Chapter Text
Stiles is running late when he bumps into the new cleaner.
“Sorry, sorry,” he says absentmindedly, shifting his laptop from one arm to the other. “Didn't see you there.”
The man in front of him goes still, hands clutching a mop where he's been cleaning up a coffee spill.
“I apologize, sir.”
The cleaner’s voice is rough from disuse, like it’s the first words he’s said all day. He sounds polite, but not particularly apologetic.
“Not your fault. That was a hundred percent me. I'm Stiles.”
The cleaner looks at him before dropping his eyes to the ground.
“Uhh, I need to run, I'm running late, but yeah, catch you later.”
The cleaner guy frowns at him as Stiles jogs away. He’s only three minutes late, no point being any later.
“Stiles, if I had a dollar for every time you were on time to our meetings, I’d have two dollars,” Professor Finstock says.
Stiles shifts in the chair he’s thrown himself down in.
“Prof, I, er, think your watch is fast-"
“Not this again, I don’t want to hear it. You’re late. You better have something good to share with me today. I had to move my viola lesson for this.”
Stiles doesn’t bother asking why he had scheduled a viola lesson for 10am on a weekday. Instead, he opens up his laptop and pulls up his latest figures. At least he’s sure he has something good to share.
“So the lab tests on the last polymers weren’t looking so promising, a rough estimated efficiency of about 3.5%. But I’ve got something new and under controlled conditions, we can boost photon-to-electron conversion and achieve an efficiency of 36.5%.”
Stiles continues on, showing the experimental setup, raw results and figures. The pensive look on Prof Finstock’s face grows.
“You’ve got to have done something wrong somewhere.”
Stiles spins the laptop around to face him and scrolls haphazardly. “Where?”
“Ehh, you figure it out, those results are looking too good to be true. We’d all have organic solar cells on every available surface if that were real,” he says with a shrug. He waves his hand in dismissal. “Go, uh, interrogate that more and come back when you’re 100% sure these results aren’t a fluke.”
Stiles bites back a sigh and heads out.
“Stupid prof with his stupid big brain and his ability to just detect when a result is probably wrong but does he help me figure out where it’s wrong, no, of course not .” Stiles barges into the break room where he sees the new cleaner stocking paper towels.
Stiles looks at him while trying not to look like he's looking at him. From the quick but pointed glance the cleaner gives him, he's failed. He's never seen the guy before, but the collar gives away that he’s a werewolf, and the light blue overalls he’s wearing bear the name of the new cleaning company the university has hired. Harris Facilities.
“Hey man, I didn’t catch your name earlier.”
Mistrust flashes across the man’s face before his expression is schooled into a carefully blank look.
“Sorry, did I do something wrong, sir?”
Stiles' heart clenches at that. Boyd was also cautious in the first days when he joined, before slowly realizing most people in the lab weren’t out to hurt him.
“No, no, just, you know. I’m Stiles.” he finishes awkwardly.
“My designation is 19621, sir.”
Stiles stares at him.
“That's quite the mouthful. Any chance you have a, like, normal name?”
It's the guy's turn to stare. Stiles can't help but feel he's being evaluated.
“The last guy who worked here was called Boyd,” he adds lamely.
Stiles is not sure why he's explaining the concept of names to this guy.
“Derek,” the cleaner says eventually. He looks at the red button on the wall and then glances away.
Stiles follows his gaze and blanches. “Dude, I’m not gonna shock you for telling me your name.”
Derek just stands there.
“Well, uh, have a good day.” Stiles backs out before the situation gets any more awkward.
Stiles really misses Boyd.
It's going on for 8pm and Stiles rubs at his eyes in frustration. He's looked at the data every which way and the result is always the same.
36.5% efficiency. 36.47833% if you're being misguidedly precise.
The cleaner, Derek, is still there. He's wiping down the empty desks and tidying away leftover mugs.
Stiles groans and looks down at the paper covered in his scrawl and wonders if more Adderall will help or hurt. Derek passes by, looking briefly over Stiles’ shoulder before moving away when Stiles stills. He smells of sweat and warmth and Stiles wonders if he can read.
He's never liked the concept of werewolf laborers.
Before meeting Boyd at the start of his PhD, Stiles had rarely spoken to a werewolf before. There were a couple at the sheriff's station while his dad was a deputy, but they'd never really been up for much conversation. After his dad became the sheriff, he stopped hiring wolves, finding the concept of dirt cheap labor understandably distasteful.
Stiles can't help but agree.
Getting to know Boyd had mostly solidified his uneasiness about the whole setup. Boyd had been owned directly by the university, which he once admitted was a hundred times better than being owned by a rental facility. He'd refused to say any more, and no one in Stiles’ group was the type to pry. After the latest budget cuts, Boyd had been sold off to the very kind of facilities he regarded with such fear.
It made Stiles’ blood boil.
Anyway, none of that helps him with his current problem. He's written down the measurements from his experiments, run the numbers through the program and he still has a wonder-material on his hands. The only thing left to do is to go home and plan the next week to run the experiment again, and compare another set of results.
Stiles sighs and packs up.
The next day, there is a sticky note on the jotter pad on his desk, the handwriting neat and tight.
It was a 1, not a 7. The efficiency is 5.2%.
Stiles stares at it.
He stares at the 7 he'd scribbled down from the software as the reading had come out. Now he sees it, it's obvious. It's a hastily written ‘1’, the top line unduly long.
He runs the calculations again with a one instead of a seven. The efficiency comes out at 5.21%.
Stiles takes the notepad over to Lydia's desk.
“Hey Lydia, do you have a minute?”
Lydia doesn't look away from her computer, where she’s busy making a graph publication-ready for Nature Communications. “What?”
“Did you leave me this note?”
Lydia takes a brief glance. “No.”
“Huh. Could it be Finstock?”
“Not his handwriting,” Lydia says, continuing her battle with ggplot.
“Your coffee, ma’am,” Derek just appears with a tray in his hand and Stiles tries not to jump out of his skin.
“Thanks Derek,” Lydia says with a small, warm smile, and Derek ducks his head.
This is why Stiles likes Lydia. She's the smartest postdoc in the department by a country mile but she'll still take the time to learn everyone's name and thank the staff, paid or not.
“Whoever it was, I owe them at least two milkshakes from the cafeteria. Grande, no less. They've saved me at least a week of work.”
Stiles emails Finstock the latest results and is unsurprised by the reply.
5.2% makes much more sense for a photosensitive dye. No worries, it happens. Try to write better next time.
Coach.
Why the guy keeps trying to get his group to call him coach is beyond Stiles. He’s added it to the unending list of Prof Finstock’s weirdness.
“Right, I'm off for lunch.” Stiles says to no one in particular. Kira’s head shoots up at the word lunch. Lydia doesn't turn from her computer but her hands still so Stiles knows she's heard him too.
“Jackson, lunch?”
Jackson shakes his head subtly from the call he’s been stuck on for the last hour.
“Matt, you joining?”
Matt grunts a yes from his corner desk. Matt joined the group about half a year ago and generally gives Stiles the creeps, but if Matt wants to join, Stiles is not going to be rude about it.
Matt, Kira, Lydia and Stiles head out before Stiles remembers his jacket. He heads back on to find Derek unloading the dishwasher.
“Derek, lunch?”
Derek stills.
“No thank you, sir. I've already eaten,” he says eventually.
“Huh. When did you eat? I swear you've been going non-stop since I arrived this morning.”
“I, uh, ate this morning.” Derek's voice is stiff, formal. “The rental facility provides food for us. Institutions are not required to feed the wolves.”
Stiles doesn't know what to say to that, so he just says “Okay.” He grabs his jacket and heads towards the door. “Also, it's just Stiles. You're making me feel like my dad with the whole ‘sir’ thing,” he gives an awkward chuckle.
“Yes, Stiles,” says Derek, before continuing to unload the dishwasher.
Stiles accepts it's the best he's going to get.
It's ten o’clock at night when Derek heads down to the basement. The meal pack is there, sitting on the grey table that matches the grey walls.
Derek tears off the plastic, stomach rumbling, and starts to make his way through the cold oatmeal.
Food is food and that's all he can bring himself to think.
He tries not to think of the PhD student, Stiles, asking him if he wants to join for lunch. Like Derek's a person. Like Derek could just say yes and go have lunch with the group.
Stiles is odd but Derek doesn't think he's bad per se. Neither are Lydia and Kira from what he can tell. Jackson is aloof and looks like he might have a temper, but until now, he’s left Derek alone.
Matt, however, has already signed up for the hire scheme that will let him borrow Derek from Harris Facilities between 7pm and 7am for $50 a night.
Derek fights down a shudder and swallows another mouthful of oatmeal. Whatever will happen will happen and Derek will box it up and shove it deep inside his mind to let it die.
When food is done and he's brushed his teeth, he says a quiet goodnight to the other werewolves, an elderly man called Kevin and a middle aged woman called Shania. Neither are particularly talkative and Derek is fine with that. What would he even say to them?
He curls up on his mattress on the floor, arranges a blanket over himself and thanks his lucky stars to be away from Kate.
Stiles has a sneaking suspicion he knows who left him the note.
It makes no sense . Werewolves go through no more than very basic education, some are functionally illiterate. But Stiles sees the list that Derek puts together for the solvents cupboard and the handwriting is familiar. Neat and tight and the spiky y is one he's stared at for a while.
He doesn't know what to do with this information, but at the very least he needs to thank the guy.
Stiles buys a bar of Hershey's in his lunch break. It's not much but at least it's something to say a small thanks.
Derek is off cleaning some other corner of the department when Stiles packs up for the evening before heading to Scott's place to hang out. He scribbles a note that says ‘For Derek’, sticks it on the bar and leaves it on his desk.
Stiles pops a Tylenol and pinches the bridge of his nose. Damn Scott and his vet school friends with livers of steel. Stiles isn't eighteen anymore. He's twenty-five going on twenty-six and his limit before hangovers is now strictly at three beers.
“Hey, Derek, hope you enjoyed the chocolate yesterday,” Stiles says as Derek crosses his desk.
Stiles isn't sure if he's imagining things but a flash of anger seems to cross the guy's face before the blank mask is back.
“Yes sir, thank you very much sir.” His tone is cool, clipped. It feels off.
Stiles doesn't have time for this. He needs to put together the journal club presentation for tomorrow and in order to do that, he needs to actually read the paper.
“Do you mind, uh, grabbing me a coffee please? White with one sugar, please. You'd be an absolute lifesaver.”
“Yes sir.”
Derek's gone and Stiles is trying to push the uneasiness back in his mind and focus on the latest cost-benefit analysis of organic photovoltaics.
Maybe the guy doesn't like chocolate.
Derek comes back with the coffee. Stiles turns to say thanks but Derek is gone.
Stiles leaves a granola bar on his desk with a note saying ‘For Derek'.
Derek's glares get more intense the next day.
Stiles tries one last time.
He leaves a packet of Cheetos because honestly, who doesn't love Cheetos?
Derek is restocking the paper towels in the bathroom when Stiles corners him.
“Dude, what's up?”
Derek freezes. Stiles can feel the anger radiating off him.
“Nothing, sir.”
“It's just Stiles. But anyway, forget about that, have I done something? Because it's hard to ignore those grumpy eyebrows of doom when you keep glaring at me.”
Derek looks like a deer in the headlights.
“I apologize, Stiles, for any glaring.” He glances at the button on the bathroom wall and Stiles wants to punch something.
Instead, he settles for sighing.
“Again, I'm not gonna shock you, Derek. Just looking to understand what I did to piss you off.”
“Nothing.” Derek pauses, seeming to consider his options. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other and then continues. “You don't have to label your trash as ‘For Derek'. I'll clear it away regardless.”
Stiles doesn't understand.
“What trash?”
It's Derek's turn to look confused.
“Uhh, the wrappers and chips packets. It's my job, I clean all the desks at the end of the day.”
“Wrappers?” Stiles frowns. “I've been leaving you the whole bar, not wrappers.”
Derek stares at him with those intense brown-green eyes, as if searching for a lie. Whatever he finds, he ducks his head.
“I'm sorry, sir, I thought–”
Just then, Finstock comes into the bathroom and Derek falls silent. Stiles quickly heads out before Finstock makes one of his weird comments about the regularity of his bowel movements.
Derek is taking notes as Matt explains his hypothesis on the posterior distribution of electron release from ionized polymers to Stiles. His hand glides over the paper and Stiles can't help but stare at the quiet confidence the werewolf displays whenever he's thinking about science.
Stiles asks why not generalize the Poisson prior to a negative binomial prior.
Matt reaches over and takes Derek's pen out of his hand and starts to sketch the distributions on a notepad. Derek gives the man one short, bitter glance before he's back to staring forward politely until he can have his pen back to finish writing up the notes.
Stiles feels pretty sure he knows who's been taking Derek’s food.
One mystery (pretty much) solved, Stiles is onto the next one.
Derek is in before Stiles gets there and is there when he leaves, apart from on Thursdays. He doesn't seem to take any breaks. When does he eat?
Like a cat with a ball of yarn, Stiles doesn't want to stop until he unravels it.
Of course, it doesn't help that Derek seems to be actively avoiding Stiles at this point so he needs to find this information out through other means.
“Hey Kira, how's it going?”
Kira leans back in her chair.
“Fine, fine. Questioning the life choices that led me to doing a PhD.”
“For the relentless pursuit of science and because at one point it seemed easier than looking for a real job?”
“That sounds about right. What's up?”
“Weird question, but what do the cleaners eat? I never see Derek eat but every time I ask him for lunch he says he's already eaten.”
Kira leans back further in her chair and Stiles starts to get concerned she's pushing the laws of gravity a little far there.
“Pretty sure the B2 basement level is their break area and where they stay overnight. I've seen the contracts they come with when writing that SPNS grant, they are allowed to take up to thirty minutes of break time for every twelve hours worked but only in controlled conditions on-premises,” she says, her lip curling in distaste. “We had to sign to say B2 was adequately equipped to handle wolves.”
Just as it looks like she's tilted the chair too far, she drops down again with a thump.
“Cool, thanks man. Also, are you down for bowling on Thursday? Scott's coming so it should be a good laugh,” says Stiles.
“Yeah, I'll be there.”
“Awesome. Bring Jack along.”
Stiles heads back to his desk in time for a meeting with Greenberg about the bizarre field results coming in from the last set of solar cells the group developed and deployed.
Stiles stays late on purpose, fiddling around with tables on LaTeX until his eyes hurt.
Derek heads down at around 8pm.
Stiles follows ten minutes later. He takes the elevator down to B2, ready with his excuse of wondering whether Derek had seen his calculator (it is on his coffee table at home, Stiles had got it out to calculate his hourly pay to see if he could justify buying Iron Man 2 on Amazon or if he should just sail the seven seas).
B2 is, in a word, depressing.
It's what Stiles imagines prison is like.
Scratch that, even the holding cells in the police department are nicer.
Every surface consists of bare concrete. There are three mattresses in the corner, ratty blankets on each. Bare lightbulbs hang forlornly from the ceiling.
Derek is frozen next to the table, a plastic tray in hand.
“What do you want?” he growls. He seems to remember himself and adds on a hasty “sir.”
“I, uh, I couldn't find–”
Stiles can't find the words. He's forgotten his excuse.
Is this where Derek sleeps?
“Dude, do you sleep here?”
Derek looks behind him to the mattress and snorts. “No. This is my office.”
“Was that– was that a joke?”
Derek goes silent again and drops his head. Two other werewolves are looking at him with distinct unease. Stiles shifts awkwardly on the spot. He remembers he meant to say something about looking for a calculator or something but instead he finds himself staring at the oatmeal in Derek’s hands.
“Is that dinner?”
Derek instinctively pulls it closer to himself.
“Yes sir.”
Stiles scratches at his face. “Do you have a microwave or something?”
“No sir.”
Stiles thinks for a moment before nodding to himself. “Alright, pass me that. I can warm it up upstairs.”
Derek doesn’t move. The grip on his box gets tighter.
“Do you really prefer cold oatmeal?” Stiles asks, trying not to sound exasperated. He’s not even sure why he’s trying to help the guy at this point.
“This is fine, Stiles. We eat it like this all the time.”
“All the time?” Stiles squawks. “Christ, how often do you have oatmeal?”
“Twice a day,” the older man says, and his voice is weirdly proud? “And generous portions too.”
Stiles doesn’t know what to say to that. Instead, he swings his backpack down in front and rummages inside until he finds the two bananas he put in this morning.
“Here, maybe these will help. I’m Stiles by the way,” he gives the older man an awkward wave.
“Kevin,” says the older man. He gestures to the other woman in the room. “That’s Shania. And it seems you know Derek.”
“Nice to meet you all. I’m going to leave these here and get going.” Stiles puts the bananas down on a chair and starts to head out.
He catches a quiet, “is he the one you mentioned before?” from Kevin, but he doesn’t catch Derek’s answer before the door swings shut.
Derek takes in another spoonful of oatmeal with mashed banana and tries to think through the Stiles problem.
(This oatmeal tastes significantly better with banana.)
(He doesn’t like being in this guy’s debt.)
And there it is. The crux of the matter.
Stiles is giving him things and he isn’t stating his price.
And not to mention the attention Stiles is drawing to Derek.
He takes another bite and lets the food melt on his tongue. After over a year of mostly oatmeal and bread, Derek finds himself holding his breath at the taste of slightly overripe banana.
It’s kind of embarrassing, really.
Anyway, back to the Stiles problem.
Either the guy has a savior complex or more bananas than sense. Either way, Derek needs him to back off. This position in the university is the best he's had since, well, since he’d been caught. Two meals a day, relatively light work, mostly civil bosses. Of course, the evenings with Matt aren’t great, but they’re nothing compared to the people Kate lent him out to. He even gets to read in Matt’s library after he’s asleep.
Fuck, he needs to keep this position.
Once his oatmeal is finished, he quickly brushes his teeth in front of the cracked mirror in the toilet and curls up on his mattress.
There’s the third part to the Stiles problem that he’s definitely not going to think about.