#and it's almost 1am so take that as you will adlfkjgh

[clotpolesonly]

Curtain Up (Thank You, Five)

some cheesy af theater AU nonsense because based loosely on the teenwolfdrabbles prompts of “act,” “patch,” and “knowledge”, which @tiniestawoo put into a theater context and then it would not stay drabble-length XD

 | Sterek | Gen | 2k | Theater AU | Oblivious Stiles | First Kiss |

(also on AO3)

~~~

“Patch! I need a patch!”

Stiles careened through backstage, dodging set pieces and actors getting to their places, trying not to make a gigantic ruckus in his tap shoes. Of course this would happen the one night their costumer couldn't be there to oversee things. That was when Allison would drop her curling iron onto Stiles' shirt for the opening of act two and burn a hole straight through it.

"It's eight til places!” Stiles whisper-shouted, as loudly as he dared backstage. “For the love of god, does anyone know how to sew a patch?"

"I do."

Derek, already dressed for his own entrance, was leaning up against the back wall and eyeing Stiles' bare chest with a raised eyebrow. Thank god for the low lighting, because Stiles did not think he could’ve handled it if Derek had been able to see the way his face—and probably the rest of him too—flushed.

“You what?” he asked, because he was an idiot.

Derek obviously agreed. His eyebrow hiked up even higher and he nodded at the shirt clutched in Stiles’ hands.

“I know how to sew a patch,” he said. “Do you have something to patch it with?”

Wordlessly, Stiles held up a scrap of fabric that Scott had hastily fished out of some bin from a distant corner of the dressing room. It was nowhere near the same color as the shirt, but it was a similar fabric and it fit in with the general color scheme of the number. The hole was dead center in the back too, so they figured that it could maybe look like it was sort of on purpose.

Derek took the scrap and the shirt without comment—not without more eyebrow judging, though, because who would he be without his judgmental eyebrows?—and slid past Stiles in the direction of the stage manager’s podium on stage left.

Mason wasn’t there, but Stiles could hear him back in the dressing room, announcing five til curtain up. He joined in the chorus of “thank you, five” by reflex, and Derek snorted into the little box of detritus that he was digging around in. Stiles would’ve snarked at him for it, but then Derek was pulling out a needle and thread and he couldn’t be anything but relieved.

“It’s not gonna be pretty,” Derek warned him, spreading the shirt out on top of the podium under the blue-tinted working light and positioning the patch where it needed to be.

“It just needs to not fall apart before the number’s over,” Stiles said, muffled around the thumbnail in his mouth. “Peter can pull me something else from the closet tomorrow.”

“He’s gonna bitch at you so much for this.”

Derek had the audacity to laugh at the idea, as if Peter hadn’t reduced poor Sydney to tears the time she had accidentally gotten red lipstick on her white dry-clean-only dress during a quick change. Stiles was not looking forward to informing Peter that his perfectly realized vision was irreparably tarnished and he needed to find a new costume for his lead dancer before tomorrow’s matinee.

“It’s not like it was my curling iron,” Stiles muttered.

He crossed his arms over his chest, feeling weirdly exposed even with Derek’s focus entirely on the task before him. The needle looked impossibly small in his large hand, but it dipped in and out of the fabric easily, leaving a line of tidy stitches in its wake.

Stiles tried not to find this newfound skill of Derek’s attractive, but, frankly, everything about Derek was attractive to him. The fact that he had been able to keep his crush on Derek more or less subtle and under wraps for the whole rehearsal process was a feat for which Stiles deserved a fucking award. Every time Derek laughed at one of his jokes, he was caught between looking for the Candid Camera guy and drafting their wedding vows.

And yet, despite his innate awkwardness, he had somehow managed to become friends with Derek. Derek, with the pretty eyes and the smooth voice and the perfect smile that he sometimes deigned to grace Stiles with. Derek who could sight-read a song note-perfect on the first try and match Stiles’ sarcasm quip for quip. The guy was literally perfect, and now he could sew too? It was just downright unfair.

Stiles dragged his taps across the floor with a metallic shhhnk and asked, “So, uh, where’d you learn to do this?”

Derek paused in his sewing just to send Stiles a flat look. “My uncle is a costumer,” he pointed out. “And my grandmother was too. She wouldn’t let any of her grandchildren get away with not knowing how to take care of their own clothes.”

“And everybody else’s, apparently.”

“Nothing is worse than a performer who does nothing but perform,” Derek said. It sounded like a mantra, a pearl of wisdom his grandmother had passed on to him. “That’s how you get entitled shitbags like Jackson who make demands of the crew without knowing what it takes to make those demands happen.”

Stiles snorted, remembering the fit Jackson had thrown over not getting a spot for his feature. One verse of a song was clearly not enough to showcase his talents properly, especially not if he wasn’t dead center with a white hot spotlight on him. He and Derek had had a grand time roasting Jackson for that one. Not that Jackson had noticed; he was arrogant enough to have actually taken their sarcastic compliments as genuine ones. Which was exactly what Stiles had bet that he would do. Derek had bought him a milkshake as his prize.

“I work set design,” Stiles found himself volunteering.

Derek glanced up at him again.

Stiles suddenly remembered that he was shirtless. He crossed his arms a little tighter and cleared his throat.

“When I’m not performing,” he clarified. “I help build the sets. And I’ve done lighting a few times! I know how to work the light boards and everything. Tried stage managing, but that one’s really super stressful, so I’ll leave it Mason. I’m not—”

Not one of the entitled shitbags, he wanted to say. Because Derek was still looking at him, eyebrows slightly less judgemental than usual. Because Stiles cared what Derek thought of him. Because Derek was the kind of performer that Stiles wanted to be when he grew up.

Not that Stiles was not already grown up, or that Derek was even that much older than him. Stiles was just a disaster bi with a huge crush and a major talent boner for their leading man, which apparently left him unable to control his mouth. Damn it, he had been doing so well at not making a fool of himself in front of Derek. And now here he was, shirtless and scrambling because he didn’t know how to fucking sew. Everybody should know how to sew! Fuck, maybe he was an entitled shitbag.

Except that Derek was smiling. It set Stiles’ stomach to fluttering more than any case of stage fright ever had. Every time.

“I suck at stage managing,” Derek admitted. “I happily leave that to my sister. It’s sets, sound design, and costumes for me. Though I would love to direct someday.”

With that, he leaned down to bite the thread, since the one thing the stage manager’s box of wonders did not seem to have was scissors. He shook out the shirt and held it up with a proud flourish for Stiles to inspect. It was still pretty obviously a last minute patch job, considering it was just a random splotch of blue on the back of an otherwise normal white shirt, but it was relatively neat and it would be a hell of a lot better than showing skin.

“You’re a prince among men,” Stiles declared. “Truly, Derek, I owe you my life. Or maybe just a favor or something, I dunno, a life debt seems a little dramatic. A favor is probably reasonable, though. So if there’s something you want, you can have it, anything you w—”

“How about a kiss?”

Stiles stuttered to a stop, hand already tangled in the shirt that Derek wasn’t letting go of yet. “W-what?”

Derek grinned, unrepentant, and gave the shirt a little shake. “For payment,” he said. “Or for luck. Or maybe just because you want to.”

Stiles gaped at him, running the words over and over in his head until he was absolutely certain that they were, in fact, the words that his ears had thought they’d heard. Even once that had been determined, the only thing he could think to say was, “Do you want me to?”

Derek opened his mouth to answer, but suddenly Mason was right there, headset on and clipboard in hand.

“Will you two quit flirting!” he snapped. “I called places two minutes ago. And Stiles, why aren’t you dressed? Don’t make us hold. I want to get out of here sometime before midnight.”

Stiles snatched his shirt out of Derek’s hand and hastily pulled it on. It was not graceful to tuck a shirt into trousers while running, but desperate times and whatnot. Ignoring Mason’s hissed “Quiet feet backstage, Stiles, for the love of—”, he slid into place in the right wing more or less stage-ready and with Derek right behind him.

He devoted ten seconds to making sure that his hair wasn’t too fucked up, then rounded on Derek.

“Were you serious?” he whispered. “Like, actually serious? About the kissing thing? You want me to kiss you?”

Derek rolled his eyes. “Well, I did ask you to kiss me. I figure that can probably be construed as me wanting you to, yes.”

“Since when?”

The judgmental eyebrows returned in full force, accompanied by the swell of the entr'acte from the orchestra out front. “Stiles, I have been flirting with you for the last two months. You can’t possibly have missed that memo.”

Stiles gaped a bit more. Squished into the wall behind him, Scott was laughing, and he did not stop when Stiles turned to demand, “Wait a minute, did you know about this? Has Derek really been flirting with me this whole time?”

“Dude, literally the whole time.”

“Dude! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought you knew!” Scott was laughing so hard, he almost couldn’t get the words out. “You’ve already been on a date and everything!”

“No, we haven’t!” Stiles insisted. Then, to Derek, “Wait, have we?”

Derek shrugged. “The milkshakes were sort of a date.”

“Oh my god,” Stiles said faintly. “My whole life is a lie. A good lie! Don’t get me wrong, this is absolutely a good thing, like, seriously the best thing on the planet, but also I’m an idiot and I’m having an existential crisis right now and I—”

“You have to be on stage in two eight counts,” Derek said. “Are you gonna kiss me or not?”

Stiles did not waste any time. He had already wasted the last two months being oblivious, apparently, and smudged lipstick and a late entrance were a price he was willing to pay for the noise Derek made into his mouth. He didn’t let up until Scott started slapping at his arm in a panic, and even then, it took all his will power to manage it.

“We’re coming back to this later,” he murmured against Derek’s lips.

Derek said, “It’s a date,” and then shoved him out onto the stage.

The patch held up through the number. Late entrance aside, it was the best Stiles had ever danced, and the milkshake Derek bought him after the show was the most delicious he had ever had.