[Sterek] Cupboard Love (boyxboy) (complete)

Chapter 22

Stiles manages to find a few hours on Saturday where he can actually head over to Derek's to cook for him for the week. It's a relief to be doing something that isn't papers or coding or studying. His brain feels like it needs a hard reset and cooking is often the best way to do that.

Stiles lets himself in, pushing the door open with his hip, hands full of groceries, and toes off his shoes before heading into the kitchen. The house smells vaguely of sawdust, so Derek must already be working on building some of the furniture Laura bullied him into.

It's quiet though, so Stiles figures Derek is out somewhere, or maybe asleep, which is why he jumps when Derek pads into the room, barefoot and with his sleeves rolled up to the elbows and a smudge of dirt along one stupidly high cheekbone. "You've got something," Stiles gestures and Derek wipes roughly at his face until it's gone. "You're good. Sorry if it's too early, I've just got a bit of a gap and figured I could cook now and maybe clear my head."

"That's fine," Derek says and hops up on the island, unknowingly mimicking Laura. "I'll hang out, if you don't mind."

"Sure, yeah, of course," he replies, flustered. "I'm making a pasta bake with swiss chard. It heats up well." Derek just nods, watching him intently and making Stiles even more nervous. Usually when he gets nervous he gets clumsy, so he falls back on his first line of defence: talking.

He rambles about Scott and Allison, about trying to make sure his dad eats well so he'll still be around when Stiles is old, about making friends with Danny in Senior year and how he'd introduced Stiles to actual programming instead of just the layman's code he was using to edit Wikipedia articles about old Murder, She Wrote episodes.

"I got interested in physical therapy after my uncle injured himself in a rec basketball game," Derek says while Stiles is scrambling for something, anything else he can talk about. It's a huge relief. "Wound up taking the program at the community college," he adds.

"What changed your mind? I mean, obviously you're super into the whole forest fire thing now," he asks while carefully ripping swiss chard from the stems.

"Millions of dollars from a random stock buy I did after one of the business classes?" Derek says sarcastically, but he clearly doesn't want to talk about the real reason, so Stiles accepts it and moves on.

"Yeah, I can see how that might be a bit of a game changer. And I guess forest fires are kind of a problem around here."

Derek nods, intent, his eyes still focused on Stiles. Even after Stiles turns back to the cheese he's grating and stops to check on the penne he's boiling, he can still feel Derek's eyes on him. "We only figured out a few years ago that setting controlled burns in specific areas prevents a big fire from sweeping through the whole park," he continues. "The Native Americans knew that ages ago and tried to tell people when they settled here, but no one believed them."

"Like an American Dark Ages of firefighting?" Stiles asks.

"Or of anything - who knows what else we brushed off?"

Derek Hale: natural history buff. Who knew? After that everything is easy. Stiles talks about his papers and exams, his plans for his trip back home over break, and Derek shares a bit about being the youngest of five, about his other sisters and brother, and how he and Laura used to get in trouble for kicking their socks off and leaving them in the footrests; how they'll probably do it again when they're both home just to bug their mom.

He feels vaguely homesick or nostalgic or both by the time the food is done and he's heading back to his apartment, but also clear-headed enough to tackle his next paper.