He's been out there for months. Stiles knows it. He's seen a glimpse of him every now and then whenever it was quiet and nobody was around. And yet, no matter how often he tried, he couldn't get Derek back to them. As soon as Stiles' attention shifted onto the wolf, he would turn and vanish between the trees.
They don't know what it had been that set Derek off. It had been months after the alpha pack was gone. Stiles had been saved. There had been losses but things had gone back to normal long ago. If you don't count the nightmares that is. They had somehow crawled back into their lives, wounded, but fond of the future they had just saved. And then, just like that, the loft had been empty. A shift in the pack bonds, an emptiness that had clawed at their hearts.
At first they had searched. Hours and hours they had run through the woods for a trace that didn't seem to have a source. Something that had smelled like Derek and yet again didn't. The searches had ended with more frustration every time and each time Stiles had struggled more to convince the pack of another try. He still doesn’t understand why they could give up. Maybe since everyone else could feel the emptiness in their supernatural bond it had been a lot harder on them, than it had been for Stiles. Maybe they couldn't take it anymore. But eventually the searches had stopped.
hey @regardselena I’m your secret valentine! I hope you enjoy this series of headcanons made just for you.
Giles Rutherford (of the Head of Rutherford Lab at the Ministry of Magic) is a very generous and understanding fellow. He has the tolerance of the most tolerant person in Britain probably. (if he were a teacher he’d be the one who gives you that third extension after your third successive family emergency)
but this was where he drew the line. no one in the history of warring lab partners had done something of this size before. who in their right mind let a group of ten chickens into someone’s office! especially considering he hated chickens!
he calls Malfoy, who is undoubtedly the culprit from how he's been smirking, and Granger, who while one of his best employees has had difficulty not responding to pranks with her own (that conjured rain cloud that had followed Malfoy all day? that sort of charmwork was 100% Granger)
their punishment? He's locking them in the lab until the locking charm wears off at 8am. the fact that tomorrow was Valentine's Day should only drive that point in further
Draco is sure he won't make it past the first hour. Granger is pacing and seething out loud screaming about how "There must be something in the employees' handbook against this- this INSANITY!". She's getting louder and more shrill. Draco hopes that it'll be enough to break the glass.
around 10:30pm (two and a half hours in), Hermione stops, realizing she might lose her voice if she kept screeching. she decides to channel her frustration at Malfoy instead. After all, if it weren't for his goddamn chickens this wouldn't be an issue
Draco decides not to respond to her rant about how his pranks were "simultaneously ruining both of their careers at the same time". He watches the clock turn to 11:11 and fervently wishes that Granger would shut up
miraculously, she does, but its shortlived because she switches staring at him intently and Draco lasts about 5 minutes before screaming
“What the hell do you want Granger?”
she’s silent until “We were getting along you know. I thought after Halloween we were proper friends and everything. What happened?”
“I’m not telling you”
he’s holds his quiet for two more hours (she thinks he’s asleep but he adjusts himself on the chair every once in a while) no matter how much she bugs him
Hermione makes an intricate timeline on the blackboard, finally narrowing it to New Year’s
“Draco,” and its big because even in that psuedo-friendship of theirs she’d never called him by his first name unless it was followed by Malfoy “what happened on New Year’s”
he doesn’t speak, and Hermione sags into a chair and closes her eyes, thinking he isn’t going to respond.
but he does “You got back together with Weasley, just when I was going to finally ask you out. it was my resolution, and I’d practiced the speech for days in front of the mirror and-”
“oh my god you magnificent pretensious idiot”
Hermione and Ron had been standing together when midnight hit, and to keep Ron from going on another rant about the perils of being single (all while he stared longingly at Pansy Merlin Ronald just ask her out like a normal person) she chastely kisses him just as Malfoy had walked into that room
GOD DRACO IS AN IDIOT CAN WE HAVE A MOMENT OF SILENCE BECAUSE THEY DID BEFORE draco stands up and tries to start on that aforementioned speech before Granger puts him out of his misery and kisses him
Good ol’ Giles finds his otp asleep and curled together in one of the chairs the next morning at 8. lying about the locking charm always works.
John Stilinski got married in a church. He wasn’t religious- his parents were Christmas-Easter Catholics, and so was he- but it was important to Claudia’s parents, so they agreed to be married in their small parish church out in the middle of bumble-fuck Iowa. After Stiles was born, they would sometimes take him to St. Lucia’s on Christmas, and even John could admit that he enjoyed the ritual and pageantry and sense of community, but Claudia died and they stopped going. Nowadays, he finds that he sometimes considers stepping into St. Lucia’s every once in awhile. Recent events have made him maybe a little less wary of the things he cannot prove, and life’s been wearing him down, but then again, he’s not so sure what Jesus would think of werewolves.
The point is, it’s been awhile since he’s pulled open the heavy wooden doors at St. Lucia’s.
It’s the warmth that hits him first, the heat’s on full-blast, and it’s cold outside- then the smell of incense. Claudia’s hand is in his and then it’s gone. Father Santiago stands in the aisle, his hands clasped in worry. There’s another figure in the nave, their back turned to John. Other than that, nothing seems out of the ordinary, no sign of violence or robbery.
The wail of a newborn, furious and loud, echoes across the church, as if to greet him. Stiles had cried like that for weeks and weeks after he was born. It was the best and most awful thing John had ever heard. It’s the first time in his many terms as Sheriff that the Baby Moses law has been used, but he’s not surprised. It was only a matter of time.
“Father,” he says, tearing his eyes away from the nave, from the person hushing and rocking the infant. He grasps the priest’s offered hand. “What’s going on?”
“At first I thought it was a joke,” Father Santiago answers, “you know, one of those toy baby-dolls that cry all the time. I thought some kid had put one in our manger display. I tried to ignore it, but the crying was getting disturbing, so I went to go try and turn it off I saw that it wasn’t a toy, it was real, it was a baby. I rushed him inside, and wrapped as best I could and called 911. Your man said I should call for you, so I did. I don’t know much about babies, but I would guess he’s just a few days old.”
“Thank you, Father,” John squeezes his shoulder briefly. “You did the right thing. Let’s go get that little guy sorted out.”
The figure in the nave turns around, and it’s Parrish. John doesn’t know how he didn’t recognize his deputy browns from the church entrance. There has always been something indistinct about Parrish, as if the edges of him are blurred in smoke, but still John should have known him.
“Parrish,” he steps up to the altar, “what’s the story? Get some paramedics in here; social services. You don’t need me for this.”
Parrish is holding the infant like a fullback carrying the football, tight and close to his body, as if he’s afraid someone’s going to strip it away from him at any moment.
“Sir,” he whispers, “this baby is running hot.”
“So call the paramedics, get Sally on the line. For heaven’s sake, Parrish, this baby needs a hospital, not the sheriff” The baby is hot to the touch but his pale eyes, when they blink open, are clear and he’s not flushed like a feverish infant would be.
“No,” Parrish hisses, “I mean this baby is running hot. I don’t think he’s human.”
John looks at the priest, still standing in the aisle, hunched in concern. He looks at the baby in his duck onesie and little yellow hat.
“Oh, fuck,” he says.
–
This is his favorite part- just the two of them lying on his bed as the morning brightens. Will is happy. He’s been fed and changed and he’s kicking his feet up as he tries to get a fist into his mouth. He makes noises- he’s not babbling, he’s way too young for that- but he’s grunting with effort as his arms flail. Derek leans close. Will smells of formula and diaper cream and himself- human and not. Derek babysat for Peter’s kids when they were young, but he doesn’t remember it being like this. Was Maggie’s skin ever this soft and perfect? Was her grip so incredibly strong? It might have been the case, but he has forgotten like he has forgotten so many of the little details about his family. He has forgotten the lullabies and the color of the nursery and if it was his Dad who bathed him every night or his Mom. So many of the minutiae that Stiles seems so interested in for some reason, that Stiles himself seems to remember about his own childhood, escapes him.
So he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know when Cora first flashed her eyes, or when his parents knew for certain that Jaimie was human and not a were like the rest of them. He could ask Peter, theoretically, but he hasn’t told Peter about Will. Peter has forfeited his right to this child. He has forfeited his right to a family. Cora, for her part, refuses to talk about it. Even after meeting Will over Christmas, she remained silent. Derek doesn’t know how to ask. It’s possible she’s punishing him. Who knows?
Derek is alone in this.
It still seems to him almost a fever dream. He was half asleep when the Sheriff had shown up at his door a few days before Christmas holding a squalling infant in his arms.
“I’m so sorry to wake you this early, Derek,” he had said, his breath misting in the air. “I didn’t know where else to take him.”
Derek had let him in the trailer, blinking in confusion, and heard the Sheriff out as he drank his coffee. It should have been funny, or moving even, a baby left in the manger before Christmas, but all he could think about was the cold and the fear and confusion. He held his arms out.
Nobody would mistake Will to be a Hale by blood- his skin is just a shade too dark, and his eyes, so pale in his first few weeks of life have, of late, begun to turn a deep, startling brown- but the moment he took that boy into his arms, Will was his.
The Sheriff had looked at him, watched him put the baby over his shoulder, carefully cradling his head, and stepped around the perimeter of the trailer, taking in the spare, unmade single bed and the dripping faucet; peering out the window at the building site a few feet away.
“Come on, son,” he had said, zipping his jacket. “This is no place for a baby. We have a spare room. You’ll take it until your house is up. And besides,” he added, already halfway out the door, so certain that Derek would follow him, “you don’t want to do this alone, trust me.”
So Derek had followed and now here he is and here he has been for the past month and a half, living in a strange haze of feedings and diaper changes and sleep deprivation. Nobody had warned him about the sleep deprivation.
Soon Derek will get up and go downstairs to join Stiles who is clattering around making coffee in the kitchen. Stiles doesn’t sleep well. Sometimes Derek sits up in bed, woken by some infinitesimal noise, some parental instinct didn’t know he had, to find that Stiles is already there standing over Will’s bassinet, soothing Derek’s son before he had even begun to cry.
“I’ve got him,” he whispers. “Go back to sleep, Derek.”
In the dark, in the quiet, with just the sounds of the night outside-in that great silent period between nature’s wakings- Stiles lifts Will up and holds him close, shushing and humming a wordless tune as he closes the door behind him. Safe. Safe, the darkness and the house says. Safe, says the trail of Stiles’s scent behind him. Safe. We are all safe. Derek turns around and goes back to sleep.
Soon. Soon, he’ll go down to the kitchen and Stiles will smile at them and take Will from Derek, lifting him high above his head.
“Hi, little guy,” he’ll say. “Hi there, my charming Billy,” and Derek will grumble because his name isn’t Billy, Derek’s father was never called Billy, and Charming Billy is a book about an alcoholic who is terrible to his family, but he’ll also smile in spite of himself, and pour himself some coffee and warm a bottle. He’ll sit and talk to Stiles as he feeds Will, or rather, let Stiles talk to him about his classes until the Sheriff comes down and then they’ll all get along with the business of getting along with their days.
In a few more minutes that will happen. Not just yet. He just wants to lay here for another few minutes with Will’s little, warm body close to his, his fingers clasped around Derek’s.
“Little boy, little wolf,” Derek singsongs, and Will’s eyes focus on his face. His gaze is a miracle. Please let him have this; he just wants to have one more minute in this miracle.
—
Kissing Stiles is an accident. He doesn’t mean to do it, but yesterday Stiles had come to the house and helped him pick out wood for the cabinets and granite for the counters and everything fit, and the day before he had walked with Will for over an hour as he screamed his way into a nap so that Derek could go over the paperwork from the contractor. Derek doesn’t mean to do it, but it’s still very early and he’s still mostly asleep, and there is Stiles holding Derek’s son in the crook of his arm, just talking to him as he grabs the milk from the refrigerator.
It is a memory that isn’t even a memory, it’s a ghost- the kitchen in the morning, his mother leaning into his father’s body to kiss him. It’s not a memory, it’s an instinct. Derek leans into Stiles’s body and kisses him.
Time stops, maybe. Stiles steps back. His eyes are wide. Derek steps back. His breath is short and his fingers trail along Stiles’s arm.
“Stiles-” he starts, and Will, with impeccable timing, promptly spits up all over the both of them.
—
“Do you think I should have him baptized?” The question is eating at him. He does not think about the kiss. He thinks about the little duck onesie and yellow hat Will was found in. He thinks about Will’s mother Derek can’t help it, he can’t help imagining what might lead someone- a werewolf or even a human- to abandon their child like that. It makes the hair stand up on the back of his neck. He knows what it means to run. He imagines her dark and small and terrified. He imagines her crawling through his window one day- tomorrow, in five years, ten years- and demanding her son. What if the church was not just an act of desperation, but an act of faith? How could he fail her in that?
The Sheriff glances up from the files scattered over the dining room table. Derek looks away, busying himself with the intricate operation that is untangling Will from the infant sling Lydia had given him without waking him up. The clock in the kitchen ticks away. Upstairs, Stiles is Skyping with Scott. Derek does not listen in.
“Were you- were you church-going folk?” the Sheriff asks.
“No. We had Christmas and Easter, like everyone else, but we didn’t- we never went to church or anything.” His family had had their own rituals. Full moons were holidays enough.
“Then I don’t see why you should have him baptized. I suppose you could talk about it with him when he’s older, when he can understand more about where he was found-give him that choice then. But I don’t see any reason why you should have to do it now if it’s not part of your heritage.”
“I just thought maybe his mom, or whoever put him there, would want that, you know?”
Werewolves could be Catholic. They could be anything. But he, he can’t. Even for Will, even for his mother, he doesn’t think he could step foot in a church. He is damned, he knows it, damned forever for everything he has done in his life. Damned now in this moment for wishing, for hoping, that Will’s mother is dead so that he never has to explain to his son that his mother left him, so that no one could ever come and take Will away from him.
“Son,” the Sheriff is uncurling his clawed fingers, and gently, gently lifting Will from Derek’s arms. “Derek, look at me. Look at me. Look at your boy.” Will is whimpering in his sleep. Derek did that. He did that and he could howl.
“Derek,” the Sheriff says softly, “I know that your life hasn’t given you much reason to trust in the good things, and I can’t tell you that it’s going to be good forever. We both know that’s a promise I can’t make, but right now, Derek, right now you’ve got your boy and you’ve got us, ok? Life’s throwing you a curveball. That’s alright. Not all of them are going to knock you out. Will is fine and you are fine and you are doing a fine job.”
Now Will is pliant against Derek’s body again, his little belly rising and falling in sleep. Derek doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know how the Sheriff trusts him with this. The Sheriff clasps his shoulder and Derek thinks he may be crying, but he can’t be sure, because he hasn’t had a full night’s sleep since he got Will and everything is a bit fuzzy around the edges and he doesn’t- he can’t-
“Come on, son.” The Sheriff steers him to the living room, “why don’t you put that baby down for a bit. Go shower and take a nap. I may be old, but I’m still fully capable of keeping an eye on an infant for a few hours.” He gives him a little shove. “Go on.”
Derek goes on.
—
It doesn’t get better, it gets worse. He is not doing a fine job. He knows he’s shifted to beta. He knows it’s a feedback loop- Will’s screams are amplified to his wolf ears and the sound of it ratchets up the adrenaline already coursing through his bloodstream and he can’t shift back. He’s on high alert and he’s ready to fight, but there’s nothing to fight, there’s just his baby’s siren wails, his tiny clenched fists, his stomach so, so tight under Derek’s hand. Derek holds him and he walks and he walks and walks. He paces miles around the house. He sings. He rocks Will gently, taking his pain and flashing his eyes. In desperation, he even lays him down on the bed, shifts entirely, and rests his wolf head on Will’s chest. For just one moment, it works. Will startles and stops crying in surprise. He bats at Derek’s head, almost poking him in the eye, and pulls at his fur. If Derek could laugh, he would.
Then the moment passes.
The Sheriff comes home from work. Stiles comes home from his night class. Will cries. Will cries and Derek just wants to shake him quiet. He just wants to slap a hand over that little mouth, and shake him so he can have just one minute, just one minute to clear the buzz in his head. He just-
He’s in the hallway.
“Stiles,” he says, because Stiles is already there. Stiles is always there. “Stiles.” He’s left his baby. Will is all alone in the room, still screaming, still in pain.
A door opens and shuts. The Sheriff emerges holding Will and his phone.
“John,” he turns. This is it, this is the end, they’re going to call social services, they’re going to take Will. They should take Will away from him.
“I’m calling Melissa,” the Sheriff says.
“Not Deaton?” Stiles asks.
“We’ll call Deaton in the morning. Melissa can handle this. That sounds like a baby with colic and that’s a Mel problem, not a Deaton problem.“
“Can werewolves even get colic?” Stiles asks.
The Sheriff looks at Derek, but Derek is already walking away. He walks down the stairs, through the living room and out the door into the cool night air. He collapses on to the front steps, head buried in his knees.
He breathes. He breathes. His son is still screaming. He pants and he shudders.
“Derek?” The tips of Melissa’s sensible white shoes appear at the edge of his vision. He lifts his head and nods toward the house.
Melissa’s smile is kind. “Now, that sounds like a baby with colic,” she says. Her hand brushes over Derek’s head and lingers for a second as she passes him by. “It’s going to be fine. Don’t worry.”
It’s not going to be fine. Werewolves don’t get sick; they don’t get colic. Either something is very very wrong, or Will’s not a werewolf and if Will’s not a werewolf, then there’s no reason, no reason at all for Derek to have him, but if he is a werewolf-
“Hey.” Stiles settles beside him.
“I can’t do this,” he says. “I can’t”
Stiles takes his hand. “I was thinking,” he says. “You guys bleed, right?”
“You’ve seen me bleed, Stiles. I’ve bled all over you.”
“That means you have red blood cells, and white blood cells.”
“Ok?”
“Which means you have an immune system, just like humans have immune systems. I think yours just works faster.”
From the back of his mind somewhere it comes to him now, Cora’s small body burning up- a fever, there and gone in the course of a day.
“So he has colic. He’ll cry for a day or two and then it will be gone and you’ll survive this. This is normal. You know, my dad said that I had colic for a good two months. I cried for hours every night.”
“How?” Derek gapes. Two months, Jesus. “How did your parents do it? It’s barely been one night and I’m going crazy.”
“Lots of coffee and, evidently, earplugs. Who knew?”
“I’m a terrible father.” It’s not an answer-Stiles’s question was rhetorical anyway- but it’s the truth. How can he be a father when most days he can’t even remember his own father’s face? How can he be a father when he is here, outside, while someone else is inside caring for his screaming child?
And yet, somehow, now, in the still night air, with Stiles thigh pressed against his own he can open his shoulders and breathe. He closes his eyes. He can hear the night birds and the raccoons that live under the porch. He can hear Stiles’s steady heartbeat, a car turning the corner a block away, Melissa’s footsteps in the house, to and fro, to and fro, and Will’s cries, still shrill and unbroken, but tapering. The tide of anxiety has washed over him, leaving a clear-headed exhaustion in its wake.
“You’re an excellent father,” Stiles says, taking his face in his hands. “You’re an excellent person,” he says again, with intent, and kisses him.
Stiles’s heartbeat thrums through Derek’s veins like a livewire, like a thousand cicadas in the preserve at dusk. He curls his fingers reflexively, holding on, keeping Stiles there, keeping himself steady.
When Stiles pulls back he is smiling.
“I think we should go on a date,” he says.
Derek is a werewolf. He has no family to speak of, and barely even has a pack. Until recently he had been living in a trailer. He is an unemployed, socially maladjusted, sleep-deprived single-father who never finished college. He hasn’t showered in three day, changed his clothes in two and he can’t remember the last time he shaved.
“A date?”
“Yes, a date. As I understand it a date is a social convention wherein two people who are romantically interested in spending time together spend time together.”
“I know what a date is, Stiles.”
“So, let’s get out then.”
“Stiles, I once threatened to rip your throat out.”
Stiles shrugs, “I once accused you of murder. Come on, it will be nice. Dad will take Will for a couple of hours, we’ll get dressed up in real clothing and go out to dinner like real live adults. Maybe I can even get you to trim that awful thing on your face,” he combs his fingers through Derek’s beard. “You look like a hockey player with a playoff beard.”
“I probably smell like one, too,” he says, and Stiles snorts. “Ok,” Derek says finally, extracting Stiles’s hand from his facial hair so he can cradle it in his palm. “Yes. Let’s go on a date.”
“Good. Yes. Good.”
“Good,” Derek agrees.
“Oh wait,” Stiles is pulling something out of his back pocket. It’s a crumpled piece of red construction paper, unevenly folded and wearing at the edges. “That’s been sitting there all day. I totally forgot to give it to you.” He holds it out to Derek.
Derek takes, and turns it over a few times before opening it up and smoothing it out on his knees. It smells of warm denim, Stiles and Will.
“Happy Valentines Day,” Stiles says.
“It’s Valentine’s Day?” Derek didn’t even realize it was February.
“Yup. And that’s a Valentine from me and Will.”
The blue crayon is barely legible on the dark red paper, but Derek can make out a badly drawn heart with the words, “Be Mine” scrawled in Stiles’s chicken-scratch handwriting. Below it is a tiny blob of yellow paint. It is almost a handprint.
Stiles shrugs and flushes. “Will’s really wiggly and he doesn’t like paint, but it’s ok, I guess.”
Derek laughs, because he can. It is suddenly very, very quiet. The silence is the best things he’s heard in days and days.
“I think he’s stopped.”
“Oh, thank God,” Stiles breathes. “I was seriously considering sleeping in my car tonight. God bless Melissa.”
“If I were God I’d give her Sainthood.”
“I think the Catholic Church does that, not God.”
“Whatever.”
“You want to go in and check on him?”
Will’s heart beats slow and steady in the living room. The Sheriff’s heartbeat is measured and even somewhere nearby. He must have fallen asleep on the couch. Melissa is washing dishes in the kitchen. Derek knows he should go help her, but he can’t make himself move just yet.
“Nah,” he says, resting his head on Stiles’s shoulder and closing his eyes. “Let’s just stay here a little bit. Just for a little while.”
—
Derek was wrong. This is his favorite part.
It’s just light when he wakes to the sound of Will gurgling and cooing to himself in his bassinet. He’s been doing that more and more often now- waking happy. Derek extracts himself from under Stiles’s limbs and sits up.
“Baby,” Stiles mutters and Derek whether he’s talking to him or to Will. It’s a moot point, because Stiles’s eyes don’t even open, they just flutter, moving rapidly under his eyelids, and then he turns over and is asleep again.
Derek pads over to the bassinet and lifts Will up into his arms. “Hey there, guy,” he whispers. “Hey there, little wolf.” Will laughs and stuffs his fist into Derek’s mouth.
It’s too early to get up, so he changes Will and then climbs back into bed and settles against the headboard, balancing Will on his updrawn knees. Will’s dark eyes are trained on Derek’s face.
“Now,” he tells Will, “we have to be quiet. We don’t want wake Stiles up. He’s very tired.”
“Too late,” Stiles groans and rolls onto his side, propping himself up on an elbow so he can blow raspberries into Will’s chubby legs. “Hello, Will, my charming Billy, William the Conqueror. Good morning.”
Will chortles and Stiles laughs and the scent of all three of them is all over the room. Three miles away, on the edge of the preserve, there is a house. It’s not a big house, but it’s big enough. Now, the sunlight will be creeping across the kitchen, illuminating the whorls in the wood flooring. Now the curtains in the master bedroom will be dancing in the breeze. It will be a little cold when they get there later in the day, but it will smell like fresh rain and grass. Soon it will also smell like them.
Uh, so here’s 3k words of fluff and soul mate marks, hope you enjoy, love. Merry Chistmas xx
To Tay (@lydiamqrtin)
From Kath (@regardselena)
Derek is laughing at her and Stiles’ keyboard-smash Polish Name Stain is scrawled across her ribs. This is not how Lydia planned to spend her penultimate summer vacation.
Derek laughs at her when she tells him. If Derek’s life wasn’t already such a fucking tragedy, she’d probably stab him somewhere particularly painful, but, as it is, it’s taken a lot of years to get him to the point where he even felt comfortable displaying normal human emotions beyond anger and that sort of fake salaciousness that had made her decide to steamroll his life and force him to become her friend. Derek laughs at her and she can’t even do anything about it, because he has a perfectly good reason for doing so.
Because there, on her left side, stretched over the delicate skin of her ribcage and fairly close to her breast, is what she assumes Stiles’ real name is. Honestly, it looks like a keyboard smash, and she almost wishes she’d taken Polish instead of French.
Jackson’s name on her forearm, near the crease of her elbow has turned into the pale white scar tissue that means she’s fallen out of love. Aiden’s name, tiny and behind her knee, can barely even be seen anymore.
There is conflicting data that says that the bigger and bolder the lettering the higher chance of forever.
It takes a while, but eventually Lydia pulls her blouse back on and considers prodding Derek on his wrist or his shoulder blade or his hip, but even she’s notthat mean lately.
And, well, it’s not like the damn thing won’t be easy to hide.
“Of course you’re going to pretend it doesn’t exist,” Derek scoffs at her, with actual inflection and everything. “Why on earth would you bother to tell him? It’s not like he’s got your name on his chest from collarbone to collarbone.”
“I will disembowel you,” Lydia says pleasantly.
-
The rest of the pack shows up across the span of the next seventy-two hours. She’d been due to be the last one back to their Hellsmouth of a hometown, but she’d changed to an earlier flight when she’d woken up in her tiny apartment, her entire left side feeling like it was being split open as something etched each letter of Stiles’ birth name into her skin like a brand. Scott and Allison show up bright and early the next morning, her best friend’s name poking out of Scott’s ridiculously slouchy muscle tank top.
Allison’s got Scott’s name in prime tramp stamp area, something that Chris Argent had nearly burst a vein in his forehead at when he’d found out. Allison takes one look at her while Scott pulls Liam into a hug. The brunette fixes her with a scrutinizing look, says “I thought you weren’t going to be back until Thursday” just for propriety’s sake, and then jab’s a viciously sharp thumb into the still-sore area that Lydia had been trying not to favor too obviously.
“You told Derek before me?” Allison asks, instead of bothering to give Lydia the dignity of asking whose name has taken up residence on her body. Like she already knows, and, shit, Lydia has never felt this flustered in her life, and she’s double-majoring in mathematics and biochemical engineering in an accelerated program that’s allowing her to get her master’s degree in just five short years.
But she’s Lydia Martin, so she licks her lip and tilts her head in a very and just what are you gonna do about it? kind of challenge that has Allison rolling her eyes.
Malia and Kira show up next, followed by Isaac and Cora. Lydia leaves to go have dinner with her mother and not because Stiles is meant to arrive within the hour, no matter what Derek’s judgmental eyebrows have to say.
She takes precisely eighteen calming breaths in the front seat of her car before she gets out and spends the entire meal wondering if Stiles was disappointed she wasn’t there to welcome him home.
She’s disgusted with herself.
-
Through a series of carefully orchestrated events, Lydia doesn’t see Stiles until Sunday afternoon, when Scott and Allison stop by to pick her up and drive her to the refinished Hale house for what has become a tradition of roughhousing, barbequing, ice cream, and movie nights that had been the first thing Derek and Scott had agreed on when deciding to be a pack together.
When they get to the clearing, Scott bounds ahead, whooping as he tears off his t-shirt and tackles Isaac not fifteen seconds after getting out of the Range Rover. Allison and Lydia follow at a more sedate pace, carrying six pies between them that they’d picked up at the supermarket. Allison is telling her that she and Scott are thinking about trying for a baby and her dad is pushing for a wedding but “—I mean, come on, dad, it’s not like this is the fifties—shared Name Stains are practically wedding rings in their own right—” to which Lydia pointedly does not mention that she’s already helped Scott pick out a ring months ago.
So she’s distracted, alright? Allison’s in a crop top and low-rise denim shorts and is gesturing viciously at Scott’s name smudged across the small of her back and Isaac is shrieking now that Liam’s joined in on some sort of mutant wrestling match slash tickle fest and Derek’s already grilling steaks and burger patties, because a pack of werewolves could probably eat an entire herd of cattle and still perk up for desert. She doesn’t notice that Stiles is even there until he comes bustling out of the Hale house with a massive bowl of pasta salad and a casserole dish filled with corns balanced in his hands.
He’s wearing the slouchy tank top that Scott had been wearing that first day, and some properly-fitted jeans and Lydia can see her own damn name scrawled across the top of his chest and after he manages to set both dishes down without disaster, he notices her and Allison lounging on some deck chairs and his stupid face just lights right up at the sight of her—them, she corrects herself furiously—and he makes his way over, hands tucked casually in his pockets and a crooked grin pulling at his mouth.
Lydia is not hearing even a single word that is coming out of Allison’s mouth, transfixed by the broad shoulders and the biceps and her fucking name displayed proudly on his chest because Stiles is far past the point where he’d hidden it in an unusual fit of self-preservation as she cycled through werewolves that generally disliked his mouthy attitude as it was.
“Hey, Lyds,” he says when he reaches them, collected but pleased in a way that speaks to the four years that have passed since high school, and Lydia can’t make herself stop—cannot get her traitorous muscles to listen to her when she tells them to stop standing and don’t you dare hug him, Martin. She throws her arms around him in greeting, pushing out a uncharacteristically redundant “hi, Stiles,” even as her heart seizes up when he makes a pleasantly surprised noise and wraps his arms around her, one hand braced on her back.
And she can feel the way his palm spreads practically from shoulder to shoulder, and he smells familiar in a way she’d never really allowed herself to notice before this very instant, and she forces herself to not look like she’s wrenching herself away from him when she pulls back after allowing herself ten whole seconds to linger and just pretend.
“Sorry we haven’t run into each other before this,” she says, setting Allison on fire in her mind when the girl has the nerve to laugh.
“Figured it’d happen sooner or later,” Stiles replies, mouth quirking up and eyes so wide and the color of actual whiskey and Lydia swallows tightly against the unreasonable momentary panic that he’s talking about something else—something besides running into each other in a town as small as Beacon Hills.
“It’s good to see you,” She allows herself to say, sounding prim and perfunctory, and his eyes crinkle at the corners like he’s beaming, even though he doesn’t allow his smile to become anything too obviously cheerful like he would’ve in high school.
“You taken over the mathematics department at MIT yet?” he asks instead, and Lydia has one second of lingering teenage-worthy angst where she wonders why he hadn’t said it was good to see her, too.
And then she flips her hair and fixes him with an unimpressed look that isn’t even acting. “That happened years ago, Stilinski,” she levels out flatly and he laughs, apologizing for even assuming otherwise.
“Stiles—help me!” Isaac yelps when Scott and Liam manage to get him on his stomach and perch themselves on his back like pleased little toddlers and Stiles glances away towards them for a moment before offering her a rueful head tilt and hastening away, ripping off his shirt and leaping onto Scott.
Allison stares at her pointedly when she settles back down into the deckchair beside her best friend, but Lydia pretends like Kira and Malia and Cora showing up distracts her from the huntress’ Look.
-
Lydia spends most of dinner trailing off her sentences when she gets distracted by Stiles and that damn oral fixation that he’d never grown out of. Every time she realizes she’s staring, she gulps down her wine. The alcohol makes her less embarrassed, but it also makes her less subtle. By the time people are starting in on desert, Allison and Derek are not the only ones smirking at her and she decides to put a mild form of wolfsbane in Derek’s water filter that will leave them all itchy for days.
It’s not her fault, alright? Back in her sophomore year when Allison had entered the world’s most perfect relationship, she’d kind of acknowledged that that sort of gushiness was something that Jackson wouldn’t ever manage to give her, but she’d been more or less okay with that back then—not even Jackson, with whom she’d shared a Name Stain since they were twelve years old was going to distract her from conquering the world of mathematics and proving to people just why they should stop discouraging young girls from math and science degrees.
She’d known even then that that sort of puppy-dog devotion would be found in one Stiles Stilinski, but she hadn’t wanted it then. Barely wanted it now, though she was sure that he’d grown up and settled into something less frenetic than he’d been in his youth. She sort of wanted to see just how much of that wholehearted attention thing had stuck around after he’d grown out of romanticizing her.
He’s talking amongst Kira and Liam, both of them piping up with the word he can’t reach in his mind the way that’s instinctual to all of them by now. Stiles had worked hard to recover, healthily, from the nogustine, had been to group therapy with Allison for a while about the rift that had been there after he’d almost killed her, and she knew that when he went with Scott and Derek to meet with other packs, they wouldn’t be able to tell that he’d ever been possessed by a thousand year old demon fox. But sometimes it shows up in his speech and the way he taps his fingers methodically, counting, she thinks, the fact that a lot of the little magic he’s able to do is eerie because of the darkness that still surrounds his heart.
Lydia thinks it’s fitting that she’s in love with him. Banshees are tied to death in a way no other supernatural creature is—she thinks his lingering darkness would fit right in with her inherent one.
She startles out of these thoughts, horrified and blushing even though no one can possibly know what she’s been thinking about—that she and Stiles would probably actually be quite perfectly matched—and considers drinking the rest of the wine straight from the bottle.
-
They watch The Notebook first, as always, and Lydia swallows tightly when Stiles takes up his usual spot on the floor in front of her perch on the couch. Halfway through the movie, during the montage when Noah is renovating the house so that it looks like Allie’s dream house, his fingers capture one of her ankles and knead into the arch of her foot, even as he watches the movie.
Liam and Malia, still not quite used to the common decency of pretending not to hear things like startled whooshes of breath, both stare at her as she tries very hard not to flush in some sort of guilty shame at how good it feels to have Stiles’ hands on her. He’s not even paying attention, either, subconsciously working his fingers into the painful spots of first one foot and the next until she’s trembling a little at how good it feels and Derek taps the side of his nose to tell her to stop leaking her pheromones all over the place.
-
Lydia spends most of the next week staring at Stiles and pretending she’s not. Being away in Cambridge had been near impossible—the thrum of pack beneath her skin calling her back home at all hours of the day. It had been pretty awful to be back in town and be avoiding what Stiles refers to as the Lair, no matter how many times Derek turns judgmental eyebrows his way.
Besides, it’s not like Stiles is even noticing her noticing him—the slope of his nose, the strong lines of his back, the nape of his neck, the grown out hair that she wants to get her fingers in and tug—so she mostly just alternates between watching his arms as he and Cora replace the shutters on the west side of the house and glaring at everyone else for laughing at her. She enacts her original revenge plan quickly and mercilessly, forces everyone to watch nothing but Nicholas Sparks movies, serves tofurkey three times, stabs Derek in the hand with a fork.
It’s days later when Stiles asks her if she wants to go along with him to his dad and Melissa McCall’s family dinner—gleefully announcing that he thinks they’re going to finally admit they’re dating. She blushes when he asks and he sort of furrows his brows at her, but she hastens to agree before he can take a proper look and realize that she’s suddenly and completely utterly gone for him.
He picks her up from her house because Lydia’s car is still in Cambridge and the town might be small, but she and he live on clear opposite sides of it. Lydia’s wearing a dress that’s just a smidgeon nicer than her every day style, a dark lipstick that she knows makes her look intense. Stiles has a fitted pale green button up on and one hand on the gearshift, long, dexterous fingers dancing around it to the beat of the music he’s got playing and Lydia loves him—can’t believe she needed a name stain to tell her what she’s apparently been hurtling towards for years and years.
The Sheriff looks surprised but not unwelcoming when she follows his son inside the now familiar house.
“Miss Martin, always a pleasure,” he says formally before his expression cracks and he grins at the pained groan that Stiles makes.
“Sheriff Stilinski,” Lydia replies primly, “the pleasure is all mine.”
And then he hugs her, because that’s what he does. So she and Stiles and Scott and Allison sit around the small table with Stiles’ dad and Scott’s mom and she pictures this in the future when everyone is older and married and is delighted when the Sheriff and Melissa break out embarrassing baby stories—some of which they helpfully provide photographs with—and after everyone has a generous helping of triple-decker chocolate cake that Stiles shoots his dad a Look for, they announce that they’re planning on getting married.
Stiles cries a little when he hugs Melissa in congratulations, but no one else is far behind.
-
He takes her home late, apologizing that all of their limited spare room is apparently being occupied by Scott and Allison for the night, and she watches as he unbuttons the top button of his shirt and drags a hand through his hair. He looks tired, but in a good way, and she watches his fingers tap at the steering wheel and watches his eyes flicker over to her when she tells him some asinine story about one of her professors, paying her the utmost attention even as he drives with a level of care that is habit now, long after the chaos of their teenaged years.
She thinks about her name, blazed across his chest—thinks about how it’s been there, for close to two decades now, and how loving her is just another part of his integral personality.
Thinks about how she wants loving him to become part of her own character.
When he pulls up into her house’s driveway, all of the windows are dark. Her mom is staying the night at her boyfriend’s house.
“Come in with me for a second?” She asks him, even though she knows he’s tired and that it’s late and she’s being very inconsiderate in asking him to stay out longer than necessary. But he agrees without hesitation, like he always has, and she unlocks the door and tugs him up to her bedroom and, in the dark, says what she’s been waiting for a month—a year, a lifetime, maybe, in the making—to say.
“Your Name Stain is on my ribs,” she tells him, point-blank. She can see his eyes in the faint light coming in from the half moon and the streetlamp outside, watches as they widen when her words register with him. She doesn’t let him talk though. “I’d really like for you to kiss me now,” she says, and it feels like some illusive tightening in her whole body has finally set her free.
Title: neighborhood watch
Rating: General Audience
Pairing: Allison Argent/Lydia Martin
Summary: in which mrs wilson, the old lady living next door to the argents watches as allison and lydia become friends and then possibly more
the fic was written as a part of the Teen Wolf Holiday Exchange and was made as a gift to regardselena.
idk bonnie might be confused bc she saw katherine when katherine died for that split second and then she was gone bc she “really didn’t want to die” so (plus they might chalk it up to her being human at the time of her death and assuming that her doppelganger-ness just didn’t matter) idk idk idk sorry
mmm yeah but I mean, now that Bonnie is the anchor, she feels all the supernatural deaths, and since it's painful as hell, she should know that Katherine isn't really dead because she didn't feel anything.
But maybe you're right though, maybe they will just assume that she didn't go to the Other Side because she wasn't a vampire anymore and that her "doppelganger status" wasn't enough. ^^
