On a Journey

☆

Taylor Swift is no stranger to coordination issues.

He manages to work his way around them with extra practice of wielding weapons, but sometimes it sneaks up on him.

Like right now.

Seemingly having tripped over nothing, Taylor falls forward and braces himself for impact.

The floor of Link's house is wooden, so Taylor can't even console himself by the idea of falling onto carpet. How did he slip? He doesn't know. It just happens. Sometimes no amount of training and practicing can prevent the air from sabotaging him.

And he knows it will hurt, because the floor is hard and it always hurts. It always hurts, but he recovers. But before he recovers, he's going to faceplant. He scrunches his face up, ready to hit the ground.

But then he stays suspended in the air.

"Are you okay?"

Taylor opens his eyes. Link is holding him by the arms and scanning his face with wide eyes.

Wide eyes… that are so close to his face.

Taylor feels a rush of heat coursing through him as he runs his gaze down Link's worried face, stopping at his lips.

They're pressed tightly together in concern, and then they're open, and saying something…

And Link is breathing, and Taylor can feel it on his face.

And Link says his name, and with the way the syllables sound on his tongue, Taylor feels like he's been put under a spell. 

Hypnotized.

Enchanted.

And he says it again, and it's just as mesmerizing as before.

They're so close together. Only a sliver of space prevents them from making contact.

There's one thought plaguing Taylor's mind and making him feel like he could melt.

What it would feel like to close that gap…

Taylor finds his body moving without his permission, chasing the pull of Link's lips like a magnet.

"Taylor!" Link shouts, and Taylor's shoulders are shaking. Link is shaking them.

"Hu—uh… yeah?" Taylor asks, dazed. The gap is wider now—Link must have made him stand upright.

"I asked if you were okay and you didn't respond," Link's lips move fast. "You looked like you were about to pass out."

Taylor's face burns.

"I—uh, I'm fine—" he winces at the way his voice cracks. "Sorry. Thanks."

"You should sit down," Link says, guiding him to the couch, hands still on his shoulders. "I'll get you some water."

"Mm, yeah," Taylor says, only half-processing Link's words because his hands are still on his shoulders…

Once Link sits Taylor down and leaves his side to get water, Taylor buries his face in his hands. God, he really is burning.

"Here," Link says, sitting next to him. Taylor lifts his head and sees a glass of water being held out to him. He takes a sip.

"Thanks. Sorry, didn't mean to freak you out."

"It's fine, I just wanna make sure you're okay."

"I'm okay. I have coordination problems sometimes. That's why I tripped. I'm not gonna faint or anything."

Probably not, he thinks. With the way Link is looking at him, nothing is off the table.

"Okay. Just… drink some water," Link says, and Taylor takes a sip. "You look really red."

Taylor chokes.

"Slowly," Link adds, patting Taylor's back as he coughs up water.

"Yep," Taylor says between coughs. "Got it."

Oh, god.

But Derek being secretive with his laptop, well, that's new.

Stiles tries everything. He tries to sneak behind Derek to get a look at the screen but that's a bust because werewolf hearing is impossible to sneak up on. He tries guessing Derek's password when Derek isn't there but that's a bust because Stiles is very, very bad at guessing passwords.

(Later he will find out the password is 5T11355T111N5K1 and then he'll feel like an idiot because he should have guessed that.)

At first Derek is only secretive with his laptop for an hour or so each day and that's fine. When that grows to several hours each day, Stiles' spideysense starts tingling. And by the time Derek has locked himself on the upper floor of the loft, in what had once been Peter's bedroom, alone, with his laptop, for two entire days, well, by that point, Stiles is worried.

Very worried.

Very, very worried, actually.

Derek has probably found someone else. That's what all the tap tap tapping is about. He's sending frantic messages and making arrangements to meet them or maybe - maybe he's in contact with a divorce lawyer and he's filling out paperwork with list after list of everything Stiles has done wrong because he's the most useless husband ever or -

The point is, Stiles is worried.

So when Derek emerges from the room that he and Stiles refer to as the spare bedroom and Peter refers to as my bedroom because he's an asshole like that, and he slinks down the spiral staircase and lurks at the bottom, chewing his lip in a way that he's picked up from Stiles over the years -

When he does that, Stiles' spideysense moves from tingling to stabbing.

"I've done something," Derek says, and scuttles off to the kitchen like that sentence won't invoke further questions.

Stiles scuttles after him because he needs to know.

"What?" he says to Derek's back. "What have you done? Have you met someone else? Appointed a divorce lawyer? I promise I'll start coming home from work on time and I promise I'll put the cap back on the toothpaste and I promise I won't put empty cartons of milk back in the fridge, I promise anything you want, just please... Derek, are you - your shoulders are shaking, are you crying?"

There's a little meep and then Derek turns round and he isn't crying, he's laughing, and he draws Stiles into a hug that definitely doesn't feel like they're breaking up but Stiles doesn't really know at this point but he thinks it would be very unfair of Derek to laugh at him and then break up with him and -

"Sorry," Derek says, "really, I'm sorry you thought that, that I let you think that. I should have told you what I was doing but I didn't want to until I knew I wouldn't fail and I didn't know I wouldn't fail until I finished it."

"Uh huh," Stiles says into Derek's shoulder because he really doesn't want to let go yet. "And what have you not failed at, exactly? And if you tell me it's a surprise, I'm going to kill you, ok? There will be blood. It will hurt."

"Noted."

"Well?"

"I wrote a book."

That makes Stiles pull away. His eyebrows are doing the same thing that Derek's do, crawling up his forehead in a desperate bid to rejoin his hairline. "A book? Werewolf erotica?" He can't quite hide the hope in his voice.

"What? Stiles, no. No, I have not written werewolf erotica. Or werewolves. Or erotica. Not linked, not separately." Derek runs a hand over his face in the universal gesture of anyone who's spent a lot of time with Stiles and can't quite believe they've just had to say the sentence they've just said. "I wrote a book."

"Ok," Stiles says, still interested despite the lack of either werewolves or erotica. "About...?"

Derek taps on his phone and then Stiles' phone pings. Derek has added him to a document.

"Can I -?"

"Read it? No, I sent you the doc for fun. Obviously."

"Just to torment me, right?" Stiles says, opening the document on his phone.

"Always," Derek says, and makes coffee. And a sandwich. For himself, not Stiles, Stiles is now engrossed in his phone and won't look up for anything until he's finished. Or he gets bored. Derek's fairly sure he won't get bored.

Stiles doesn't. He stands there, in the kitchen, and reads on his phone until he has the need to hug something and then he sits on the couch and hugs a cushion and reads on his phone. He's still reading when Derek orders takeout (pizza so it can easily be reheated later when Stiles is ready), and when it gets delivered, and when Derek waves a slice of pepperoni pizza under his nose, he bats it away.

And so it goes until, eventually, somewhere around one in the morning, after Derek has gone to bed where he is utterly failing to sleep, Stiles runs his thumb gently across the screen and puts down his phone.

He wipes the back of his hand over his eyes, sniffles, gets up, and crawls into bed beside Derek.

"I think," he says hoarsely, "I think that might be the most beautiful thing I've ever read. Ever. I think it might actually be the most beautiful thing ever written."

Derek lets out a shaky breath. "Yeah, it's - it's ok, isn't it?"

"I think you might have to accept that it's better than ok. It's extraordinary."

Derek makes a contented growl that's almost a purr and wraps his arms around Stiles. All he's ever wanted is to be extraordinary and now he is, in the eyes of his husband. And that's enough. Stiles thinks he's created something extraordinary.

That's enough.

*

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