WHAT YOU HAVE DONE.
i just had to reblog this bc i love how it starts as brainstorming and then converts into an actual fic, it seems, almost without the writer’s realization ^_^
iwasbornfor asked you:
iwasbornfor(.)tumblr(.)com/post/29862616489/i-saw-you-standing-alone-a-sterek-fanmix-on … So I kind of brainfarted into existence an entire Sterek jazz playlist (featuring songs featuring the moon) and an AU to go with it. I thought you might enjoy it?Oh, hell yes! Exactly what I was waiting for! Thank you so much! I love the song choices; they fill me with such a powerful sense of nostalgic romance!
Now, all I want to complete my life is a 1920s historical AU in which Stiles is a newspaper-boy in suspenders and a hat (YOU KNOW WHAT I’M TALKIN’ ‘BOUT), unfortunately orphaned because his policeman dad was gunned down by the Italian mafia during an alcohol raid. (Prohibition era, remember?)
He and his best friend Scott, both orphans, are living in Dr. Deaton’s Home for Boys, a small but unusually well-run orphanage funded by Dr. Deaton’s quite lucrative veterinarian practice (some of his clients include the pets/horses of senators and visiting British royalty), as well as mysterious benefactors whose backgrounds no one entirely knows. (Hint, hint!)
Stiles is a spazzy-but-secretly-responsible teenager who, being the sensible one out of his and Scott’s bromantic duo, is worried about what the hell he’ll do once he turns eighteen and has to leave the orphanage. He isn’t rich enough to get into any university, even if he’s more than clever enough. (He has this massive crush on Lydia Martin, the town’s princess, who is as beautiful as she is brilliant - but she’s way out of his league. If only… No. It’ll never happen.)
Jackson grew up with them at the orphanage, too. (See above photo.) But he’s been adopted by this glitzy lawyer-type and has since become an arrogant bastard that won’t even drop by to visit. He’s too busy pretending to belong among the hobnobbing rich folk, turning up his already upturned nose at everything, wearing the snazziest clothes, hanging out with the richest friends (this suave, cool guy named Danny), betting on the fastest horses, dating the prettiest girls.
Lydia.
Dating Lydia.
What makes it worse is that Jackson doesn’t genuinely seem to care about her, either. Stiles occasionally catches them going out, Lydia in a lovely dress with a fur stole around her slender neck, and Jackson’s arm around her as he smirks that infuriating, I-own-everything-including-you smirk.
Damn it.
Meanwhile, all Stiles has to his credit are a couple of coins left over from his newspaper business, and top grades at the local school. But it’s not like he has a future. Orphans never do.
So, Stiles is considering various options - joining the military with Scott, maybe? - when he runs into Derek Hale.
Mafioso Derek Hale.
From the Irish mafia.
Dressed in a sharp suit and silk trousers that probably cost more than what Stiles will make selling newspapers for the rest of his life, and such a sour, broody sonovabitch that he might as well be living in hell, instead of in whatever palatial mansion he does live in.
Oh, and he carries a gun. A really big… gun. Of, um, big. Proportions.
Trouble is, he takes up temporary residence in the five-star hotel Stiles operates outside of, and he buys the paper from Stiles, every evening, like clockwork. And glowers down at Stiles, like Stiles’s dumb peasant face somehow offends him, until, one day, he offers Stiles an unexpected deal.
“You’re Stiles, right?”
“Yeah,” Stiles answers, cautiously. “How’d you know?”
“Heard you talkin’ to that other kid.”
Oh. Scott. Still, what does that have to do with -
“You look like you need some dough,” Derek says, his hat shadowing his face.
“Huh?” Stiles gapes up at him.
“If you deliver somethin’ for us, you’ll be rewarded. Richly rewarded. We need a new face for this deal, someone the cops won’t recognize.”
And Stiles just - explodes, slamming the paper into Derek’s chest hard enough to make the man actually stagger a bit.
Derek looks stunned. Well, as much as a man with a shadowed face and a stubbled jaw can look stunned.
“Why, thank you ever so much for taking pity on my poverty, Mr. Hale, but it’s a decent poverty, and at least I didn’t have to sell my soul to get it. My hands ain’t stained with blood. And I sure as hell won’t do anything that might hurt cops, seeing as how my dad used to be one. Got it? Now back off.”
Derek grits his teeth. “It was a good deal.”
Stiles barks out a laugh that isn’t a laugh. Not at all. “Yeah, that’s what the devil always says. Get outta here.”
And maybe Stiles is stupid. Maybe he’ll be dead before the night is up, shot full of holes in some alley on the way back to the orphanage. Maybe he’s offended the wrong man. No, he’s definitely offended the wrong man. He’s just rejected Derek Hale, prince of the Irish mafia, nephew of Peter Hale, the Alpha of that particular pack of rabid wolves.
But Derek just… pauses. All over. Something undefinable seems to come over him, and he just looks at Stiles, like he’s never seen him before.
One of his gloved hands comes up - and Stiles doesn’t flinch away from it, because he won’t, he’ll never flinch from a scumbag like this - and cups Stiles’s face, angles it into the streetlight, so that it shines into Stiles’s eyes, nearly blinding him.
Stiles is being studied. His entire face is being studied, and his - his mouth, and Stiles doesn’t know what to do with that, a hot, uneasy prickle running over his skin, making it break out in goosebumps.
He tries to blink past the light to see Derek’s eyes, but they just glint from under the brim of his hat, avid and strangely hungry.
Stiles clenches his jaw against the sudden (and suddenly bizarre) temptation to part his lips.
Derek’s gloved thumb ghosts over Stiles’s throat, making him shiver, and then, Derek steps back.
“You’re a strong one,” Derek murmurs, and then he’s gone.
