"Really," Stiles complained, "why is there so much blood, like, all the time? I mean, this is definitely something they should warn you about beforehand. You'd think it'd be all saving people and stuff, but really, I spend most of my time trying to get all of the blood out of my hair."

"It's not that bad," Derek said, wondering if it was too soon to kill him. Why Stiles felt the need to complain constantly, Derek had no idea. But it was driving Derek insane.

Not that that was unusual, for Stiles.

"Not that bad?" Stiles pulled off his blood-stained t-shirt and held it out demonstratively. "I know you've got your whole brooding thing going on, which somehow corresponds to you not wearing a shirt half the time-" Derek thought this was a generous estimate, but he kept his mouth shut "-but it doesn't work that way for all of us! There's only so many times I can tell my dad I got a nosebleed before he either gets suspicious or tries to take me to a doctor."

Derek flinched slightly at the mention of doctors, tried not to look too hard at the nasty bruise that spread over the left side of Stiles' ribs, or the small cuts that littered his arms.

"He can't find out about this," Derek said, reflexively, because the mention of the Sheriff had sent a cold bolt of fear through his veins, and maybe he didn't want to think about the fact that Stiles probably should be going to a doctor right now, not to mention all the times he'd been injured in the past.

"Yeah, no duh," Stiles said, dipping his shirt in the river and attempting to wring it out. "I mean, we're lucky Scott and I play lacrosse." He gave up on the shirt and switched to poking experimentally at his ribs. "These could be fractured; I actually might have to go to the hospital."

He poked at them again and winced in pain.

Derek stepped forward,ignored the way Stiles' heart rate jumped. He brought his hand up, hovered it a centimetre above his rib cage. "Can I?"

Stiles' voice was unsteady. "Yeah, sure, go ahead and do your weird werewolf mojo-" he hissed in a breath when Derek's hand made contact, his pain leaching out in black rivulets. Derek imagined it tracing its way through his body, leaking into his heart.

He imagined all of his blood black, full of Stiles' pain - it stung, doing this, but it stung almost in a good way. He kept going, sucking out the aches and bruises from falling too many times, twinges from old injuries, stopping only when Stiles pulled away.

"Woah, dude, that was," Stiles swallowed. "That was a lot. It's not usually that intense."

Derek pulled his hand back and turned away, hoping for the conversation to be over. "You were in pain," he said gruffly. "We still have a while to walk. I didn't want to have to listen to you complaining the whole way."

Stiles grinned. "You were worried about me, weren't you," he said, wringing out his wet and bloody t-shirt as much as he could and pulling it back over his head. "You totally were, I can't believe it!"

Derek grimaced. "I wasn't worried, I - "

"Does this make us best friends now?" Stiles asked. "And to think of it, I still remember when you frequently tried to murder me - Hey!"

Derek had shoved him into a tree.

The thing about Stiles -

Well. The thing about Stiles was that, someone, completely unexpectedly, he had become someone that Derek - well, maybe cared about was a strong way to put it, but someone Derek tolerated at the very least.

Someone that Derek could trust, kind of, at least in a fight - not that Stiles was good at fighting, mostly he was good at getting stabbed and giving Derek headaches, but still.

Friends were really things that Derek had, but he thought maybe Stiles could be one. Not yet, but maybe.

Maybe that's why that bruise stuck in his head, spread purple over the juts of Stiles ribs - he seemed skinny, had he been eating less? - and that little wince of pain as he poked it. The way it didn't even shock him anymore, that the blood was more of an annoyance than anything.

A part - and Derek didn't know how big that part was - of it was an act. Derek knew Stiles still got scared, still was fragile and terrible at most things and not jaded in any sense of the word but - he hadn't ever expected he'd one day be staring at a fragile human teen and regretting the fact that he was watching his innocence leak away, ounce by ounce.

Stiles shivered, wet t-shirt sticking to his skin, and Derek pulled his eyes away hastily. "Put your jacket on," he said gruffly, because Stiles actually had one, this time - he'd taken it off during the fighting and was now cradling it in his arms.

He shook his head, face pale. "I don't want to ruin it," he said, and now that Derek looked, he could see that he was holding it slightly away from his body, trying not to get any blood on it.

Derek crossed his arms. "Why did you wear it, then?"

Stiles rolled his eyes. "I didn't know we'd be fighting. It's not like we went out into the woods looking for a battle. I'd like to remind you that I was innocently grocery shopping. You were the one who practically dragged me out of the store."

Derek clenched his jaw. Stiles was right - he had been grocery shopping, looking exhausted and clutching a bag of chips, when Derek had found him.

"Here," he said gruffly, shrugging out of his leather jacket and holding it out. "Werewolf, remember? I don't get cold."

Stiles stared at the jacket for a long moment, then back up at Derek - for a moment, he was sure the teen was going to refuse. But then a particularly vicious gust of wind blew through the trees, plastering Stiles' wet and blood-spattered hair even tighter to his skull, and he shivered and grabbed the jacket.

"Thanks," he said, pulling it on clumsily, one-handed, the sleeves extending past his fingers. He was blushing now, faintly, pulling the leather tighter around himself; Derek banished the traitorous thought that Stiles would probably smell like him after this, like pack.

Derek swallowed past the sudden twinge of something in his chest. It was too close to the Full Moon, his instincts clamouring louder than usual. "I don't know what's so important about a jacket, but Scott would probably kill me if you died of hypothermia."

"Scott would definitely kill you," Stiles countered, then sobered. "And the - the jacket was my mom's. So."

Derek's heart dropped. Of course. Stiles wasn't looking at him, voice quiet. "I don't have very much of hers, anymore. I used to - it's a men's jacket. She got it used somewhere, said she loved the style but it was ridiculously big on her. She would put it on me, said one day it would fit me."

Derek recalls the way the jacket hung on him - not quite as big as Dereks, but close. Stiles shrugs.

"I'm not quite there yet, I guess. Probably won't ever be - " too skinny, Derek's mind whispers "but wearing it reminds me of her."

Derek cleared his throat and looked away, his fingers worrying at the thin bracelet he wore around his wrist - it had been his fathers.

Derek knew what it was like to lose people. But somehow, that didn't make it any easier to know what to say.

Of course, it was at that moment that Stiles' phone rang. The moment was broken, the subject not broached again.

But Derek never could get it out of his head, the way Stiles had looked in his jacket, the faint blush on his cheeks, eyes wide and face smeared with blood. Bruises spread out across his skin like oil spills, like the ink on a page - their story is written in scars, and it's all Derek's fault.

But he's not thinking about that then, in that moment - not thinking about how he's torn Stiles' life apart, about how a normal teenager should be out with friends or even grocery shopping instead of complaining about having to wring blood out of the fifth shirt this week in the dark woods.

No, Derek was thinking of the way it made him feel when Stiles looked at him, when he told him things in that exhaustion-roughened voice, when he talked to Derek like he was an actual human being.

Later, Derek would map it out in his mind, the shape of it, the trajectory of him falling for Stiles - inexorably, like gravity was drawing them together.

In his mind, that was the beginning: him lending Stiles his jacket.