I Will Run You Like A Thread (Fem!Stiles x Derek)

I will wrap you in my arms (and you'll know you've been saved)

When she and Derek first got together, when they first started this, Stiles had been terrified from day one that at some point, some indeterminable, dread-inducing point in the future, Derek would finally see through her cracks, see all the bits and pieces she kept shoved down inside. The real ugly stuff. And worse than that, he wouldn't want to see it. Of course, she knows how stupid that was now, considering Derek had point-blank admitted to being scared of the exact same fucking thing where she was concerned, and Stiles hadn't hesitated for a second to tell him exactly what she had thought about that.

There's not a single thing about Derek she doesn't want to know. Doesn't want to see. Not a single thing about him that could scare her off. And she knows, she really does – that Derek feels the same way about her. Derek might not be the most verbose of men, but even when he doesn't say it, she feels it. Feels it in the way he looks at her, how his eyes follow her across the room, how he knows exactly how and when to reach for her, how to soothe her.

How he always, always, always takes care of her, even when she's too stubborn to admit that she needs him to, and more than that, that she wants him to. She —

There's a sharp tug against her scalp and Stiles's thoughts blip and skip like a needle on a broken record.

"If you're still thinking this clearly after the last two hours, I don't know if I did my job right."

"You did your job very right," Stiles says, eyes slowly opening to see Derek watching her with one of those indulgent little smirks that she loves so much because she's almost ninety percent sure she's the only one who ever gets to see them. "I can't help it if my brain has an extremely impressive refractory period."

There's the eyebrow arch (Classic Derek, Stiles notes, blinking dreamily). "I guess I'll have to keep trying harder, then."

If he tries any harder, she really might actually die. Images whirl through her mind, smokey and half-formed as she remembers exactly how the last two hours had passed. The way he'd wound her up in the shower and then taken her apart all slow with his mouth and his hands and his fingers. How he carried her to the bath afterward when she was too shivery and fucked out to walk. She has a dim memory of falling asleep in his lap as he ran a brush through the tangled mess of her hair. Which that alone, impressive, considering the rat's nest—

"Stiles," Derek chides, tugging again on the curls wrapped in his fingers. "Tell."

There were coherent thoughts in her head, she's sure of it, but when the tips of his fingers are skittering over her scalp like this, it's hard to remember what they even were – "So who taught you," she hums curiously, turning her head just enough in the cradle of his lap to finally recognize the rhythm behind the movements of his hands, " – how to braid hair, I mean?"

His hands still. "Four sisters, Stiles. If you had hands in my house, you knew how to braid," Derek says after he's silent for just long enough that Stiles thinks she might've messed up, should have realized what a stupidly obvious and stupidly morbid question to ask –

"It's okay, baby." His voice is soft against her ear. "My mother – she was a lot of things..." His touches too, the way he grabs her wrist and deftly twists off the band wrapped there that she'd had in her hair earlier, presumably to tie off his handiwork, "and always running late was one of them, so I – "

"So you helped," Stiles offers, reaching up to stroke his jaw. "You were a good big brother."

Derek doesn't acknowledge this, which doesn't surprise her in the least. Neither does the way his thumb finds his mark on her throat, swirling patterns on the skin there. "Is that really what you wanted to ask about?"