January seventh. Seven days since the start of 2015, and seven days since his father's death.
The bastard, he thinks bitterly. The past year Derek Hale had made it very obvious that he hated his scrawny guts, taking every given opportunity to shove...
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Hey, where'd you put the trash bags?"
Derek nudges the box with the tip of his boot, sliding it across the floor. Stiles stops it with his sneaker and tugs out a bag.
"Thanks."
The sun is actually out today, casting a stream of pale yellow through the shattered window even as it dips below the trees. Dappled light filters in and kisses the wreckage of the room, making the pieces of glass on the floor sparkle like diamonds. The mattress and broken furniture have been hauled out to the driveway and the ash is mostly swept away, leaving a large stretch of blackened hardwood behind. Stiles is kneeling in the corner, picking up the last few dead leaves. The walls have been scrubbed down, the mold and blackened paint chipped away. Derek stares at it all, stunned with how empty it looks.
He doesn't know what made him decide to finally do it.
But this morning he had stood at the bottom of the stairs with the box of trash bags in hand, staring up at the room with his feet nailed to the floor. After a while Stiles had quietly risen from the couch, come up behind him in his batman pajama bottoms and said, "let me put on some jeans. I'll come help you."
Derek hadn't said no.
Now five trash bags are stacked up by the door, tied off and bulging with dead foliage and ash and wood splinters. That's mostly accredited to Stiles, who had stuck to cleaning up the plants and soot, letting Derek deal with the more personal items like picture frames and soiled clothing on his own. They had been working almost all day— Stiles had left a couple times to bring up more cleaning supplies and grab lunch, but Derek had insisted that he wasn't hungry, because he thought that if he left the room he might not be able to walk back in.
Stiles had brought up a sandwich and a bottle of water for him anyway. The sandwich sits untouched by the door, the bottle of water empty in one of the trash bags.
Derek drags a hand across his brow and pushes himself towards the corner of the room he had been avoiding. He hasn't said much the whole time; his voice seems to have abandoned him since walking upstairs, but Stiles had been filling the air with a gentle stream of babble, reciting everything from the logistics of lacrosse to the plots of all seven Star Wars films. Derek couldn't have been less interested, but he listened anyway. He's grateful for the noise, because he knows otherwise the silence would have drowned him in his thoughts.
His knees crack as he bends down and picks up the blue toothbrush abandoned amongst the broken glass.
"So. Why did you have this?" He asks, holding it up.
Stiles looks over and winces. "I was out of toothpaste, so I went to find some in your bathroom... And got distracted."
Derek nods and tosses the brush into a black bag. It's almost funny.
