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Stiles pulls on his boxers and uses his foot to nudge the naked guy on his floor. “Uh, Derek, right?” The guy groans. “I’m really sorry, man, but you have to go.”
Derek sits up, looking ruffled and rugged and hot. Score one for drunk Stiles. “Or we could go for round two?” He grins, toothy and genuine, and Stiles is so tempted to take him up on the offer, but.
“Yeah, except that I’m already late,” Stiles replies, flailing around in his attempts to clean up the living room. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. First day. Shower. Me. Yes. You need to…go. Be gone. Leave. Sorry.”
Derek’s gone when Stiles gets back from showering, thank god, because that was not an offer Stiles could refuse twice. He grabs his keys and runs out the door, off to day one at Beacon Hills Hospital.
When Stiles finally gets to where he’s supposed to be, the chief of surgery, Alan Deaton, is calmly speaking to the twenty interns around him. “This is a different game from med school,” he says. “Back then, you were being taught by doctors. Now? You are the doctors. Some of you will make it through your years as a resident here. Some of you won’t. Some will end up in different specialties. Some of you won’t be able to handle the pressure. But whatever happens, welcome to Beacon Hills Hospital.” He smiles beatifically. Stiles is kind of scared of him.
Deaton sends them to the locker room, where Stiles studiously ignores everyone around him, because he’s hungover and doesn’t want to give off the wrong impression. Then he hears names being called around him, interns trickling out of the room with their residents, until he finally hears “Genim Stilinski” in one of the lists. He makes his way to the door with six other interns, and fuck.
Derek. Derek is his resident, looking all scowly and hot.
“I have five rules,” he says, ignoring Stiles. “Memorize them.”
That Wednesday, Stiles posts a flyer: “Roommate(s) wanted, preferably awesome.”
That’s how he ends up living with Scott McCall.
“Martin, you’re with Dr. Argent. Whittemore, mini-Argent, Dr. Hale. McCall, Finstock. Stilinski, you’re with me today.” They split up, and Stiles power-walks to catch up with Derek.
“Dude, I’ve been trying to get you alone for the past week, and all you do is look grumpy and run away.” Derek hands him a stack of charts and keeps walking. “Why didn’t you tell me you worked here?”
Derek shrugs. “Didn’t seem relevant at the time.”
“But you’re my resident, dude!”
“Stop calling me dude, Stilinski. Last weekend happened, whatever, let’s be mature adults about this.”
They fuck in the on-call room at lunch that day.
“It’s just that Scott and Lydia get all the good surgeries, you know?” Stiles says to Allison and Jackson around a mouthful of mac and cheese. “And, like, Lydia I get, because she’s all I went to Harvard Med School and I’m perfect and probably sleeping with some higher power – sorry Jackson, I’m just saying – and none of us can compete with that. But Scott? How?”
The first time Lydia initiates a conversation with him, Stiles nearly drops the baby he’s holding.
“Stiles, right?” she asks, leaning against the doorframe, filing her nails, casual as can be. He doesn’t know how she manages to look flawless in her scrubs, but she’s perfect and terrifying.
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“Okay, then, Stiles. The way I see it, you’re the only person in this program who can compete with me mentally, though even you’re not perfect there. Though I’d rather be the only person getting the good surgeries, I don’t want you trying to do away with me. So instead of being competition, we’re going to be friends now. But I’m taking your endarterectomy this afternoon.”
She turns on her heel, not allowing him to comment.
At least, not until she shows up on his doorstep later that week, a textbook in one hand, The Notebook in the other.
“So how long have you and McGrumpy been sleeping together?” Lydia asks, nonchalant, as she files her nails at lunch.
“You and the Nazi are boning?” Scott yells. Everyone in the cafeteria stares.
“Stiles, is it?”
Stiles turns to see Dr. Peter Hale, head of cardiothoracic surgery, leaning casually against the doorframe. “That’s me,” Stiles replies, adjusting the sleeping patient’s IV.
“Stiles, I have a bit of a…personal favor to ask of you.” Stiles turns and raises an eyebrow. “I’ll let you scrub in on my pericardiectomy tomorrow morning in exchange for your assistance.”
Stiles isn’t going to pass that up. “Fire away, Dr. Hale.”
“Could you tell my nephew that he needs to stop letting Laura’s death affect his work? I would tell him, but, well, it’s a sore spot between us, and I know he cares for you, so…” Peter trails off with a smile and an innocent-looking shrug.
Stiles thinks he’s kind of skeevy. “You’re wrong. He doesn’t care for me, and I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Whatever you say. But,” Peter singsongs as he leaves the room, “pericardiectomy!”
Stiles pages Derek to the on-call room as soon as he gets the chance.
“Hey,” Derek grins, locking the door and grabbing Stiles by the waist.
Stiles pushes him away. “Nope, nope, nope, not why I called you here.”
The grin is gone like that. “Stilinski, did you compromise a patient’s well-being again?”
“No, jesus, no. And besides, that was Scott last time. No, uh, I just wanted to say that your uncle is a creep and –“
“Did he hurt you,” Derek hisses, grabbing Stiles by the shoulders.
“What –“
“Did. He. Hurt. You.”
“No! What the hell? He just…who’s Laura?”
Derek’s face falls, and he lets go of Stiles, instead making his way to one of the beds and sitting down shakily. “Laura used to be a doctor here. Chief resident, actually. She needed surgery and she died in Peter’s OR, and I know he could’ve saved her.”
Stiles sits next to him and takes his hand. “Derek, I –“
“I could have saved her, Stiles. But they wouldn’t let me into the OR because I was ‘emotionally compromised.’” He pushes out the last words like they taste bitter. “So I had to watch from the gallery as he took away the last person I had left.”
“Who was she to you?” He’s braced for fiancé, or girlfriend, but no.
“Laura Amelia Hale. My older sister.”
They sit in silence for a long time.
“Stiles, will you be joining me in my pericardiectomy today?”
Before Stiles can answer Peter, Derek is there, standing between them. “I’m sorry, Peter, but Dr. Stilinski is going to be aiding Dr. Finstock with his selective laryngeal adductor denervation-rennervation shortly. In fact, he was just heading to the patient’s room.” Derek hands him a chart and glares at him. “Go.”
Stiles runs.
“Is this a joke?” Dr. Finstock shouts when he finds Stiles in the patient’s room. “I asked for Whittemore! No offense, Stilinski, I just think you’re more a…second-string kind of guy. You know, obstetrics or something, not plastics.”
“Well, you got me. This is a teaching hospital.”
Finstock groans. “Well, at least you’re not Greenberg.”
Derek takes Stiles out to dinner that night, wines and dines him and all that. He tells Stiles about Laura, and how she was the best damn thing to happen to this hospital, ever. How her heart was so healthy, and she should have survived, and she should finally be an attending, maybe even head of cardio because she was just that good.
They go back to Stiles’s house, but they don’t have sex. Stiles just holds his hand and lets him talk and talk, about the time Laura dug up their dead dog when she was eight because she wanted to play surgeon, and about he record-high scores on every test ever.
Laura sounds a lot like what Stiles can remember of his mother. He tells Derek that, and then they’re both talking, and it’s wonderful.
They fall asleep together, and from then on, Derek’s a little less of an ass at work.
“Stilinski!” Jackson barks.
“Jackson, I just had to tell six kids and their pregnant mother that Daddy’s not going to wake up. This had better be really fuckin’ good because I am in no mood for your bullshit.”
Jackson thrusts a wad of cash at him. A lot of cash. “You and McCall have an extra bedroom. I’m moving in.”
“That’s not even a little bit good!”
Jackson smirks and walks away.
Stiles is balls-deep in Derek’s ass a month later when Scott bangs on the door in the middle of Stiles’s orgasm. “Stiles, I’m trying to study.”
“I don’t give a fuck, Scott! Go to Allison’s!” He pulls out and wipes up.
“You’re the worst best friend ever!”
Stiles hears the door slam and laughs, collapsing next to Derek, who pulls the covers over them both. “So, did he really get chlamydia from Greenberg?”
Stiles laughs even harder than that. “Dude, have you seen the way Scott looks at Allison? Not happening. Jackson’s the one you have to worry about, STD-wise.”
“I thought he was dating Lydia?” Ha, Stiles was right; Derek does try to keep up with his interns’ sex lives.
“Nope, she’s devoting her time to stalking Papa Argent, trying to get surgeries. No sex.”
“Does that girl even have feelings?”
“I sincerely doubt it. Hey, speaking of, can you get me in on Argent’s amygdalohippocampectomy on Tuesday?”
Stiles does get to scrub in on the amydalohippocampectomy, which is the coolest surgery he’s helped with so far. The patient is a med student named Erica, and she’s totally smitten with Stiles, which is flattering as hell. When she comes out of surgery, with a really good prognosis, Stiles waits for her to wake up and gets to be the one to tell her that she’s going to be better than okay. She insists on giving him a hug for helping her, and she tells him he saved her life. He stammers a bit, and she laughs before kissing him on the cheek and saying she’ll hopefully see him again.
Lydia pushes Stiles into the on-call room. “Stiles, we need to talk.”
“Are we about to have sex? Because that’s basically the only thing this room gets used for.” She hits him. “Then what?”
She inhales, deeply, and sits on a bed. “I’m sleeping with Peter Hale and I think I’ve gotten in too deep.”
Stiles fist-pumps. “I knew it!”
“You did? How? Stiles, he wants me to move in with him and now I don’t feel like I’m getting good surgeries because I deserve them. But honestly I’m afraid he’ll ruin my career if I end it.”
“But really, Peter Hale? Kind of poor judgment there.”
“He has two PhDs.”
“I am sleeping with his nephew, Lydia. A different generation of Hale.”
“I can say no to him, though, right? Not…end things, just reduce them?”
“Totally. Just angle for more neuro or something.”
“Ugh, I hate my life.” Their pagers go off in unison, and they run. In the halls, they hear talk of a collapsed bridge, major surgeries, and Lydia grins. “This’ll make me feel better.”
Stiles is in the lobby, playing Angry Birds on his phone, waiting for Derek to meet him so they can go out for their six-month anniversary dinner. Derek’s a sap. “Excuse me?” he hears.
He turns to see a blonde woman, probably in her thirties, smiling wide. He matches her smile. “Hello! How can I help you?”
“I’m looking for Dr. Hale?”
“Derek or Peter?”
“Oh, Peter Hale works here?” Stiles decides he doesn’t like her. She reminds him of some sort of snake. One that looks really cool, and then eats its mate, or something. Her smile seems too fake.
“Derek should be down here any minute. What do you need?”
“Oh, sorry, I totally meant to introduce myself. I’m Dr. Kate Archer-Hale, Derek’s wife.” She holds out a hand. Stiles doesn’t take it.
Derek comes power-walking into the room. “Hey, Stiles, sorry I’m – Kate.”
“Hey sweetie! I realized we ended things poorly back in New York, and I think I’m ready for us to get a fresh start here in California.”
Derek glowers at her. “Katherine, you slept with my uncle, then burned his house down in the middle of a family gathering.” Stiles gawks.
“You have no proof that was me.”
“And I thought the divorce papers were enough to indicate that there’s nothing to fix. Come on, Stiles, we’re leaving.” Derek practically drags him out the door. Once they’re in the car, he says, “Sorry about her.”
“She’s a doctor.” Stiles doesn’t know what to do. “Please tell me she’s not going to start working at BHH?”
“Her degree’s in anthropology.”
Stiles breathes a sigh of relief, but still asks Derek to drop him off at home instead of taking him to dinner.
He barely talks to Derek for a week.
Derek shows up on his doorstep with flowers. Stiles takes them, and tells Derek he’ll let it go in exchange for at least two extra surgeries this week.
Derek tells him that’s unethical.
He gets the surgeries, and Derek gets blowjobs. Win-win situation, really.
can’t come over rn sorry, Stiles texts Derek.
Why not? Is everything okay?
He responds with a picture of Lydia sleeping fully-clothed on his bed, her face all red from crying, caption your uncle proposed and she doesn’t know if she’s ready for that
What the fuck? Derek texts back.
Stiles grabs Lydia by the arm. “My best friend and your boyfriend are apparently about to go beat the shit out of each other over Allison’s honor. Want to go break it up?”
“Jackson’s not my boyfriend.” They powerwalk toward the courtyard where this is supposedly going down.
“Semantics. You’re totally in love.”
“He’s an ass and I’m not interested. I prefer men who are on my level.”
“Friendly reminder that you’re still avoiding Peter Hale like the plague.”
“You’re the worst. Where’s Allison?”
“Surgery. They timed it so she couldn’t get involved.”
“Neanderthals.” They push through the crowd to see Jackson swing at Scott, who spins around and elbows Jackson in the face. There’s blood. Stiles is guessing broken nose.
He and Lydia run toward the boys and pull them apart. Scott’s got at least two broken fingers, and Jackson’s nose is fucked as well (which Scott thinks is just hilarious).
“What the hell happened here?” Stiles looks up at Finstock’s distinctive voice and sees Deaton looking at Scott like Scott kicked a puppy. Dr. Mahleani is already checking their broken bones out, and Lydia is trying to flirt with Dr. Argent while telling him that the fight was over his daughter’s right to have one-night stands. It’s a mess.
“Being suspended is boring, Stiles!” Scott whines.
“It’s boring without you here for me too, Scott. And Allison looks suitably depressed, don’t worry. At least nothing is happening.” Lydia barges into the on-call room. “Scott, I gotta go.” Stiles hangs up. “Hey girl hey.”
“Are you as mind-numbingly bored as I am? There are no interesting surgeries this week, there haven’t been any good traumas, and I can’t even torture Jackson for fun! Ugh.” She crosses her arms and leans against the wall. “Can we just will a major trauma to happen? Is that morally wrong?”
“We’re surgeons. We cut people open for kicks. We have no morals. Let us pray.” They jokingly clasp their hands together in prayer, just in time for their pagers to go off.
Lydia grins. “Fabulous.”
Stiles runs up next to Derek, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “What do we have?”
“Some sort of robbery downtown. Four people got shot, all on their way here.”
Ambulances come screaming into the bay, and Lydia adjusts her ponytail.
The first ambulance has a pregnant woman in it, stable and conscious, screaming bloody murder about her baby. “Someone get Morrell!” Derek shouts, before telling the woman that her baby is about to be in the best hands in the country. He’s just gotten her calm when the second ambulance pulls in, so Stiles greets that paramedic, whose face is grim.
“John Doe, mid-fifties, multiple gunshot wounds, breathing but BP dropping -“
Stiles stares at the body, barks a laugh. “No.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s not a John Doe,” Stiles chokes out between bursts of laughter, because this isn’t real. It’s a sick fucking joke is what it is, and somebody’s going to pay for this bullshit because it’s not funny. Stiles is just laughing because it’s absurd.
And it’s clearly not real, because his dad’s not that pale, and his dad shouldn’t be wearing civilian clothes in the middle of a Thursday afternoon, and his dad is so much more than this John fucking Doe somebody put in the world to fuck with Stiles’s head. Because the world is made out of assholes with sick fucking senses of humor and this is not his dad –
“Stiles.” Derek rests a hand on his back, but Stiles shakes it off.
“Don’t touch me,” he mutters. The hand doesn’t move, so Stiles repeats himself. Only this time, he screams it, the words ripping though his throat. Derek backs away.
Stiles grips his dad’s hand. “Are we going to get him into surgery or not?” he yells.
They won’t let him into the OR, so he sits against the door and tries to remember how to breathe.
As soon as he sees Deaton’s face, he knows. “We did everything we could, Stiles.”
Stiles doesn’t speak to anyone for three weeks after the funeral. Scott sits with him on his bedroom floor sometimes, but he knows better than to talk. Lydia temporarily moves in, makes him change and shower and eat. Even Jackson comes in sometimes, tells Stiles about how Greenberg revealed that Finstock started the chlamydia outbreak, or how Derek is “stupid and bitchy without his sidekick.” Allison deals with his extended family.
But then, three weeks after, everyone’s working and Stiles is studying for his intern exam when there’s a knock on his door. He opens it, and Derek’s there, suddenly holding him tight.
“Stiles, I know. I know what you’re going through, okay? And I know that it’ll never have been long enough to accept the pain, but it’s time to start living with it. Just because you’re the only Stilinski now doesn’t mean you’re alone, okay? You have Scott and Lydia and Allison and even Jackson. You have me. So you’re going to shower now, with or without my help, and then we’re going to go in and talk to Dr. Deaton about getting you back to work.”
Stiles’s throat hurts when he tries to talk, but he talks anyway. “Move in with me.”
“Stiles –“
“Derek, I need you here.” He makes a noise that’s supposed to mean I love you.
Derek nods.
It’s weird how normal things are when Stiles goes back. Finstock is yelling at Greenberg about insolence and suture technique, Jackson is trying to get one of the nurses to sleep with him, and Allison is teaching Scott how to do a running whipstitch on a banana. Derek squeezes Stiles’s hand and lets him scrub in on a few minor procedures to get back into the rhythm.
Stiles isn’t really okay, but he’s getting there.
A few weeks later, Stiles is getting his post-coital snuggle on with Derek in the on-call room when Lydia bursts in. “Jackson is delivering a baby in an elevator right now, Stiles. We need to go see this.” Stiles pulls his scrubs back on and sprints after her.
They get to the scene, where an elevator is stuck between floors, with the doors just a little bit opened. Morrell is talking Jackson through the process of a C-section, and he’s doing really well.
“The elevator’s not really stuck,” Allison whispers to Stiles.
“Morrell and Deaton arranged it because they thought Jackson needed to get his head out of his ass,” Scott elaborates under his breath. “They think he needs to accept his love of babies.”
Stiles looks at Lydia, who’s stationed right by the elevator door, expression rapt, breaking into a massive smile when the baby starts crying. Jackson is grinning too, hysterical, and Morrell tells him that the elevator should be fixed any minute now.
“But he’s my star!” Finstock shouts. “That kid is the future of plastics! He can’t be a…a baby doctor!”
“I had sex with Jackson,” Lydia announces, closing Stiles’s bedroom door behind her.
“Yes, I heard you, just now. Thin walls.”
“Peter Hale is going to tear me apart. He will destroy me and my career for this.”
“S’what you get for sleeping with attendings!”
“I hate you.”
“I know.”
Kate shows up at the hospital again a few days later, complaining of chest pains. Derek avoids the case, but Allison breaks her ankle the day of Kate’s surgery, so Stiles ends up covering for her.
When he stops into her room, she spends twenty minutes ridiculing him for being the other woman. He does his best to ignore her, and soon enough it’s time for him to take her to the OR.
The best thing about his friendship with Lydia and her attempts to avoid Peter Hale is that he gets a disproportionate number of heart surgeries, this being one of them.
Halfway through the surgery, Peter makes a cut on her heart that seems entirely wrong, and when she flatlines, Stiles notices that Peter doesn’t try to fix anything, and remembers what Derek had said about Kate sleeping with his uncle and then burning his house down.
Stiles just never realized Peter was the uncle.
“Dr. Hale, can I talk to you?”
Peter turns. “What is it, Stiles?”
“What was the purpose of that cut you made across her pulmonary artery?”
Peter smiles at Stiles, though it’s not friendly-looking at all. “Sometimes people do horrible things, and then accidents happen.”
“You’re a doctor.”
“A very good one, yes.” Peter pauses. “You could be a very good one too, with my help. I could help you, Stiles. Would you like my help?”
Stiles breathes deeply. “I don’t want anything to do with you.”
The next morning, Stiles tells Dr. Deaton about what he saw.
Peter is gone before noon.
Scott fails his intern exam a week later, despite Allison’s best efforts. Lydia gets a perfect score. Stiles gets a congratulatory blowjob from Derek for a job well done.
Stiles wakes up at three in the morning and sits bolt upright.
Derek rolls over next to him. “What’s wrong, Stiles?”
“I’m a resident.”
“Yes, I’m very proud of you. Go back to sleep.”
“But Derek!”
“What.”
“I get interns tomorrow!”