on "his side", or if he was torturing himself, or if it was just really dumb, shitty luck. Either way, it meant he spent a lot of time dealing with icy glares that could shatter him at fifty paces, and he had to pretend he could easily ignore them.
Unsurprisingly, it never got easier. After a solid two weeks he still felt that gut-check when Derek ended up in his field of vision, and he was whining about it to Lydia one day at Bean Scene when she finally lost her cool.
"Stiles Stilinksi, I am not listening to another word of this!" she fumed, slapping down the cloth she had been using to wipe the counter. "I told you to fix this when it happened. I told you to fix it when I found you drunk and half-passed out on the football field. I told you to fix it when you spent day after day crying on my couch. Now I'm telling you, I am going to fix it!"
She emerged from behind the counter with a determined glint in her eyes and Stiles started to sit up and apologize, but the glare she shot him silenced him before he could get a single word out. "Stay here. Do not move. Your ass better still be on that seat when I get back, or so help me, I will track you down and make you suffer."
It was a sufficiently scary threat, and it kept Stiles glued to the seat as the first five minutes passed. Then another five. Then ten. At thirty minutes exactly, Stiles' head snapped up from where he'd been contemplating his knees when he heard the sound of laughter. His stomach twisted instantly when he saw Lydia dragging a recalcitrant, moody Derek Hale behind her, to the amusement of the majority of Bean Scene's patrons. One long, perfectly manicured finger stabbed in Stiles' direction, and Stiles was more afraid of her than him when she snarled at Derek to "sit your ass down, and don't even think about moving until the two of you have talked to each other."
Derek sat, his eyebrows drawn together in a thunderous scowl as he refused to even acknowledge Stiles. Stiles glanced helplessly at Lydia, who nearly bared her teeth at him as she pointedly stared at the back of Derek's head, and he sighed.
"We might as well talk about it," he finally muttered reluctantly. "She'll keep us here until Christmas otherwise." Derek slid a glance in his direction without moving his head, his lips pressed together, and Stiles scowled right back and rolled his eyes. "I fucked up, okay? I fucked up, royally, and I've hated myself pretty much every day since then. Happy now?"
A disdainful snort escaped the other man before he could stop it. "Hardly," he retorted, the word drawn out through clenched teeth. "You deserve to hate yourself."
"I know, Derek! I hate myself precisely because I know exactly how much I should hate myself!" he cried, throwing his arms in the air, and Derek shifted slightly until he was actually facing Stiles, studying him suspiciously.
"If this is a ploy to get me to forgive you, you can fucking forget it," he spit out. "You fucking left me, Stiles. You told me you loved me, fucked the hell out of me, and then fucking left. You broke my fucking heart and I don't know why the fuck you did it, but I will never fucking forget that."
Stiles blinked. Derek was no stranger to the occasional f-bomb, but he was pretty sure he had never heard Derek spew so much profanity at one time. "This isn't a ploy, Derek. Lydia's been on my ass pretty much ever since it happened, telling me to fix it. She got tired of waiting for me to do it on my own, so she intervened. I had nothing to do with this."
He snorted again, crossing his arms defensively over his chest as he glanced away once more. Stiles leaned forward, his elbows digging into his knees as he dropped his head into his hands, fingers plowing tunnels through the thick strands at his temples. "What I did was unforgivable," he admitted softly. "I don't expect you to forgive me. But I want you to understand why I did it. Maybe then you'll know exactly how much I destroyed myself, too."
Derek uncoiled, leaning forward into the space between them and sticking his face into Stiles'. "I will never understand," he hissed, and the venom in his tone combined with the fury on his face had Stiles rearing back fearfully. "And I don't fucking care that you destroyed yourself in the process."
Stiles swallowed painfully. He'd thought he'd been prepared to face down an angry Derek. What he hadn't know was that there was no way to be prepared. There couldn't be anything worse than the look of contempt and disgust on the face of the man he loved more than he'd ever known he was capable of.
He opened his mouth, though in truth he had literally no clue what he could possibly say, when Lydia came over to save the day. Sort of. She sat down beside Derek, patting his knee sympathetically, and sighed. "Look, I know you don't owe Stiles anything. I know what he did, and if I were you, I would have kicked his balls into his throat." Both Derek and Stiles winced at the graphic threat. "But he's my best friend, and I can't stand seeing him so unhappy. I also know he has his reasons for what he did, shitty as it was. Please, if not for Stiles, then for me, let him explain. Then you can leave if you want to."
The thing about Lydia was, she was a total bitch when she wanted to be. She was also an amazing person and friend, which Derek had come to understand in the time he had known Stiles. It was impossible to ignore the simple, heartfelt request, and Stiles could see the moment Derek caved. "Fine," he growled. As Lydia stood, patting him on the shoulder this time, his head swiveled until the full effect of his adamantium-melting glare was focused in on Stiles. "Talk. You have five minutes, and then I'm gone."
The pressure it put on Stiles had the words freezing on his tongue, and he stared at Derek helplessly while he struggled to figure out how to start, what to say. Derek watched him impatiently, looking pointedly at his watch as if to say, "tick tock, time's a-wasting".
Finally, he found a place to begin. "My entire life, I've been waiting to find my soulmate," he said, and it didn't escape his notice that Derek flinched. "When I was younger it was a fantasy, a fairy tale, the handsome prince and the beautiful princess who were meant to be in love and together forever. When I got older, I realized that it wasn't always a fairy tale, especially because the mark isn't definitive, it doesn't tell you exactly who, it just kind of guides you in the right direction." Derek sneered at him, but it wasn't as vicious as it had been, which was heartening.
"My mom," and here he faltered; talking about her was always difficult, even with Derek, whom he'd told the whole story to, "my mom always told me soulmates were special. That this was the person you were inextricably tied to from the moment you were born, and it was a bond that could never, ever be broken. She told me never to settle. She wanted me to wait for my soulmate, to make sure that when that person came into my life I was ready for them, that I didn't lose them because I hadn't been patient enough to wait for them. She always insisted that I was special, and so was my soulmate, and I deserved nothing less than that person. She wanted so much to see me find my soulmate, to see me be as happy as she was with my dad." He choked up a little and he had to fight back the tears before he could continue. "I've been actively trying to find him ever since. I want to show my mom that I found him, that I waited and was worthy of him."
The final words came out on a rushed exhale of breath, and Stiles could see that Derek was struggling with a response. How could he possibly be angry with Stiles after that, even though he clearly wanted to be? Stiles was honoring his mother's dying wish, what kind of a douche would he be if he still resented Stiles?
Stiles stepped in to save him. "It doesn't excuse what I did. But I wanted you to know why finding my soulmate is so important to me that I ran away from the one person I've ever been head-over-heels in love with, who I've been happy with since the day we met. I love you, Derek, that is the God's-honest truth. But you're not my soulmate, and I can't give up on finding him."
Derek stared at him for several minutes, and Stiles chose not to mention that it had long been past five minutes by that point. "Why?" he asked finally. "If what you're saying is true, and you gave up on us because of what your mother wanted for you, why did you…" Fuck me were the words he refused to say, but Stiles heard them as clearly as if he'd yelled them.
"Because I'm weak," he said simply. There was no sense in trying to evade it or sugar-coat it. "I loved you, I wanted you, and that night I wanted to pretend that it was good enough. My mom wanted me to be happy above all, which is why she was so determined that I wait for my soulmate. I was happy with you. I knew we could have been happy for as long as we were together. I tricked myself into believing I was doing what she would want."
"And afterward?" There was only a trace of bitterness in the question, which was better than Stiles could have hoped for.
"I ran away because I couldn't face you," he answered immediately. "When I woke up I knew I'd been wrong to give in to how I felt about you. I also knew if I explained to you why the soulmate thing was so important, you'd try to talk me into staying for the same reasons I'd talked myself into it the night before. And you'd have succeeded. I wanted to believe it, and I would have let you convince me, and I would have been doing everything she'd begged me not to do. I couldn't do it, Derek, so I ran away. And I'll regret what I did every day for the rest of my life."
Derek sat there for a long moment and Stiles waited. Waited for him to get angry and leave, taking Stiles' heart with him. Waited for him to say Stiles was forgiven, because he loved him and couldn't hold it against him. Waited for him to decide whether Stiles' heart would live or die. "So am I supposed to forgive and forget because you thought it was better to rip my heart out than to hold yourself accountable for your own actions?" His voice was pleasant, his smile genial, and Stiles knew he'd been wrong. This was worse. So much worse.
"You're not supposed to do anything but what you want to do," Stiles replied softly. "I'm not asking anything of you except for the time you've already given me, to explain. I wanted you to know it wasn't because I didn't love you enough. It was because I loved you too much."
Derek blew out a breath and stared at Stiles. "I don't know if I can be your friend again," he said finally. "Things have changed between us too much. But we were good friends once and…" Stiles' heart rate shot into overdrive when Derek paused, hardly daring to believe he might be granted a second chance, especially considering how angry Derek had been only ten minutes ago. "And I don't love you anymore. So it might be easier to try again."
Stiles couldn't breathe. He couldn't inhale, couldn't even gasp in a half-breath. Derek didn't love him anymore. He'd finally broken that fragile, beautiful bond between them. "That's… that's good," he finally managed, wheezing. "It'll be easier, if you don't love me. We can, uh, concentrate on being just friends. Really good friends. That's all." He tried to nod but knew it came across as if a puppeteer was jerking on his strings for the way his head bobbed erratically.
Derek gave him a strained half-smile. "I hope we can," he offered, though it didn't sound entirely genuine. "Maybe if we can put all the romantic bullshit behind us, we can become the kind of friends we should have been."
"Time to give it the old college try," Stiles responded with fake cheer.
Derek barked out what was apparently a surprised laugh. It was clear he hadn't intended to allow Stiles that kind of familiarity, at least not yet, despite his well-intentioned words. "I can't see you giving it anything less than your all," he admitted, unexpectedly gentle, and Stiles sighed quietly. Maybe, just maybe, Derek was right after all. If they put all the bullshit behind them, they could move on and actually be the amazing friends they'd started out as.
Stiles would just have to spend the rest of his life pretending he didn't love Derek with all his heart and soul.