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Derek gets the first note in his locker on a Wednesday, a few months into senior year.
You have amazing taste in shoes, it proclaims, and Derek frowns. He's no stranger to compliments, being lucky enough to be tall and into sports, but he's never been complimented on his clothes. Ever. In fact, he'd been almost priding himself on how eye-searing he could make his style until his mother actually begged him to at least make an effort for school.
So now, when he's out in public, he sticks to a semi-conservative style he's more or less stolen from his uncle Peter. Not the v-necks, though. Not until Derek has the chest hair for it, anyway.
But his shoes... he looks down at his scuffed Chucks. They're over a year old. Which... come to think of it, might be a point in their favor. He likes durable things. And who knows, maybe the note-writer (with horrendous hand-writing, by the way) is just a fellow Chucks fan?
All in all it puzzles Derek for about two minutes total. Then the bell rings, so he stuffs the note into his bag, and forgets about it.
Then, a few days later, another note flutters to the floor when Derek opens his locker.
I love that you take care of your hands.
Derek has a brief swoop of panic in his gut, because if someone saw him with his claws out somehow, he's gonna be in so much trouble.
But... come to think of it, he does take care of his hands. He kinda has to. As a werewolf everything grows at a phenomenal rate, which means endless haircuts for one thing, but also means having to trim your nails every few days. And because he hates snagging on things, he always does a little filing, just to round the edges. And the whole process kinda makes his hands feel dry, so every so often he'll follow up with some nice moisturizer...
So, yeah, it's not wrong, but he's stuck on how the note-writer knows this, other than maybe having an exceptional eye for detail. But, whatever, Derek decides to take it as the compliment it's obviously intended as, slips the note into his chem book, and goes off to class feeling weirdly uplifted.
You should always wear those pants.
He reads the note three times before giving up, because it doesn't make sense. These jeans are old, too small, and the only ones he had left in his closet, because he'd stupidly ignored his mother's warnings that no laundry would be done if it was not brought to the laundry room downstairs. Hell, he's afraid to bend over out of fear he'll pop the button, and he's forced to adopt a gingerly sort of sprawl every time he sits down to not strain a seam.
Laura laughs at him at lunch, and he grumbles at her, but then he also almost chokes on his mystery meat when a cheerleader passes by with a group of friends and asks him if he has a date with a casting couch later. Or, rather, he chokes when he stupidly asks Laura what that means, and she tells him. Gleefully. He wishes pretty much every day that he'd never had a sister, much less a twin. There's no getting away from her, even at school.
So that note gets tucked away, deep inside the thickest book Derek owns. Because while it makes him feel clammy with embarrassment, he also can't help but be flattered, and he also can't make himself throw it away.
“What's up, loser?” Laura crows as she slams into the boys' bathrooms. Derek scowls at her in the mirror.
“I think you're the loser right now seeing as you're lost. The girls' bathroom is across the hall, dumbass.”
“There's also a line all the way to the library, and it might be stanky in here, but I can deal.” She pauses with her hand on the nearest stall door, sending him an odd look. “Okay, seriously, what are you doing?”
Derek stops fiddling with his hair, and turns around to glare at her. “None of your business.”
He can see her mouth opening again, but he's not in the mood. “Shut it, or I'm telling the hall monitor you're in here.”
She snaps her lips shut, but also narrows her eyes at him. He's gonna get questioned later, he knows from experience, but he just doesn't want to deal with her now. So he saunters out, feeling weirdly taller, and unconsciously rubs his thumb against the note in his pocket.
Your hair looks particularly luscious today.
Damn right it does, Derek thinks smugly to himself.
So far the notes have been mostly innocent, possibly apart from the one about his jeans, but there's no mistaking today's note.
You need to stop leaning like that. It makes it very hard for me to concentrate in class.
Derek is, in fact, leaning, even as he reads it. It's just a comfortable pose, shoulder against the neighboring locker, hip jutted out, legs crossed as he reads. He isn't doing it on purpose, and he never considered it alluring, but now he's glaringly aware. He glances around, trying to figure out if the note-writer is nearby, but no one is even looking his way, everyone milling around to get their things the last few minutes before the bell.
“Excuse me,” a sweet, if somewhat snippy, voice chirps behind him. “You're blocking my locker.”
“Oh, sorry.” He moves away and lets the girl get her things. He knows her, vaguely. She's a junior, and her name is... Libby? Or something? All he knows about her is that his locker was hers the year before, but that she somehow managed to make the administration switch them. Possibly because of the unholy screech it made the first time he opened it, but he'd just asked the janitor to borrow some oil for the hinges and fixed it. But, then again, from what he can guess about Libby, she doesn't seem the type to be caught within five miles of an oil can. And she also does not seem the type to be very patient with anyone, despite the sweetness of her voice.
She does send him a brief smile, though, and he returns it with a distracted nod, still too absorbed in the note in his hand.
And after that it only seems to get worse. Or better. Derek can't decide which.
Your eyes are incredible. I'd drown in them, if you'd let me.
You're practically glowing today.
This is gonna sound weird, but you have really awesome teeth.
You're the smartest person I know.
That last one drives Derek nuts, because it definitely implies that the writer knows him personally, somehow. None of the notes ever smelled like anyone recognizable, only giving off the chemical smell of mass-produced school notebooks and a variety of sweaty teenagers, and the handwriting is not familiar.
He possibly even becomes a little bit obsessed, laying out the notes on his desk at home, chronologically, looking for a pattern. But he finds nothing. Laura does, though. Namely the notes. She laughs so hard she makes herself sick, and Derek finally snaps after weeks of her taunting, and their parents find them locked in an even wrestling match, smelling of puke and littered with bruises.
It's not a high point of Derek's life, he admits.
He finally decides to solve the mystery once and for all, although it costs him his lunch hour. Because that's usually the time interval when the notes appear. So for several days he lurks in an empty classroom across from his locker, eating power bars instead of school lunch meat, and listening.
Finally, after four days of boring lunch hours, he hears the scuff of shoes on linoleum come to a stop right outside, and he peers through the door just in time to see a lanky and completely unknown boy slide a note through one of the slits in Derek's locker door.
To his credit he doesn't even flinch when Derek emerges from the classroom. Hell, he even sends Derek a small smile, before simply turning on his heel to leave, otherwise not acknowledging him at all.
“Hey! Wait a second!”
The boy turns around, confused. “Uhhh... sure, what's up?”
“Is this some kind of joke?” Derek blurts, because nothing makes sense. The boy was caught in the act! Either he has the best poker face known to man -which Derek doubts, because it looks like a very expressive face- or there's something else going on here.
The boy glances at the lockers with a hint of fear in his eyes. “Joke? No...? Oh!” he says suddenly, lighting up. “Oh, no, dude, it's not a prank or anything! Like anyone would still have testicles if they ever dared prank Lydia Martin, you know what I mean?” He sighs, dramatically, and stares besotted at Derek's locker.
“She's just so beautiful and amazing, you know? I know she's, like... WAY out of my league, but you can't win if you don't play, right?”
Derek is still confused, but at least one part of the mystery is solved now. He points to the locker door still being gazed at by the apparent admirer.
“That's my locker.”
“Uh... nooo? That's Lydia Martin's locker.”
“I don't know who that is, but this is my locker.”
The boy is looking increasingly ill, suddenly. “No, it's not,” he insists, weakly, so all Derek can do is raise an eyebrow at him, input his combination, and swing open the door.
The latest note slithers to the floor, but the boy's eyes are glued to Derek's things. His books, his size twelve basketball shoes, his gym bag, the picture of him and Laura giving each other noogies at Disneyland taped to the inside of the door.
“Oh... my god. I'm dead,” the boy peeps, looking distinctly like he's about to puke. Or pass out. Or both.
Derek is disappointed that the notes obviously weren't meant for him. He's self aware enough to admit it. But this guy looks legitimately concerned for his life, and Derek can't stand to look at it.
“Hey, it's okay, no hard feelings,” he says evenly, picking up the last note to hand it back.
There's a long, frozen moment before a shaking hand comes up to take the note. It's a nice hand, Derek thinks. Too bad it comes with such awful penmanship.
“You... really?” The voice is incredulous, and Derek does his best to calm whatever fears are obviously still racing around the boy's head.
“Really. It was kinda nice, you know?” he says, aiming for casual, and then curses himself at the wide-eyed stare directed at him. “Everyone likes compliments, right?” he adds with a shrug, and closes the locker door again.
“So, you... you're not gonna, like... rip my arms out of their sockets and beat me with them? To death?”
The entire scenario is so baffling to Derek it takes him a while to recover. “Why would- what? No, I'm not gonna- wuh-what the hell gave you the idea I would do that?! To anyone!”
The boy shrugs. “You're hot, popular, and you have eyebrows that serial killers would actually kill for, and I'm... I dunno, scum of the Earth?” He looks utterly unconcerned by the statement, too, and Derek feels a headache coming on.
“Even if all of that was true- which it's not- it still doesn't explain why you're expecting some kind of blood bath, here.” Derek is aware he's being defensive, but considering he's already struggling with puberty and wolf instincts, and doing damn well at it, thank you very much, he does not appreciate the implication that he'd harm someone for... he doesn't even know what.
“You're kidding me, right?” the boy says with a snort. “You're the star of the basketball team, and I'm like an amoeba in the food chain here, man, and I've been leaving you fucking love notes and getting my unintentional gay all over you for weeks.”
Derek can tell his eyebrows are drawing attention to themselves again from the way the boy swallows, but there's no helping it. Everything is just making him more confused.
“Whatever, I'm not gonna...” he waves a hand around helplessly. “Do anything. Like I said, it was nice. And it was an honest mistake. End of story.”
He turns around to go somewhere and sulk for a while over the fact that his secret admirer wasn't even his, but the boy stops him with a touch to his elbow.
“Look, uh. I'm sorry. Really. I didn't mean to... uh...” he trails off, searching Derek's face, and shifting on his feet. “Just. Sorry,” he says, and then rushes off in the opposite direction, leaving Derek alone in the hallway, confused, hungry and disappointed.
He keeps the notes. The illusion was nice, brief as it was, and Derek allows himself a full week to wallow in his misery. Laura doesn't even mock him, and that more than anything should probably tell him how sad he looks.
It's not that he can't get dates. He's dated plenty before, but no one ever seem to look beyond his sports skills and the cred it brings, and it might make Derek a freakish anomaly of high school, but he doesn't care about status. Which makes it even more ironic that he has it. But he can't help that playing ball makes his blood sing and that he's been blessed with fairly good genes looks-wise.
The bottom line is that no one ever cared to look closer, and even though it was all a mistake, the thought that someone wanted to was wonderful while it lasted.
He also finds out who the poor guy is who somehow got the wrong locker. It's a complete coincidence, because Derek hears him, his voice easily recognizable, talking to a friend just around the corner one day. His name is Stiles, he's a junior, the son of the sheriff, his best friend's name is Scott, and he talks so much that Derek could probably have written an entire essay on him just from what he caught of a five minute conversation.
And he's in love with Lydia Martin, who Derek finally realizes is the girl who swapped lockers with him, when she finds a note of her own one day, standing right next to Derek, so close he can smell the familiar chemical paper.
“Oh, my god,” one of her friends titter, reading over her shoulder. “That is sooo creepy.”
Lydia nods, and holds out the note with two perfectly manicured fingers. “Yeah. A little too Hannibal Lecter for me, thanks.”
“Who?”
“... some creep I read about somewhere,” she hedges, and then orders the friend to get rid of the note.
It ends up in a trash can a few lockers down, and Derek has to restrain himself to not fish it out, just to see what it says. None of the notes Derek got ever felt creepy, and he feels weirdly jealous that someone who obviously doesn't appreciate the attention is getting them now.
He goes home, shifts and runs until his lungs burn, and finally decides he has to let it go. It was never meant for him, it was an honest mistake, and Derek has indulged his need to sulk now. All he can do is get the fuck over it.
Of course, that's when he finds another note.
You did great at practice yesterday.
Regards, Stiles, the doofus who got the wrong locker.
Derek is getting really sick of being confused, and he stomps down the hall angrily, following the scent he now knows, in a direct line from his locker to where Stiles is lounging outside against a tree with a friend. The friend takes one look at Derek and makes himself scarce. Stiles looks like he wants to join him, but bravely stands up and meets Derek's glare head on.
“Is this supposed to be funny?” Derek snarls, shoving the note into Stiles' chest.
“Nooo? It was supposed to be nice.”
Derek blinks, slowly, searching Stiles' face. “What.”
“You know, you could really use some punctuation for that question there,” Stiles notes with a grin, and Derek feels like he's yet again missed something. Stiles rolls his eyes. “You said, and I quote, -everyone likes compliments, right?- and you even had a question mark in there, so I know you know how to use them.”
“You're a very strange person,” Derek says finally, still not sure he understands what's going on, but his anger has fizzled like air from a leaky balloon.
“But you didn't rip my arms off! And you also didn't tell me to stop!” The look on Stiles' face is best described as gleeful, and now Derek is positive he's missing something.
When he doesn't come up with something to say, Stiles starts fidgeting, and suddenly Derek has to fight down the urge to smirk, because obviously Stiles doesn't do well with silence. Finally Derek has a weapon of his own.
“So do you want me to cut it out?” Stiles blurts eventually. “You can totally tell me to my face, I won't get weird about it. At least, no more weird than it already is. But you did say it was nice, and, well, I finally got the right locker, but it didn't go so well, so I thought, hey, why not keep sending my compliments someplace where they're appreciated, you know? No homo! Or, you know, a little bit homo, maybe, whatever floats your boat, man, I swing all the ways, but I get the feeling a big, strong joc- err, sporty type like you doesn't appreciate the homo the way I do, so feel free to tell me to shove it. Also, tell me to shut up anytime. No, really, please tell me to stop before I somehow manage to say something even more embarrassing, because, seriously, this is bad enough, and now I feel a desperate need to go brain myself on a nice rock somewhere and just let the circle of life take me, dude, I swear to God this word vomit is some kind of illness yet to be diagnosed. Maybe I should become a scientist just to solve the mystery of how to shut the hell-”
Derek finally slaps a hand over Stiles' mouth out of sheer desperation. He's not sure he's ever heard that many words in such a short span of time, and he needs a moment to absorb them all. Stiles doesn't exactly stop talking, though, but his shoulders slump with relief, and there's a muffled “fanks, mwan” against Derek's palm. It tickles. And not in a bad way.
“Right,” Derek says firmly. “I'm not gonna tell you to stop. Okay? It was nice, like I said. I just wanted to make sure you didn't just keep doing it for... a joke or whatever.”
“Pweeds, I waik my baws,” Stiles argues behind Derek's hand, and he presses it in a little tighter, before he loses his train of thought.
“And...” Derek hesitates, not sure he should add his thoughts on this before having time to think through all of Stiles' chatter, but he feels it's important to bring up. “As for the, uh... homo. Don't worry about that.”
Stiles' eyes go impossibly wide, and seeing as his mouth is now finally slack and quiet, Derek finally removes his hand.
“You're telling me you're...?” he trails off, as if even saying it will bring him severe punishment.
Derek shrugs. “I dunno. Never really thought about it.”
“But... you don't mind that I'm... uh...”
“Swinging all the ways?” Derek asks, proud that he managed to pick that much out of the rambling. “No, it's fine.”
Stiles studies him for another long moment, and then he smiles, hugely, and the change it makes to his face is mind-blowing, leaving Derek helpless against smiling back.
“All right, brace yourself, dude, I am gonna woo the shit out of you. No need to woo me back or anything,” he assures hurriedly, “I'm used to the unrequited thing.”
“That sucks,” Derek says honestly, and Stiles nods.
“Yeah. But that's the life of the social outcast.”
The bell goes off, and Stiles explodes into action, scrambling for his things and rushing off, talking all the while.
“Shit, gotta go, but fear not, my beefy friend, wooing is gonna happen. All the wooing!” he shouts over his shoulder, and Derek groans into his palm for a second before he remembers it was the same one that was just over Stiles' mouth.
* * *
What color are your eyes, even.
You should wear the green shirt every day, man.
How do you look good in basketball shorts?! NO ONE looks good in basketball shorts. It's unfair.
I think I might have given you a teeth note already, but OMG, you have the cutest bunny teeth, you should show them off more.
I saw you help that old lady with her groceries yesterday, and I gotta say you're killing me, here. You're not allowed to be hot AND be a good person.
Never stop laughing. Ever.
Addendum to the green shirt observation: always leave those two top buttons undone.
Thanks for the coffee this morning, you're the best. :)
Roses are red, violets are blue, whatever you wear, I wanna do you. ;)
You need to stop asking if I'm serious after every note. Like I told you, I'm wooing you, man. (And holy crap you're brutal at Scrabble. Take me now.)
Do you even realize how awful it was to drag my sorry ass out of bed this morning with you still in it? Next time we're doing it at my place, and YOU can be the one to sneak out at the crack of dawn.
Just felt I should take this opportunity to get in one more laugh over how you genuinely thought I didn't know about the wolf thing. Seriously, you guys are lucky most of the world's population is dumb as a doorknob.
Full-mooniversary is SO not a thing. Just admit you wanted to romance me for no reason. Being honest with yourself is a sign of maturity, Derek!
Had a disgustingly cheesy anonymous Valentine's sent to Laura's locker. There's a limerick about her feet in it. You're welcome.
Stop freaking out, okay? So you said it first, big deal. If you'd given me like two seconds before running off with your tail between your legs I would have said it back. Alright? Love you too, sourwolf. All the homo. <3
End.