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Seven months.
Seven months of dating Stiles, of falling slowly and irrevocably in love with him despite Derek’s better judgement, seven months of convincing himself that the Mieczyslaw whose name was marked on his skin was platonic, that whoever this person was—if Derek ever met them in the first place—they would understand.
Seven months, and Derek finally finds out he’s been dating his soulmate all along because the bartender had dropped Stiles’ ID and Derek would recognize that letter combination anywhere.
He thinks he’s going to be sick.
“I don’t have a name,” was one of the first things Stiles ever said to him, somewhere in between “do your eyebrows always do that?” and “come on, one coffee can’t hurt.” And now the memory of it is all Derek can hear over the pounding of his own heart in his head, a drumbeat that sounds like he’s being marched to his own execution.
“Stiles,” he says, and it’s like he hears himself from out of his body, his voice perfectly calm when all Derek feels is heartache, “I think—I need to go home. I’m not feeling well.” It’s oddly formal even for Derek, who still can’t always let his guard down—although now he supposes he knows why.
He remembers too late why he’s never used the I don’t feel well excuse around his boyfriend, a second year resident at the university hospital. “Not well how? Nauseated? Light-headed? When’s the last time you had water?”
“Headache,” he lies. Close enough. He just needs to get out of here. “I think it’s allergies.”
“I’ll go—”
“No,” he says, barstool scraping the floor as he stands up. “I’m just going to go lay down. I’ll talk to you later.”
Stiles looks uncertain, then surprised when Derek leaves without another word, without a hug or a kiss goodbye. Derek sends each of his phone calls to voicemail, locks the door behind him when he gets home, and turns the phone off.
He’s always wondered about Mieczyslaw. The name had appeared the summer before he turned seven, a morning itch on his ribs that turned into a blistering red spot at mid-day, and had faded back into smooth skin with small, perfect letters appearing as it neared midnight. Derek had heard of soulmates; his parents had each other, Cora had a name at birth, and Laura had gotten hers the year before. But at six years old it was just a given, something he didn’t think about at all until his mother had brushed her fingers over the newly set letters and smiled.
“This is the person who will love you more than anyone else in the world,” she had said before kissing his forehead.
His mom likes Stiles, Derek knows that. She disapproves of their relationship, still of the opinion that Derek should be searching for Mieczyslaw, but that doesn’t affect how she treats Stiles. He’s invited over for every Sunday dinner, had taken a trip to Seattle with them the month prior to visit Cora, and Derek knows she texts him every week to see how he’s doing.
He has no clue how she’s going to react to this. He’s not actually sure he should tell her—she’s been telling him that Mieczyslaw would love him for decades now, and Derek doesn’t think he can look her in the eye and tell her that his soulmate had apparently found him good enough for the short-term, but decided almost immediately that Derek wasn’t worth the rest of his life.
It takes four days for Stiles’ voicemails to take on a different tone. From:
“Hey babe, you feeling better? I’ve got two overnights in a row and a seminar but if you need me to come by I’ll make time. Call me. Text me. Whatever you need, I can get it. Talk to you soon.”
to
“Derek, what’s going on? You haven’t even texted—I know you like to conserve words but come on, you’ve got two working thumbs. I’ve got two days off and if I don’t hear from you I’m gonna bust your door down to make sure you’re still alive.”
to
“Okay I’m trying not to take this personally because I know you said you weren’t feeling well but—I had been kidding about busting the door down but now I don’t think I am. Please call me.”
to
“Did I do something? I don’t—look, I know the residency is a lot but I swear it’s almost over and my schedule will calm down, I—if it’s not that, if it’s something else you can just tell me, I know I fuck things up but—Derek, please.”
to
“Alright. I can take a hint, despite what Lydia thinks, so—um. Okay. I’m sorry, for whatever it was. Uh, okay. Take care. Bye.”
and finally, in the early morning hours two weeks after Derek last saw him, a three minute voicemail with no words whatsoever, just the quiet hitch of Stiles’ breath before the message ended.
He ends up telling his mom the truth. She coaxes it out of him over coffee, leaning into the side of her armchair while he curls up against the arm of the couch like he’s sixteen all over again, heartbroken after Paige had found her soulmate.
When he says, “you said he would love me,” she kneels down in front of him and wipes the corner of his eye that he didn’t realize was wet, presses her palm to his cheek.
“Then he’s a fool,” she says firmly. “But sweetheart—I think you should talk to him. You’re not the only one I worried about for the last few months. That boy looks at you like you hung the moon; it was his heart I was afraid would break, not yours.” She brushes her thumb across his cheek. “Find out why he lied. Even soulmates make mistakes.”
He waits until he knows Stiles has a day off and shows up at his apartment, and is a little surprised when Stiles doesn’t slam the door in his face. But Stiles just blinks at him in surprise and says, “oh, you—okay, hold on,” and reappears a minute later with a shopping bag. It takes Derek a moment to realize it’s all the stuff he’d left there over the last few months, the book that had been on Stiles’ bedside table, his favorite coffee mug, the same ratty UCLA shirt he got when his acceptance letter came. “I couldn’t find your BHFD hoodie,” Stiles says. His tone is a mask, the one he used to use when he’d talk about patients who had passed. “It’s probably at my dad’s. I can have him drop it off at the station for you. I, uh—okay. Bye, Derek.”
Derek sticks his hand in the door before it can close on him, shopping bag dangling from his fingertips. He lets it fall. “Can we talk?”
Stiles’ voice cracks when he says, “I’m really not up for that. I heard, you know—Laura told Kira that you found—I can’t really lie and say I’m happy for you—”
“Please,” Derek says, and Stiles seems to deflate, shoulders dropping as he steps back and lets Derek inside. They don’t move beyond the hall; Stiles leans back against the wall and watches him, arms crossed, and Derek doesn’t know where to start, so he just goes for blunt. “Why’d you lie to me about not having a mark?”
Stiles frowns, face melting into a look of confusion. “I didn’t,” he says, and Derek feels a spike of anger in his chest. “You’ve seen me naked, Derek, you know—”
“I know you have a tattoo where the name is,” Derek says, “and that people sometimes get them covered—”
“I don’t have one,” Stiles says. There’s a flush on his cheeks and his posture grows tense, arms tightening over his chest. “I don’t know why you think I did and if this—” Derek yanks his own shirt up, pulling it high enough so that Stiles can see the name curved around his ribcage, free from the patch Derek has been keeping on it since he met Stiles.
He doesn’t expect the brief look of devastation on Stiles’ face before it hardens and he pushes off the wall, disappearing into his bedroom before coming back out with a small box in one hand, rustling through it with the other until he pulls out a photograph and holds it out. It’s him and Scott half hanging out of a pool; Stiles’ hair is buzzed and he’s so skinny his ribs stick out, and Derek stares at the space where his name should be.
“That’s not me,” Stiles says, subdued. “But he shouldn’t be hard to find. I’d like it if you’d go now.”
Derek leaves.
There’s only a small percentage of the population with no mark. Stiles had once told him it was three percent, something Derek accepted as fact because Stiles generally knew what he was talking about. There were other small percentages that he’d heard about throughout his life—people whose connection was familial (1.5%), platonic soulmates (8%, though there was a raging debate on whether they were actually platonic or just weren’t accepting their feelings), and those with a one-sided connection (2.7%).
Derek’s starting to think he falls into one of those categories after all.
“Three,” he says, his mom’s hands squeezing his shoulders from where she looks at the computer screen from behind him. “All of them live in Poland. I messaged them anyway.” Derek’s not the biggest fan of putting all your information on social media, but it’s working to his advantage now. There were a lot more Mieczyslaws on Facebook than he thought, but filtering it by birth year and removing the ones who had already found their soulmates made it a manageable task.
Now he just has to wait.
Stiles looks tired, dark circles under his eyes, watching Derek warily. “I can’t do this,” he says, and it sounds helpless, like he’s pleading with Derek to understand. “It’s not me, Derek. I wish it was.”
Derek holds out the papers—proof, everyone he’d contacted who had sent him back a name that wasn’t his. “I don’t care,” he says, because he knows. He knows Stiles will argue with him all day long, that he’ll tell Derek not everyone uses social media, that he could be going by a nickname like Stiles himself does, but Derek doesn’t care. He hasn’t cared that Stiles wasn’t his soulmate for a long time now; having a one-sided connection won’t make a difference. “I want it to be. I want you to be.”
Stiles’ hand crunches around the papers for a moment before he tosses them on the floor. “Fuck it,” he says, reaching out and pulling Derek in. His mouth is warm and desperate against Derek’s, and Derek kisses him back, hands holding Stiles like he’s afraid he’ll run. “I wanted it to be me, too.”
It takes time to get them back on even footing. Stiles runs hot and cold, will sometimes trace his fingers over the letters on Derek’s skin, sometimes wants it covered up. Derek has bouts of insecurity, of wondering why the universe decided he wasn’t enough, and withdraws until Stiles smothers him enough that he goes back to trying to accept that he can’t control the ways of the world. But they do, eventually, get back on solid ground; Stiles starts his fellowship in pediatric surgery, they stumble upon the perfect house—four blocks from the station, three to the hospital—Derek proposes. Stiles shows up shortly after that with Derek’s name tattooed above his heart; Derek gets a lot of judgemental looks at the tattoo parlor when he asks for a thin line through Mieczyslaw and for Stiles to be written below it.
They’re happy with their lives, for years and years, past the time that Stiles stops worrying someone else with his name will show up, that Derek sees how much better they are together than apart.
And then Stiles comes home frowning, fingers digging into his side, pizza box landing on the table with a loud thump. “Did you change detergent or something?” he complains, giving Derek a distracted kiss and peeling off his shirt. “This has been itching me all day. I should have known you would look for better deals instead of buying the expensive shit I like. My skin is sensitive, Derek.”
“No,” he says slowly, brushing his thumb over bright red skin, hot to the touch, “I didn’t. And I don’t think this is a rash—I think it’s a mark.”
Stiles goes pale and refuses to talk to him the rest of the night. It doesn’t stop the writing from appearing the next morning, the name Isaac curved along the wings of the phoenix that Stiles had tattooed to cover up his lack of a mark when he was in college.
“I’m forty,” Stiles says, staring in the mirror. “That’s just—what the fuck. What the fuck.”
“It could be platonic,” Derek says, and Stiles levels a glare at him so vicious that Derek takes a step back.
“You bet your ass it’s platonic,” he hisses. “Christ. I can’t even think about this. I’m getting it covered.”
They end up dealing with it by ignoring it, and Derek never forgets, but he’s not exactly worried.
“—unit 629, ETA three minutes, male child with multiple abdominal GSWs—”
“You’re gonna be okay,” Derek says, hands pressing down on the kid’s stomach. He’s unconscious, barely breathing, but Derek talks to him anyway. Kids have always affected him too much, made the wall he keeps up to do his job crumble, and this one, with his pale skin and blond curls, faded bruises on his cheeks—this one is worse. “The doctors are going to fix you right up, and you’re gonna be okay.”
It’s Stiles waiting at the bay doors, gloves snapping on as the stretcher is lowered, rolling the bed out to meet them. “Easy,” is all he says when Derek transfers the kid, bloody hands leaving streaks on the white mattress. “I got it,” he says, looking back at Derek. “I’ve got him, Derek, I promise.”
Derek strips his gloves off, looks down at the blood covering his uniform, and barely makes it to the trash can before he throws up.
Stiles’ text had been a curt come back, and Derek’s heart is in his throat when he jogs down the halls of the pediatric unit, checking each room for his husband until he finds him in one with the lights dimmed, sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Is he—”
“He’ll be fine,” Stiles says, grimacing. “Sorry, I just realized what you would have thought. He’ll be fine—there will be a few lingering issues, I had to—anyway, that doesn’t matter. I wanted to show you something.” He tugs the blanket that’s tucked around the kid’s body down gently and pulls at the thin hospital robe. There are bruises—shoeprints, Derek thinks, and he doesn’t realize how tense he’s gotten until Stiles’ hands are pulling his fingers apart.
“Jordan said the dad coded in the rig,” Stiles says. “They couldn’t get him back.” He doesn’t sound sorry.
“Good,” is all Derek says.
“Derek,” Stiles says, quietly, squeezing his hand, “look at his mark.”
Derek blinks. It’s just visible over surgical tape, the letters that make up his own name, and he looks up at Stiles, frowning. “My name’s pretty common,” he says, confused. “So unless you’re telling me there are two Mieczyslaws in Beacon Hills, I’m not sure why you’re showing me.”
“His name is Isaac,” Stiles says, “and you can think this is crazy, but I’m pretty sure that’s your mark on his skin.” Derek’s looked up a lot about soulmates in the last seventeen years; he’s never heard of something like this happening. “His mom’s dead,” Stiles adds. “He’s going to need someplace to go when he gets out of here. And we’re—we always talked about it, and I know it’s—”
“I’ll go figure out who I need to talk to,” Derek says, kissing his temple. “We’ll bring him home.”
“Okay,” Stiles says. He sounds unsure, and Derek kisses him again.
“It’ll be fine,” he says, reaching up, fitting his thumb under Stiles’ ribs, right on his mark. “He belongs with us. I promise.”