Kings of the Moonlight

Better Together

Our dreams and they are made out of real things, like a shoebox of photographs with sepia-toned loving.

-

Derek is nervous.

Derek is so beyond nervous that he thinks this amount of tension deserves a realm of its own. He fidgets in his living room, adjusting things incessantly, because they refuse to sit just right, and he's pretty sure he has adjusted the photo frame on the shelf short of five times but it's still bugging him.

The photograph is of Isaac's second birthday, he's beaming up at Derek behind the camera, cake all over his fingers and cheeks and coloured sugar sprinkles tangled in his curls.

Derek resists fixing the frame once more because he knows that it's not the photo frame that has him this worked up, but rather a culmination of everything that this weekend will entail.

It's the first time, in a very long time, that Derek has been without his son near him. It doesn't matter that a mere ten minutes before, Erica had called for Isaac to say goodnight.

His son had yawned into the telephone, tired due to staying way up past his bedtime, murmuring quietly to his father. Derek had sat on the living room couch and held the phone so damn close to his ear - like he'd be able to teleport himself into that room by sheer power of will. Eventually, Isaac had waved him off, sighing,"Night, Night, Daddy; Sleep tight," before he had passed the phone to Erica without further ado.

But Isaac's not here, at home with Derek. It makes him more anxious than he cares to admit.

The astonishing dependency he has on his son's presence rears its ugly head once again - foaming at the mouth, gurgling and boiling with a deep seated fear of everything that could go wrong with Derek not being there. His son is far from being okay, he's hurt and he's scared and he still suffers from night terrors, damn it.

Derek can't shake off the feeling that he needs to be there with him.

How's Isaac going to react if anything happens and he wakes up and Derek is nowhere to be found? Derek stands stock still in the middle of his living room, his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows and his fingers pressing tight to his mouth if only to dull the need to snatch his car keys and head over to Erica and Boyd's.

He closes his eyes and he inhales deep, even breaths that card through his veins like long pulls of the ocean. It calms him somewhat, tethers him to the general acceptance of his son's safety. He breathes and he thinks, and he assures himself that Isaac is going to be okay. Derek feels lost without his son, a solitary planet wandering empty spaces without the aid of gravity, and the feeling sits heavily on his chest.

Such as it is, Derek doesn't even hear the knocks on the apartment's front door for a very long while.

And when the echoes of the second wave of knocks falls into silence, Derek's mind finally slots into place: Stiles.

Of course, that realisation brings with it the other half of his anxiety about the upcoming weekend; the man waiting on the other side of the door, waiting for him in fact.

And doesn't that make Derek a nervous wreck. He practically forces himself to start towards the door; he wants this, whatever this is, so much that it scares him and he doesn't know what to do with himself.

He hasn't done something like this in a long time; the whole business of dating and the simple, expectant situation that he now finds himself in.

Derek unlocks the door with a practiced ease, his mind already whirring in half a dozen different directions, buzzing with excitement and apprehension in equal measures.