Chapter 3

Navigating the aura-sphere's cryptic countdown would be easier if Derek had a more personable job. Laura was the one who went out and organized their crew, coordinated with each venue's local muscle, and talked to people on the phone. Derek was the one who would walk the entire venue three times to make sure he hadn't missed anything and then watched every member of the sounds, light, and stage crew to make sure no one was doing something potentially hazardous… like unscrewing stage lights.

Imitating Stiles, Derek now wore a black and red wrist band over his numbers. Between the singer's insensitive words and Emily's intrusive groping of his arm, Derek wasn't taking any more chances. If he met someone in the next few days and it seemed like they may be the one, then he'd take the wristband off and they could touch their wrists together and get the official okay from the aura-sphere and all that jazz. But until then, the wristband was staying on.

Maybe Stiles was smarter than Derek initially gave him credit for.

Rubbing his fingers over the unfamiliar fabric, Derek watched as the stage crew set up and the sound crew did a sound check. If any of this tour's crew were his One, he hadn't noticed yet. They were all nice, he supposed, but since he was nothing if not an anti-social butterfly, it was hard to get a true feel for anyone, and no one was making an effort to talk to him either.

"Boo," someone said right by his ear, and it sounded like a snap in the quiet air around Derek.

Spinning his head around, he found himself face to face with his client, who looked extremely pleased with himself for startling Derek.

"Stiles," Derek scolded and dropped his wrist.

"Did I scare you?" Stiles asked and shifted the hood on his jacket so it hung more over his face. "You didn't even notice me coming up, did you? I totally got you."

"Stiles, I have a job to do," Derek said and looked back at the crew. "Shouldn't you be getting ready for your meet and greet?"

In response, Stiles groaned. "Damn, you're no fun. I came here to escape my tour manager, not find a second one." He crossed his arms and stood beside Derek, surveying the arena and stage from their spot in the bleachers. "Well… no falling lights this time, right?"

"Your stage has no lights today. Just the sun. But hey, your stage is built from scratch. There's always the chance that it'll collapse beneath you, so don't worry," Derek answered and then knit his brow tightly together when he realized he was joking with someone.

"Awesome. And maybe this time I'll get, like, a cool bruising or a broken ankle. Then my fans will think I'm badass for surviving." And Stiles was joking back. Derek bit his cheek. This was not a typical occurrence in his life. How long could he keep this up?

"What, no injuries to show off from me tackling you to the ground?" he asked and turned his head just enough to get Stiles in view so Stiles could see him smirking.

A dramatic, disappointed sigh escaped Stiles' lips and he shrugged. "Gosh, I wish. All I got was a skinned elbow and look" – he held up his elbow for inspection and it was a healed, fresh pink – "no proof. Ms. McCall put Neosporin on it and now it's like it never happened. Didn't even go to the hospital."

"Such a disappointment," Derek drawled.

Stiles nodded. "Absolutely. Next time you save my life, I expect better from you."

"I'll do my best."

And now Stiles was full-on grinning at him, like this kind of banter was completely normal. And maybe between Stiles and Scott it was, but it wasn't normal for Derek. Despite this, he found himself smiling back. It was nothing beaming like Stiles', but it was there, toying with his lips and sending a warm feeling to his stomach, so it counted nonetheless.

Both their phones went off at the same time and broke the moment.

Derek's phone showed a text from Laura, but Stiles actually had a phone call. From the expression he made, Derek guessed it was Ms. McCall.

"Oh, hey, Mom," Stiles greeted and pushed his hood down. "What? No. I'm totally ready. I was just stopping by the stage to thank Derek for saving my life…. Yeah, yeah. I'm heading over right now. Yep. Walking as we speak. Uh-huh. See you in a second."

Judging by Stiles' expression and muttered "Shut up," Derek's face must look exactly how he felt – oddly amused and not surprised at all. Stiles was a smooth little liar and also a procrastinator. Sort of the opposite of Derek – who was kind of a terrible liar and had a work ethic that refused to let him not do his job.

"Need to head out?" Derek asked.

"Yeah," Stiles sighed, slipping his phone back into his pocket.

"Want me to walk you out?" And Derek hadn't even checked his text yet, but it could wait.

Without a second of hesitation, Stiles said, "Nah," and shook his head. "I can make my own way. Besides, we're ending on a good note here. If you walk with me, we still have time to start getting on each other's nerves."

"Valid point," Derek conceded, despite how it hurt his pride. Someone relating Derek to a bad conversation or expression was not something to be proud of, and honestly he hated to even admit that he'd caused such a thing. His mother was always talking about putting aside your personal feelings while working, and yet Derek had pretty much painted every interaction since arriving with all his hormonal emotions… which were mostly negative.

Stiles smiled at him and held his hand up in a wave as he turned away. "I'll catch you later, sour puss."

And then he was trotting down the steps and out of sight. After he was gone for a full minute, Derek mentally cursed. He'd meant to ask Stiles why exactly he'd decided to let them stay on as his bodyguards.

When he checked his text, Laura was telling him Stiles was late and asking if Derek had seen him. Sighing, Derek sent back 'No' and put his phone away.

A signing event wasn't a place Derek needed or wanted to be, but Laura had volunteered to go. Every half hour, she sent him a text with an update on the event, and that was cool… if he cared about what she was sending. A third of her messages were job related. The rest, not so much.

Between

'Two ppl just bumped into each other in line & found out they're soulmates. Hurray for One!'

And

'Lot of Ones here today. Expected more Zeros hoping Stiles was their One. Should I be this disappointed?'

Derek may as well have been at the event instead of overseeing set-up. Around two p.m., Derek's stomach started to growl, but he refused to leave the area unsupervised. It was probably a sad sign that one of his more senior employees popped up right at that time to relieve him.

"Get out of here, Derek. You need to eat or you'll be unfocused," Jordan Parrish ordered as he came to stand by Derek.

Parrish had come to work for them after doing a stint on the elder Stilinski's tour. He skillfully name dropped the rock star in his resume and interview with the Hale company, and it did a lot to bolster his chances despite the 'stint' being a one-time gig and not a full contract run. He'd been a local back then, but now he was with a company, now he went where the client went.

That was five years ago. And he'd been a huge change for everything at the heart of the Hale family.

"Hey, Jordan. How much aura-sphere do you think you've got in you?" Derek asked and glanced down at the man's wrist. Instead of numbers, plain skin stared back. There were no marks at all.

At the question, Jordan looked down at his wrist momentarily as well. Then he shrugged. "Not sure. I'm sure there's still plenty, even though the numbers are gone. We both know it's possible for them to come back on, like some sick light bulb, so the energy must still be there. But I don't really think about it a lot. Why?"

Now Derek shrugged – a quick roll of his shoulders. "You verge on that psychic area sometimes – like my mother."

Jordan chuckled and shook his head. "Because I know you'd starve yourself if someone didn't come relieve you of duty?" he asked and clapped Derek on the shoulder. "I'm not psychic. And neither is Talia. We're both just… empathetic. Now go eat."

A gruff grunt was all Derek could respond with. His mind was on Jordan's wrist. When you finally met 'The One', your wrist lit up like a fluorescent bulb all over and people reported warm, tingling sensations all over their bodies. Then, in an unexplainable phenomenon, your wrist went blank. No more numbers. No more countdowns. Nothing.

Except when it didn't.

Talia Hale was a good example of this. Married happily to The One for twenty-five years, her wrist blank and perfect. Then the car accident happened. Now Talia Hale's wrist was alight once more. Typically when a loved one dies, the one left behind gets a new count down. Usually it starts at zero, because someone alive long enough to see their first love die has typically already met the person who's aura matches up next-best with theirs. But for some, the countdown is back in the double digits, and middle-aged people find that jolt of youth again as they wonder and worry over their futures.

For Talia Hale, things were a little different. Her light came back on, but there was no number in place. Instead, two small dashes decorated her wrist, like a stop watch that hadn't been set. Uncle Peter called in the family doctor when the lights appeared two days after Dad's death, but he seemed displeased with their evaluation.

Sometimes when a person loses their first love, they no longer require or desire someone new to fill that hole, and sheer strength of will keeps the clock from counting. Talia had a large family and a close-knit family-like feel in her company. She had all the 'soul mates' anyone could want, according to her, and she had decided long ago that, no matter what, her first true love would be her only one.

Derek could understand that. But he couldn't help but wonder about Jordan. What would the man do if his girlfriend died in an accident like Derek's father? If those lights came back on before the police could call, if they came back on a week later, what would they do? Would they choose to move on and find their next person, or would they become eternal dashes, like his mother?

And what about Derek? What if his numbers started a new countdown before he found his one? Would he grieve someone he'd never met? And what about his second soul mate? Would their relationship be tainted by the fact that Derek had never met his first?

Shaking his head, Derek focused on filling up his plate at the food tent set up just outside the arena for the crew. There was no sense in wondering about these things. Jordan and his girlfriend were both healthy and safe, and Derek still had eighteen days to find his soul mate. Any 'what-if' scenarios were unnecessary stress and definitely unnecessary distractions from work.

'OMG Stiles just dumped caramel frap all over his shirt,' Laura texted.

'omg can you tell how interested I am?' Derek texted back.

'Supremely,' Laura answered almost too fast to be comical.

And Derek almost made a comment about her preoccupation with liveblogging the event instead of being a security guard, but then someone sat down at the table with him. With a quick glance around, Derek saw that, of the four tables set up, only two were occupied. Derek was one of the occupiers, but there were plenty of other seats around.

His new lunchtime cohort sighed instead of greeted him and then stabbed his fork into the tender meat of the ham laid out on his plate.

"Um," Derek began and then stopped, unsure how to continue. When he got no response, he tried again. "Shouldn't you be at the signing?"

Scott McCall's face screamed innocence when he finally focused on Derek, but Derek wasn't so sure about its validity. Scott was Stiles' assistant tour manager. If not at the signing, surely he had someone fancy to have lunch with at least.

"Not really," Scott said and swallowed his food. "I'm his liaison with the crew, not the public. Besides, we're friends. I'm not his shadow."

And then they ate in silence. In his chest, Derek's heart hammered with anxiety. He really needed to work on small talk with people, because he was far too nervous about messing up this conversation. Scott appeared perfectly at ease, which should make things easier, but it kinda made Derek annoyed instead.

"Did you need something?" he asked when he finished all but the mashed potatoes on his plate.

"No. You just looked lonely." And Scott shoved a heaping spoonful of his own potatoes into his mouth. Derek grimaced and Scott tried not to laugh before he swallowed. "Listen, dude. Stiles is cool, alright? And he noticed you don't hang out with anyone, so he asked me to make sure you got your daily dosage of human interaction."

"How kind of him," Derek grunted out, and really he supposed he should be grateful that someone cared about that, but at the same time he felt insulted – like Stiles didn't think Derek could handle his own social life. "But you don't have to. I'm fine."

"I can see that."

Derek huffed and focused on his potatoes, which he pushed around his plate a bit before regrouping them into one spot and then repeating the process before finally deciding to eat them. When he looked up, Scott was staring at him, but the younger man quickly looked away when he got caught.

"What?" Derek snapped.

"Nothin." But under Derek's glare, Scott couldn't hold up. "Why are you a security guard? Couldn't you be like… a model or an actor or anything?"

"My family is all in security, like the Argents. It's what we do, and we all happen to like doing it," Derek said, setting down his spoon on his empty plate.

"Alright, that's cool, I guess. Family business. I mean, I guess that's part of the reason I started doing this too. My mom loves her job and I've been on sets and stages and tour buses most of my life, so it kind of soaked in. I was thinking of branching off into being a producer though. Know what I mean?"

"If you're suggesting I think outside the box and find new employment, you don't have to be cryptic about it. You can just ask me to leave." He stood then, taking his plate with him to the trash, and Scott followed immediately after him.

"No, that's not what I was saying. I was just saying I love my job but I have other interests. It was a simple conversation." And he slipped between Derek and the trash to throw his stuff away first.

"You want to know my interests? Fine. I'll tell you if you move," Derek agreed and Scott had never moved so quickly. Derek took his time throwing out his plate, partially to make Scott wait and partially to give himself time to think about the answer. "I like dogs – all kinds, and when I was five, I wanted to own a dog breeding business," he said finally. "Enough?"

"For now, I guess." And Scott shrugged before walking off with a slight bounce in his step. His odd glee over the conversation made Derek uneasy, but there was nothing much he could do about it, especially since he had no proof it had any malicious meaning.

Suddenly Derek had an awful, terrible thought. His mother gave him this job to make him socialize. Oh, that was evil. It was positively Peter of her, and he would not forgive her. Today.

A few hours before dinner, Laura, Stiles, and the rest of the crew returned from the signing. Stiles regaled them with facts about the length of the line and how it zigzagged through the store, went out the door, and disappeared out of sight of the glass storefront, and about the people he met and things he signed.

"I signed a lot of pictures and CDs and paraphernalia but three girls and a guy asked me to sign body parts and, oh my sweet baby Jesus, there was a guy who tried to start up a biblical discussion with me right there at the table, like there weren't fifty billion people waiting in line. And another guy told me he loved me but that it was because the government was using my music to brainwash people. Now he was funny."

And the stories went on and on until dinner. Most people listening had been present and jumped in to aid the stories when it was warranted, but mostly Stiles needed no encouragement or support. Of those who weren't at the signing but were at story time, there were three and one of them was Derek. He leaned against a wall as Stiles was given new clothes to change into, vanished behind a changing wall, walked out in casual clothes, and was then prepped for dinner. But no matter how many times he was interrupted for news about work or to be asked a question about something unrelated, Stiles kept going back to the signing event when he was allowed to talk freely once more.

Odd to say, but Derek found it slightly endearing and definitely comical.

When he and Laura retired to their room for the night, she sighed dramatically and dropped her jacket over a chair.

"You know how they say you should never meet your idols?" she asked, slumping into the squeaky fabric.

"What? Tired of Stiles already?" Derek replied, sitting on his bed and removing his shoes. Honestly, he was surprised. It usually took more for Laura to stop liking something.

"No." But she sighed. "He's still great. He's fun and he's funny and he's so talented. But Derek, he talks SO much. And I blame my low tolerance for it on you. You're virtual muteness has ruined me."

"Nope. Can't blame me. I'm not mute around you," Derek reminded and picked up the room service menu.

Leaning forward and balancing her chin in her hand, Laura surveyed him. "Yeah, but you sure don't talk half as much as Stiles, or anyone else for that matter. It's a good thing your soul mate likes the strong, silent type."

It was the first time Laura had ever brought up the subject of Derek's timer. Usually she waited for him to say something, or she reacted to him reacting to his numbers. The odd broach in their rules of conversation drew Derek's attention out of the menu and over to his sister.

"What?" he asked smartly.

Her shoulders rolled in a shrug. "I don't know. I guess seeing all those fans today who weren't there to make Stiles fall in love with them… and even those who were… it made me wonder about you and how long it'll be before you figure out who's aura matches yours. I mean, I just want you to be happy, you know? You smile and talk more when you're happy, and you've been so quiet since-"

She cut herself off, and Derek gave her a steady stare, daring her to continue but also asking her not to.

Taking a deep breath, she continued. "All I'm saying is that even without a true love, you still found happiness once, and I'm just excited for you to find it again… and for forever this time."

"Thanks, Laura," Derek said, and he meant it for everything she left unsaid as well as for all her well wishes spoken out loud.

And as he drifted off to sleep that night, he expected to think about the past, but instead he thought of Stiles and dreamt about asking the singer to sign his chest.

Preview Chapter 4:

There's a party thrown in honor of the new tour and everyone's there – major artists like Bono and John Stilinski, and plenty of press. Derek is meant to be looking for future work, but everywhere he looks, he sees something that reminds him of soul mates. Unsurprisingly, Stiles and he end up disagreeing, but maybe the evening isn't a total loss. Derek thinks he may have a clue to who his soul mate is.