Chapter Text
If anyone asked Stiles, he would deny to his dying day that he hadn’t originally meant for the notes to go to Derek.
“Scotty, can you see her? Did she get the note? Is she smiling?” he whispered into his phone, as surreptitiously as one could while sprinting across campus to get to gym class after taking a major detour after Chemistry, where Harris had kept him late, because Harris was a hateful ass.
“I told you, dude, she’s just acting like her normal Lydia self. Too good to talk to the plebs, probably able to crush some balls under her Loubitons. Actually, come to think of it, she’ll crush your balls if she finds out that you’ve been slipping her notes every day. What did this one even say?”
“Dammit, Scott, they’re anonymous! And not creepy! Just! Encouraging!” Stiles said, giving up all pretense of whispering. A girl looked at him from her place atop a picnic able, and Stiles shot her a quick handgun-slash-wink combo, making her grin, and hopefully forgetting what he had said. “And if you must know, I said, ‘you have the grace of swan, and you are beautiful, majestic, and unflawed.’”
“Someone could probably give you a restraining order over this, Stiles,” Scott said slowly. “Hold on, someone’s-”
“Hey, McCall, think fast!” Stiles hears over his earpiece, listening to the muffled slock that implies that Scott did, indeed, think fast and not just beam it in the nose like he did that one time at camp. “Good catch, man; keep the orange and enjoy. How’s everything? Lacrosse is starting up soon, right? I was thinking about maybe trying for the team, this year. I didn’t play basketball this year, and I kind of missed the team spirit.”
Stiles can hear Scott sputtering, struggling to form a coherent response to Derek Hale, the most popular boy in school, equally blessed with charisma, looks, smarts and athletic prowess. The man was a god, and deigning to talk to Scott, a lowly junior? Well, it was practically unheard of, especially for him to know his name. Apparently, this was also what Scott mentally fixed on. “You know my name?” he finally got out, voice muffled through his pocket, Stiles assumed. “You don’t talk to anyone, man, how do you know me?!”
Derek pauses, then clears his throat. “I have approximate knowledge of many things, Scoot McCool.”
“Oh my god. You know about that.”
“Scott, your face was a meme pasted around the school for an entire month my sophomore year. Of course I know. Everyone knows.”
Silently, Stiles is freaking out because that prank really wasn’t meant to get so out of hand, but people had started making variations of the poster, and it took off. He’s pretty sure it was going to be in their senior yearbook somewhere, but that’s – that’s besides the point! he mentally yells at himself. Derek! Is talking to Scott! It was a miracle – Derek had stopped playing ball after his girlfriend had died in a tragic mountain lion accident, and after an attempted arson on his house, and he hadn’t talked to anyone outside of his family, Erica, Boyd, and Isaac since. Him talking to Scott would instantly boost him to stratospheric levels of cool, for little reason beyond the fact that the most aloof person in school had talked to him. Also, wait, had he quoted Adventure Time at Scott? This was a singular experience.
The bell rang, and Stiles groaned. He was late for class, Derek had distracted Scott from watching Lydia, and now he would never know how she reacted. He was gonna have to keep this up. He wouldn’t admit defeat until she smiled at one of his notes.
To be perfectly honest, he just wanted her to smile.
--
Derek had been having a perfectly shitty day before the note, to be honest. Laura had taken the keys of the Camaro back with her to college, seven hours away, thank you Laura, so he had to figure out how to hotwire Peter's old car that was kept rusting under a shed in the back - go figure, those keys were "mysteriously lost," as said by a smirking Peter, the dick - to get to school on time, and to top off the ruination that was the morning, Cora stole his toaster strudel that he had decorated himself and first period was dissections, which both hurt his nose and his sensibilities.
For a werewolf, you think that he’d be more used to seeing the insides of little fluffy animals, but dissections whacked him out.
He had gone, fuming, to his locker, to grab the orange he had left in his locker yesterday and to switch out some books. When he had finally spun the right combinations (it took him five tries; like his day wasn’t already bad enough?) something fluttered out and landed at his feet. He stared at it, and finally bent down to grab it. As he read it, he could feel his eyebrows doing something spectacularly complicated. This note was… well, it was possibly the sweetest thing anyone had done for him since Paige. It was a compliment – no numbers, no hints, nothing requiring a response, just a no-strings-attached pick-me-up in his locker. He looked around the hallway, straining his ears for conversations, trying to parse out who had written the note. Finally, he caught the tail end of the note, being repeated through the tinny speaker of a phone. As he zeroed in on who it was, he grinned. There was no way that Scott McCall had been the one to give him the note – while the kid was nice, he wasn’t the brightest penny at the bank, and he wouldn’t be able to put together a note like this unless it was for Allison Argent, his attached at the mouth girlfriend.
He weighed the orange in his hand and nodded decisively, after glancing between it and Scott’s phone. “Hey, McCall, think fast!” he yelled, and whipped the orange towards Scott as soon as he had turned to face him. Scott’s face showed his panic as he quickly stowed his phone in his pocked with one hand and grabbed the orange right before it smacked him in the nose. He could practically feel Scott’s confusion, as he stared at the orange in his hand, and turned to Derek. Derek kept talking, plowing over any questions that he might have had. “Good catch, man; keep the orange and enjoy. How’s everything? Lacrosse is starting up soon, right? I was thinking about maybe trying for the team, this year. I didn’t play basketball this year, and I kind of missed the team spirit.”
Scott’s jaw dropped practically to his knees, and he started making a series of questionable noises. “You know my name? You don’t talk to anyone, man, how do you know me?!”
Derek’s face twitches a little, collecting his thoughts. Finally, he clears his throat. “I have approximate knowledge of many things, Scoot McCool.”
“Oh my god. You know about that.” Scott was steadily turning further and further red, eyes darting around the hallway, hoping that no one was listening to him flounder in front of, arguably, the most popular guy in school.
“Scott, your face was a meme pasted around the school for an entire month my sophomore year. Of course I know. Everyone knows.” He rolled his eyes, but puts on a little smile for Scott’s benefit.
The bell rang, signaling the herds of kids to move towards their classrooms to second period. “So, Scott, what were you talking-”
“Derek, I’m so sorry, but if I’m late to Harris’ class again, he swore he’d fail me, and I really can’t afford that. I’ve gotta go, so I guess I’ll see you at lacrosse tryouts?” he asked as he backed away. When Derek nodded, he grinned, lopsided as ever but twice as earnest. “Great, dude! See ya!”
Derek watched his retreating back, and made a mental note to watch out for Scott McCall. He was a nice kid with… interesting friends, he mused, staring at the note in his hands.