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More WIP Amnesty! Kidfic this time--werewolf eye color, in particular, got jossed here. But mostly, uh, in the survival-of-the-fittest competition that is my brain, hookerfic beat out kidfic for The Next Huge Teen Wolf Epic I Will Spend A Year Writing, so this one's never getting finished.
1
Stiles was pretending he'd already fallen asleep, resisting this part of the night's encounter like he always did. It was just habit, Derek was pretty sure--pure stubborn Stilesian contrariness. Derek worried about that occasionally, about whether it was counterproductive to keep insisting on this and so give Stiles something to dig in his heels against. But he couldn't stop now that it was established as a ritual, and he wasn't going to leave open any possibility of ambiguity. If Stiles broke his own heart over Derek that was fine, as long as Derek never gave him reason to believe that it was going to be anything else.
Derek poked Stiles in the shoulder, and heard the little guilty-annoyed jump in his heartbeat.
"Say it," Derek ordered, in a low, patient tone.
Stiles dropped the arm he'd flung over his face, giving up the pretense of post-coital dozing. He glared through half-open eyes at Derek.
"Your pillow talk is seriously the worst."
"If you want pillow talk, get a boyfriend," Derek replied implacably. "Or girlfriend. If you want to keep fucking me, say it."
Stiles gave a put-upon sigh but didn't argue, didn't even latch on to some semantic detail about who fucked who more often. Derek had worn him down at least that far with repetition. Or maybe it was just that he was too tired to argue; his feigned sleep would have been real if Derek had given him another five minutes, which was why Derek hadn't.
They only fucked. They didn't sleep together. Derek wasn't going to give Stiles even the illusion of some greater intimacy by staying in bed until Stiles fell asleep.
"Say it," Derek repeated, knowing full well that Stiles was gathering himself to do so.
"Jesus, I'm just trying to remember all of it so you don't turn it into a fucking call and response again," Stiles snapped, waking up a little further.
"Let's see: It's just sex. It's totally meaningless sex. You don't have any special feelings for me and never will. If I start thinking I have special feelings for you, I don't, it's just endorphins and hormones and the fact that I'm a dumb kid who's never fucked anyone else and doesn't know any better."
Stiles's heartbeat, slightly elevated by familiar annoyance, didn't alter as the words--relentless, heartless, and by now utterly routine--poured out of his mouth. There was no flicker of a lie, no defiance, no hidden hope or complicated emotional entanglement behind them. Derek had made sure of that.
"You're only fucking me because I'm conveniently close to the pack but not one of your betas, and because I'm--"
Stiles made a face. On this, of all the declarations Derek had insisted on from the start, Stiles's heartbeat persisted in stuttering.
"Irresistibly attractive," Derek prompted. "Hot. Eminently--"
"Eminently fucking fuckable, yeah, okay," Stiles grumbled, because apparently the idea of his own appeal still stuck in his throat even though he'd gotten entirely accustomed to the idea that he was being used for convenient, loveless sex.
"And flexible, and easy, and have a refractory period almost as short as a werewolf's. And sooner or later one of us will get bored or find someone to have an actual relationship with and then the no-strings sex will be over, forever and ever amen. Okay? Was that all of it? Can I go to sleep now?"
"Do whatever you want," Derek replied in a tone of indifference as rehearsed as Stiles's recitation. He yanked on his jeans and grabbed the rest of his clothes to put on as he walked out.
"Lock the door behind you." Stiles flipped over, not even looking in Derek's direction as he sprawled out to take up the whole bed. "My dad still has not quit freaking out about that time he came home and it was open."
"I will lock the door," Derek agreed on his way out of Stiles's room, gritting his teeth a little. It was, he supposed, only fair that Stiles got to say that every single time, no matter how much Derek wanted to protest that it had been one time and he knew better. He was never going to be as distracted again as he had been the first time Stiles fucked him, but he wasn't about to explain what had happened to his head that night--not even to get Stiles to stop reminding him.
He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, silently dressing while he listened to Stiles's heartbeat descending into sleep. When he was sure Stiles was out he made a silent circuit of the house, checking every window and door to be sure everything was locked before he let himself out the back door, double-checking the lock from the outside.
He walked the three blocks to the Camaro with a comfortable sense of having his bases covered. Whatever else he fucked up, he'd left Stiles safe tonight, physically and otherwise. Derek wasn't going to be any sixteen-year-old boy's Kate Argent.
2
Stiles and his dad had long since hammered out the division of labor when it came to grocery shopping: Stiles took the aisles (dangerously full of processed foods) while his dad handled the outer edges of the store--produce, meat, dairy. They traded off a cart and a basket, and whoever had the basket found the cart to dump stuff into it when they filled it up. They each had a list for their respective area of responsibility, and on a good day they could finish in half an hour and have food for weeks.
Today was going to be a good day--Stiles could feel it in his bones. They'd come to the store after dinner on a Friday, when neither of them were hungry, the heat of the day was easing off, and the after-work crowds had dissipated.
Stiles had the cereal aisle more or less to himself. He was squinting at the nutrition information on a box of Honey Nut Cheerios when somebody tugged on the pocket of his jeans.
Stiles looked down at the kid looking up, and she said calmly, "You smell like my dad. Where is he?"
Stiles blinked, but there was actually no merciful moment of incomprehension or disbelief. The kid had black hair, neatly combed into two little pigtails, and wide gray-green eyes surrounded by long black eyelashes. She had round cheeks and warm olive skin and a patient, serious expression. She looked exactly like what Derek's four-year-old werewolf daughter would look like if Derek had a four-year-old werewolf daughter, which apparently he did.
Stiles crouched down, wondering what she would make of his thundering heart, to say nothing of what her daddy's teenaged booty call must smell like to her. He'd showered twice since he'd last touched Derek, but he'd learned, to his eternal embarrassment, that that didn't make much difference to werewolf senses.
"I haven't seen him today. Did you get separated from him?"
She shook her head. "I've never met him. I'm supposed to find him. Are you going home soon? Can you take me? I have these so I can find him."
The girl held out a Ziploc bag to Stiles; it contained a folded piece of cloth and some papers, also folded. When Stiles opened the bag even his feeble human nose recognized the smell of familiar sweat. Derek.
One of the pieces of paper was a birth certificate--an original, with the seal and everything. The kid's name was November Diana Hale, according to this, and her parents were Guadalupe Gray and Derek Hale. She'd been born four and a half years ago--January 2, 2007, so her name wasn't a reference to anything obvious--in some town Stiles had never heard of in New York State.
The other piece of paper was a death certificate for Guadalupe Gray, dated two weeks ago.
"Oh, man," Stiles said, feeling a horrible pang of empathy for this half-orphaned kid, his throat going tight at the thought.
But November didn't seem to notice or care. She just repeated, "Can you help me find my dad?"
"Did you," Stiles said, looking around, but there wasn't an adult in sight. Not that a werewolf would need to be in sight to be keeping an eye--ear, nose--on her. "You didn't come all this way by yourself, did you?"
November pressed her lips together and a deeply familiar stubborn look took over her face, her tiny black eyebrows drawing down tightly. Not telling.
"Stiles?"
Stiles twisted without standing up to see his dad standing at the end of the aisle with the cart, the kid-seat at the front piled up with bags of brightly-colored produce.
"Hey, Dad," Stiles said, and looked back only to find that November had crouched down as well, hiding behind him to keep out of his dad's sight. "Hey, it's okay. That's my dad."
November didn't look especially reassured, scooting closer to Stiles and practically trying to burrow between him and the shelves when his dad rolled the cart up to them.
"Uh, Dad," Stiles said, looking up helplessly. "This is November Hale. Derek's daughter."
His dad's eyebrows went to heights normally reserved for Stiles telling really incredibly bald-faced lies. "Derek Hale has a daughter?"
Stiles gave him an I know, right? face and offered the papers without standing up; the second his dad's gaze shifted down Stiles stuffed the Ziploc bag into his pocket, turning toward November again as he did it.
"Hey, come on. It's okay, my dad's a good guy," Stiles coaxed.
November squinted her eyes almost all the way shut, so that only a hint of blue escaped when they flashed bright.
Stiles shook his head and touched his finger to his lips.
November nodded quickly.
When Stiles turned back, straightening up, his dad was still staring at the papers, frowning. November grabbed Stiles's shirt, tugging, and when Stiles looked down at her, she just started climbing him. He scooped her up--crap, she was heavy, were normal little kids this heavy?--before she could show off any too-obvious werewolf skills.
The sheriff looked up, and his frown didn't lighten. "So, you two know each other pretty well?"
Stiles shook his head, and November's flying pigtail brushed his cheek as she shook hers. "She just walked up to me and asked me if I could help her find her dad. I found out who she is two minutes before you did."
His dad gave him and November a long, skeptical look, and then said, "When's the first time you saw Stiles, sweetheart?"
"What's Stiles?"
His dad snorted, but pointed at Stiles. "This guy, his name is Stiles. Didn't he even introduce himself?"
November shook her head again.
The sheriff sighed. "Did you come here with your dad?"
November mixed it up by shrugging and then hiding her face against Stiles's shoulder.
"I didn't see that Camaro," his dad muttered, and then he shook his head. "Come on, we'll take her to the front, they can make a PA announcement. Somebody's gotta be looking for her, she didn't just walk in here by herself."
After five PA announcements, Stiles switching November from one hip to the other eight times to try to keep his arms from falling off, one ear-splitting shriek when his dad tried to take November from Stiles, and several minutes of the flustered assistant manager fiddling with the security cameras, it turned out that November had walked in by herself. His dad's expression had turned from grim to quietly furious by the time he led Stiles and November out to the cruiser.
There was, as it turned out, a car seat in the trunk for this sort of situation. His dad hooked it up and left Stiles to buckle November into it while he radioed in about an abandoned child.
Stiles's phone was heavy in his pocket. But he hadn't had a hand free--and his dad's attention diverted--long enough to even text Derek, and how the fuck could he sum this up in a text? If Derek had known that his daughter he'd never met was in Beacon Hills looking for him, he'd be here already. As desperate as Derek was for pack and family, he'd never let his own kid go begging. Which meant he didn't know she was in Beacon Hills.
Did he even know he had a kid? Four and a half years ago Derek had been barely eighteen and Guadalupe Gray, if the birth and death certificates were to be believed, had been twenty-eight. Stiles kind of doubted that had been a long-term relationship.
If Derek didn't know he had a kid, Stiles wasn't going to try to break it to him by text, especially when it would probably come out sounding like Stiles was making some kind of dumb joke about Derek having knocked him up. And if he actually just busted out his phone and called with his dad right there, he'd have to explain why he had Derek's phone number in some way that didn't involve getting Derek arrested for a bunch of felonies he actually had committed. So: not an option.
Also not an option: getting out of November's reach. She got a hold of Stiles's fingers and didn't let go, and Stiles was pretty sure he wasn't breaking her grip before he broke his own bones. He buckled in in the back seat, giving his dad a nod when he looked back to check that they were ready to roll.
Stiles sat with his head down all the way there, wiggling his fingers occasionally in November's ferocious grip and trying to figure out how he was going to get her to Derek without anyone getting arrested.
When his dad parked the car outside the Sheriff's Department, he sighed and then turned and said, "Son, do you know anybody who knows exactly where Hale is living right now, or how to get in touch with him?"
The question contained an out, which made it almost certainly some kind of trick question. Stiles wasn't going to point his dad at Scott or Isaac or Boyd, and no way was he opening the can of worms that was Peter Hale.
Stiles put his hand on November's knee and gave it a reassuring squeeze as he shook his head.
His dad sighed again, and Stiles said, "We should take her home with us, though."
"Stiles, she's not a puppy--"
Stiles bit his tongue for a second, and then said, "No, I mean--you're still on the list as an emergency foster parent, aren't you? Mrs. Robinson took that baby in the spring and the Garcias got Isaac Lahey. It's probably your turn, right? We haven't had a foster kid in the house in forever. And I mean, it's 8:30 on a Friday, she's a little kid, she should be in bed. Isn't Kathy from the CPS office covering Trinity County this week? She'd have to drive all the way back here, she wouldn't get in until like midnight--you're not going to keep November hanging around here until midnight, right?"
"You'll feed her and take her for walks, I won't even know she's there," his dad muttered, but held up a hand when Stiles tried to defend himself. "No, you have a point, and it's obvious she doesn't want to be separated from you, either. But I still have to call Kathy and fill out some paperwork. Come on."
So Stiles unbuckled November and led her out of the car. She walked beside him exactly as far as the front desk and then made a tiny alarmed noise, staring at the exact spot where Stiles had seen the first of way too many dead bodies fall four months ago.
Stiles picked her up immediately, cradling the back of her head in his hand while she tucked her face into the side of his throat. If she could smell Derek on him, there was no way she wouldn't pick up traces of what had happened here, no matter what kind of industrial cleanup they'd done.
Stiles hurried her through the corridors in his dad's wake, and shut the door firmly when they were in his dad's office. Nothing too bad had happened here, and even to Stiles it smelled like his dad and home; he could feel November relax as he sat down in his usual chair. After a few minutes she relented enough to pick her head up and look around a little.
His dad was filling out a form while talking on the phone--to Kathy, Stiles assumed, since he was saying, "Yeah, my CPR's up to date, of course it is. Yeah, same address, nothing's changed there. Just me and Stiles. I think this is going to be short term, anyway--once we track down Hale...."
Stiles wished for werewolf hearing, because his dad glanced up at him and didn't say anything after that except repeating "Mm-hm," a lot. Stiles looked down at November to see if she was picking up any useful information, but she was either asleep or doing a good impression of it, slumped heavy and hot against Stiles's chest. Even in the air-conditioned office he was sweating where she rested on him.
"Okay," his dad said finally. "Thanks, Kath. Good luck over there."
He hung up and signed the form with a quick flourish. "Kathy's got a situation over in Trinity, probably can't get back here before late tomorrow, so we'll see about doing some family reunification before CPS gets officially involved, if Hale turns up before she does."
Stiles squeezed November but didn't say anything to her or to his dad, who leaned in and said, "What do you think, Miss Hale? Would you like to sleep over at Stiles's house, since we're not sure where your dad is right now?"
November broke cover immediately to nod and smile.
***
November was back to pretending to sleep by the time they got to the house. She wiggled all over and hugged Stiles a little as soon as they stepped inside. If she could smell Derek on Stiles, she could definitely smell him in the house.
"I'll make sure the guest room is okay," his dad said quietly. "Wake her up and get her changed into a t-shirt for PJs, okay?"
Stiles nodded and carried November into his room, where she immediately slid down to her feet and dashed over to his bed. He winced, hoping she at least didn't know what it was she was smelling when his bed reeked of sex. He dug through his drawers, grinning when he found the perfect thing.
"Hey, November, you want to wear this one to sleep in? Your dad borrowed it one time, can you smell him on it?"
November leaped off the bed and came running back, burying her face in the blue-and-orange striped t-shirt.
"Mostly it smells like you," she informed him. "I like it, though."
"Cool," Stiles agreed, and helped her take off her little pink sandals and her green shorts and white t-shirt with a butterfly on it, leaving her Dora underpants in place as he helped her into his t-shirt. It covered her nearly to her ankles and the sleeves went down well past her elbows, the collar sagging nearly all the way off one shoulder.
"There you go, you're all nightgowned up. Time to brush your teeth."
Stiles coached November through the process of getting ready for bed, since she still seemed pretty shy of his dad. Luckily she was totally potty-trained and even remembered to wash her own hands without being reminded; less luckily, she demanded that Stiles convert her pigtails into braids so her hair wouldn't get all tangled while she slept. Stiles figured out how to do the braids; his dad came back in just as he finished the first one and offered him a couple of hair elastics.
Stiles took them without meeting his dad's eyes and carefully fastened the ends of November's braids with them, remembering his mom leaving them around everywhere, putting her hair up into a ponytail before she started cooking or working in the yard, tugging them out at random times and letting her hair fall down loose. And then... not, toward the end. No more ponytails, and no more ponytail holders. Stiles hadn't noticed exactly when they all disappeared from the counters and end tables and bathroom drawers.
November turned and hugged him when he finished, and Stiles hid his face against the top of her head for a few seconds and then said, "Okay, all ready for bed now? Do you need, um, a story or a song or prayers or anything?"
November shrugged and then shook her head.
"Okay," Stiles repeated, looking helplessly toward his dad, who stood in the doorway of the guest room, watching them with a weird, unreadable expression on his face. "Uh, right. Hop in, then."
His dad had already pulled back the covers of the guest room bed, a big double bed with plain pale blue sheets and a striped comforter. November clambered in, and Stiles helped her get covered up.
"Okay, well, my room's right next door," Stiles said. "I bet you can hear me in there if you listen--" heartbeats would be comforting to a little werewolf kid, right? She'd expect to hear her family's heartbeats all around her. "And if you need anything, just yell out, I'll hear you."
November nodded again and cuddled into the pillow, and Stiles stood there for another minute, watching her, feeling like he should be doing more and totally at a loss for what that might be. Finally he headed to the door and shut off the light.
His dad pulled the door nearly closed but not quite, settling a hand on Stiles's shoulder and steering him firmly down to the kitchen in silence.
Stiles tried to figure out what he was about to get asked, or told, but he really wasn't prepared for what his dad came up with, which was, "I need you to tell me, right now, if Derek Hale is having sex with Isaac Lahey."
Stiles just stared for a second and then said, "Dad, what kind of--"
His dad raised his hands placatingly. "I'm not asking you to get any of your friends in trouble. I'm not going to go swear out a warrant. But right now, tonight, I am November's foster father, which means I'm as responsible for her safety as I am for yours. More, in fact, because she's younger and more vulnerable. I need to know what kind of person I might be handing her over to tomorrow."
"And, what," Stiles demanded, guilt and fear and anger curdling in his stomach. "What, if he's gay then he's some kind of child molester?"
"No," his dad said, rolling his eyes like that was crazy, waving it away. "Stiles, no, come on, you know me better than that."
"I don't--what are you even talking about, Derek Hale and Isaac Lahey?"
His dad snorted. "Stiles, I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm the sheriff of this county, and when people in this county are concerned about something possibly illegal happening, sometimes they get the idea to talk to me about it. So when Derek Hale invited himself over to the Garcias' house to tell them that Isaac Lahey would be spending most of his time at Hale's place--wherever exactly that might be, Hale was never specific and Isaac has never said either--they talked that over with me, being concerned, just like I am, for the safety of their foster child for whom they are responsible."
"He," Stiles opened and closed his mouth a few times. He knew Isaac was supposed to live with the Garcias and he knew Isaac pretty much didn't. It had never occurred to him that the Garcias--or his dad--knew why.
"Apparently," his dad went on, in an I'm-humoring-you-by-pretending-to-explain-this kind of tone, "the two of them bonded over being orphaned at sixteen and being falsely accused of the murder of a family member, and Derek helped Isaac stay hidden after he fled the jail that night. No one's going to press charges against Hale for that when we're not pressing charges against Isaac for running. No one wants to encourage Isaac to run away completely from his court-appointed guardians, and since they do see him at least once a day, since he's stayed in school and continued to participate in extracurriculars, finished the school year with better grades than he's ever had before and seems to be in better physical and mental health than he's ever been--the Garcias, and I, feel it's best not to force the issue.
"But if Derek Hale is in the habit of exploiting or manipulating vulnerable children for his own... satisfaction, then that's something I need to know about him before I hand over a four-year-old into his sole custody."
"I don't," Stiles said, and had no idea how to follow that up.
"Don't tell me you have no idea," his dad said. "Isaac's working at Deaton's now, he's friends with Scott, and I know you've crossed paths with Hale more than a time or two. I'm not swearing you in to testify, Stiles, but I know you kids hear things about each other, I know you know Hale, and I need to know what he's like. For November's sake. You accused him of murder, remember? And now you think I should hand this kid over to him?"
"Derek wouldn't," Stiles said, and that one he could finish. "He wouldn't hurt Isaac, and he wouldn't hurt November, either. He's--he just wants a family again. He had little cousins and stuff. Isaac's like that to him, he wouldn't ever--they're not. Sleeping together. Derek's not a bad guy. I was wrong about him before, I didn't know him then. He'll--"
Stiles couldn't quite promise he'll be a good dad, because the very idea of that broke his brain.
"He'll try really hard," Stiles said. "He'll do his best for her."
Stiles held his dad's gaze as it turned searching.
"Okay," his dad said finally. "Well, so far we haven't gotten any database hits on missing kids matching November's description, so for the moment we'll go with the theory that she is what she says she is. If she's Derek Hale's child, he has a right to custody as soon as we can find him and tell him so. But I suppose you don't have Isaac's phone number, either?"
Stiles took a page from November's book and didn't say a word, just shook his head.
His dad's lips quirked. "Uh-huh. Well, I've got a few more phone calls to make."
"I should go upstairs. So I'm close by if November needs anything," Stiles announced.
His dad nodded again, waving him away, and Stiles bolted.
Up in his room Stiles immediately pulled his phone out and then hesitated. If he was going to call Derek and drag him into a confrontation with the sheriff, he should have just done it two hours ago and saved a few steps. If he wanted to keep Derek away from his dad--or at least give Derek a chance to find out about this and decide what to do before he was dealing with the sheriff--he had to wait at least until his dad was asleep.
That gave Stiles nothing but time to think.
Could this possibly be for real? Could Derek really have a kid without knowing--or did he know? Was Derek running around searching for her, unable to find her? Would it occur to Derek to call the police about his missing kid, like a normal person? But if he were searching for her wolf-style he would have to pick up her scent mingled with Stiles's and figure it out, wouldn't he?
And if he didn't know, if this were as much a surprise to him as to Stiles, was there any chance that November was really only an orphaned kid coming to live with her dad? Why was her last name Hale if she'd never met Derek? For that matter her purported mom's purported name--Guadalupe Gray--was pretty much the most obvious I am a werewolf name since Remus Lupin. That couldn't possibly be for real.
But what was she, then? Some kind of evil shapeshifter? Bait? An alpha pack trick to get Derek off his guard, make him vulnerable, give him something to lose?
Stiles's brain wandered all too readily down that path, imagining all the horribly inventive ways a little girl who looked just like him could be a liability for Derek.
November herself couldn't be lying--that would be too easy for any werewolf to spot. Whoever she really was, she must believe that Derek was her dad, which probably meant her mom was really dead. Had the alpha pack killed some werewolf lady and stolen her daughter just to set this up? Had they somehow made November just for this purpose, magicked her up out of a piece of Derek's hair or something and then told her he was her dad and she had to go find him? And if they'd done either of those things, was there any limit to what they would do to get to Derek and his pack, such as it was?
It shouldn't have been a surprise by now--they hadn't drawn the line at Erica, and Stiles still didn't know, or want to know, what Boyd's silences meant about what else they'd done--but it was still a sick, horrible jolt in the pit of Stiles's stomach.
If she was only going to be used against them, should he even tell Derek at all? Shouldn't he....
This, Stiles realized, was what he got for advocating killing Jackson to solve the kanima problem, and for all those times he'd insisted their lives would be easier if Derek were dead. Now trouble was here in the shape of a four-year-old girl who'd cuddled and clung to him and trusted him to help her, and now his respect for human--well, tiny werewolf--life was kicking in with a stomach-turning vengeance.
Stiles got up, shoving his phone into his pocket, and the Ziploc bag crinkled. He pulled it out again and unfolded the piece of cloth, pressing it to his face. It did, he was positive, actually smell like Derek--like Derek's sweat, specifically, which was a smell Stiles had gotten to know intimately over the last couple of months of (totally meaningless and convenient and no feelings involved, yes, Derek, shut up) sex.
The piece of cloth was the sleeve of a shirt, light blue, nothing he could picture Derek wearing, but obviously he had. Not anytime recently, Stiles was pretty sure--but then how would anyone have gotten it? For that matter, if the alpha pack were capable of magicking a kid out of nothing, or killing a woman, stealing her kid, and forging identification and a scent object to connect her to Derek--why hadn't they just killed or captured Derek and the rest of the pack already?
Stiles tucked the shirt sleeve back into the plastic bag and dropped it on his desk, sitting back down with his head in his hands. Maybe this wasn't so bad. Maybe for once the worst possible thing wasn't happening here. It would be weird, but hey, Jackson had survived, right? He'd even managed to stop being the kanima. Sometimes things turned out okay. Maybe November was going to be one of those.
And maybe they were all going to die horrible deaths on the tiny claws of the most adorable kid Stiles had ever met.
***
Stiles had gone back and forth on it about a hundred times when his dad knocked on his bedroom door and then stuck his head in to say good night.
"Don't stay up too late," his dad said, smiling slightly. "I might need you awake to babysit in the morning."
"Yeah, no, totally, got it," Stiles agreed, a little frantically.
His dad just shook his head and said, "Whatever you're thinking, don't go getting too attached, Stiles. She's not a puppy, and we're not keeping her."
"You keep saying that like I don't know that," Stiles replied, trying to summon up some kind of normal exasperation and not this tangle of guilt and doubts and heartsickness mixed with a certain frisson of outright terror.
"I know, okay? She's a kid. She's got a dad. Kids belong with their own parents. I get it."
His dad sighed. "I just don't want to see you get hurt, son."
Stiles was tempted to launch into an edited version of Derek's sex mantra--it's just foster care, it's meaningless babysitting, November doesn't have any special feelings about me and if I think I have any about her it just means I'm playing into the alpha pack's hands--but that wouldn't help right now.
"I know," Stiles repeated.
"Okay," his dad sighed. "I'm gonna get some sleep, I have a feeling tomorrow's going to be an interesting day. Wake me up if November needs anything, okay?"
Stiles nodded.
"Good night," his dad said, and then, "I love you, son."
Stiles looked up, startled. "I love you too, Dad." He summoned up a smile. "Thanks for never abandoning me in a grocery store."
His dad smiled back. He opened his mouth like he was going to make a joke about having come close, but then he shut it again and nodded, and shut the door.
Stiles waited until he'd heard his dad's bedroom door close, and then waited until he'd heard the toilet flush and the sink run, and then made himself wait another five minutes after that, and then he pulled out his phone and sent a text.
This is not a booty call. I need you here asap. Important.
He had no idea what to expect. Derek responded pretty promptly to offers of sex--as did Stiles, when he could, when it was Derek asking/offering/demanding--except when he didn't respond at all. Stiles hadn't had any other reasons to try to get hold of Derek lately, so he had no idea how to predict this. Ever since Boyd turned up and Jackson left town in the midst of all the confusion over whether he was actually dead or not, things had been pretty quiet.
Stiles got up to pace, telling himself it was too soon to send another text at the same time he was berating himself for waiting so long to let Derek know something was going on--that his daughter was looking for him--and then berating himself for playing into the alphas' hands by telling Derek at all.
There was a tap at his window, and Stiles jumped, whirling toward the sound. He nearly fell over before he regained his balance. He scrambled over to the window and pushed it up to find Derek giving him a deeply dubious look from the other side.
"Your dad's home," Derek said quietly, making no move to come in.
"Yeah, and we're not having sex, this is a whole other thing," Stiles whispered. "Get in, come on."
Derek sighed, like he was doing Stiles a huge favor by actually coming inside instead of lurking on the roof, but he climbed through the window and shut it behind him. He looked around the room and then stared, frowning, toward the guest room. Obviously he could hear the new heartbeat in the house.
"Who is that?"
"Yeah," Stiles said. "That's kind of the million dollar question right now. She says she's your daughter and she's supposed to find you and stay with you, but she won't say who brought her to Beacon Hills or anything about her mom or her family. Pretty sure she's a werewolf, though. She flashed her eyes at me."
Derek's frown deepened a little, but he looked... not surprised. Really not at all surprised.
"Did she tell you her birthday?"
"She had a birth certificate with your name on it," Stiles said. "I think my dad's got it now. Mom's name was Guadalupe Gray but that has to be fake, right? I mean--"
"Her birthday," Derek repeated impatiently, turning his attention to Stiles.
"Right, yes. 2007. January, um--January second."
"Wolf moon," Derek replied, his gaze settling on the wall again. "That's what we were aiming for. That's the luckiest birthday."
Stiles blinked, his brain going blank. Of all the things he'd tried to imagine, he hadn't imagined anything like this. "You... wait, what?"
"She has a lucky birthday," Derek said slowly, with exaggerated patience. "She was conceived in April because her mom wanted her born in January. The January full moon is called the wolf moon--it's a lucky time for a werewolf kid to be born."
"Okay," Stiles said. "No, I'm going to need more than that. You have a kid, how--"
"Do you actually need me to explain how babies get made?" Derek smirked.
Stiles threw up his hands. "Dude. Come on, give me something here, my dad is fostering her because she's technically been abandoned, I am unavoidably involved. Who is she, who is her mom, what--what the hell, Derek, you were eighteen."
"Seventeen at the time," Derek corrected, and Stiles flailed his arms wildly and felt his face contort into an expression that must have looked shocked or murderous or something because Derek added quickly, sounding rattled for the first time, "Seventeen is legal in New York. I was--like a sperm donor, okay? Werewolf packs, especially the old packs out East, sometimes they want to add fresh blood without adding a strange wolf. They make a deal. Laura and I needed to settle down somewhere so I could finish high school, but we weren't going to join a strange pack and we couldn't hold our own if another alpha challenged Laura. We made a treaty--I helped make some babies, I guess. I never saw them, they just told me I didn't have to do any repeat performances and that was it."
"Some?" Stiles echoed, unable to get his head around the magnitude of this. Performances. "Babies?"
Derek's shoulders slumped. "There were three packs whose territories converged there. That was what made it work. We stayed balanced between them by making a deal with all of them, so each one had the other two keeping an eye out. Three nights, three...."
Derek trailed off, waving one hand, and didn't say babies again. Or performances.
"She--November had a death certificate, too. For her mom. But seriously that name can't be--"
"No," Derek agreed. Stiles could see him pulling himself back together from that little flash of discomposure. "None of the packs were named Gray. They were old, though. Established. Any of them could have a fixer who arranged that identity for her to cut off the connection. One of the packs must have collapsed--otherwise they would have kept her even if her mother died. She's their blood, too. But we agreed at the time that the--the kid would come to us, to the Hale pack, if anything happened and the mother's pack didn't want them. I gave them a scent object so they'd know me if--"
Stiles stumbled over to his desk and grabbed the Ziploc bag, throwing it at Derek, who turned it over in his hands and nodded.
"This is a piece of it. She's--what did you say her name was?"
"November," Stiles repeated. "The birth certificate said November Diana Hale."
Derek nodded. He looked down at the Ziploc bag again, and Stiles watched him take a couple of deep breaths; Stiles got a weird, inappropriate flash of the way Derek had hesitated before taking his clothes off in front of Stiles for the first time. Then Derek walked over to the wall and crouched down beside Stiles's dresser. He knocked gently on the wall, pretty close to where November was lying on the other side.
"November Diana," he said quietly, but with an unmistakable alpha resonance in his voice that made the hair on the back of Stiles's neck stand up. "Wake up. Come here."
Derek turned without straightening up and stared at the door. Stiles moved toward it and opened it just in time for November to dart through.
She stopped short right beside Stiles, staring at Derek--at her dad.
Stiles shut the door silently and looked at Derek, who had a look on his face Stiles had never seen before--definitely not directed at him, but not for Isaac, not for Erica back before everything went so wrong, not for Boyd miraculously returned alive from the alphas. Derek was looking at November with actual genuine happiness, without any wariness or pretense. His eyes lit up red without a hint of violence or threat. Stiles looked down and realized that November's were glowing blue.
"Come here, bright eyes," Derek said, barely above a whisper, and November ran straight into his arms as he tipped onto his knees.
3
When Laura had mentioned the remote chance that any or all of the treaty offspring could end up belonging to the Hale pack, Derek had asked her how he would recognize them. He'd wondered how he could ever be sure the child handed over was really his own.
"Oh," she'd said airily. "You'd know."
At the time it had seemed like superior alpha-big-sister mysteriousness. As an alpha himself, and remembering that Laura was barely nineteen at the time, he thought it might have included an element of determined bluffing.
Still, it turned out to be true. He'd been able to pick out the little girl scent in Stiles's room even before Stiles mentioned his daughter. Between that and her heartbeat he'd felt a strange click of recognition, not unlike first seeing his betas after the change took hold, but more. Deeper.
That had been strange and wonderful and terrifying, but before he'd had time to think that through, November had dashed through the door. The fact of her in front of him, looking like his own and Laura's baby pictures, like one of his cousins miraculously alive again, was overwhelming. And she was so much more: his, and smiling, and safe, and staring at him adoringly as her eyes lit....
Derek's throat felt like it was going to close up, the top of his head felt like it was going to float off. It felt, he thought dizzily, like falling in love, but all at once and without fear, bone deep and undeniable.
"Come here, bright eyes," he managed, and even as he was thinking, oh God I sound like my dad, November was scampering into his arms and he was folding her in against his body as if he could press her right into himself.
Mine mine mine, pack and family, alive and whole. She squirmed around in his grip, getting herself well covered in his scent, and him in hers. Derek was thankful for the mildness of the summer night, which meant he was bare-armed for this, only separated from his daughter by a t-shirt as he mingled his scent with hers, running his hands from the crown of her head down to her heels.
At last he pushed her back a half-step. "Let me look at you, pup."
And now he sounded like his mother as well, but he supposed that was inevitable--he would be both father and alpha to November.
She was grinning, and she threw her chin up and shoulders back under Derek's fond scrutiny. She really did look like him, as round-cheeked as he'd been until he grew into his face, with the same muddle-colored eyes and black hair.
Four and a half, Stiles had said, which made her a year older than Derek's youngest cousin had been at the time of the fire. Derek hadn't had much contact with children since.
He touched her chin, making a show of studying her smile. "Have you got your big teeth yet?"
She shook her head, smile undimmed, and Derek looked down at her hands. "What about your claws, have those come in yet?"
She shook her head again, flexing her fingers instinctively as if to shoot her claws out.
A child-yet-to-change was effectively an infant within the pack, not even really a beta. Derek took a deep breath and flicked a glance toward Stiles, who was watching in rapt fascination.
Derek settled his gaze on November again. It was good to have a witness, but it wasn't as if the truth wouldn't be obvious to everyone, and his promises were for his daughter alone.
"November Diana," Derek said quietly, and he felt his eyes light again. Hers shone blue in instinctive response. "I claim you as my child and as the child of my pack. You will have place and protection among us for as long as I live and as long as the pack endures."
Neither of which was really much of a guarantee, Derek thought grimly. November's heartbeat stuttered a little, and he realized that she had already known the death of a parent and the demise of a pack. She knew exactly how hollow and temporary that protection might be, even if she didn't know anything about the Hale pack.
Derek folded her into his arms and held her tucked against him until her heartbeat evened out. When she made a tiny squirming motion toward escape, Derek set her on her feet again and looked her in the eye.
"Stiles told me that you didn't tell anyone anything about your mom," Derek said. "Or about your pack."
Her former pack, now, but Derek wasn't going to press that point with her.
November nodded, darting a slightly anxious look toward Stiles.
"When I was little, the first thing my parents taught me was not to tell outsiders anything about my family or the pack," Derek said quietly, and November's attention settled back on him. She stood a little straighter, taking confidence from his sideways reassurance.
"I know you know better than to tell," Derek said softly. "I won't ask you to. But I need you to tell me if anyone hurt or scared you, or if you're scared now about anything that might happen because of what happened before you came here."
November blinked, started to shake her head, and her eyes filled with tears. Derek had to reel her in again before they fell; even so it felt like being stabbed to know that he had made her cry, to know that such awful things had already happened to her. He couldn't help imagining--what if it hadn't been him and Laura who survived? What if only Lizzie had been left alive afterward, and Deaton or someone had dragged her halfway across the country to dump her on some distant kin she'd never met?
Then he would have been dead, and November would never have been born, and he would not be here now with her in his arms.
"You're safe now," Derek whispered. "You're safe. I'm here."
November nodded against his chest, agreement or confirmation or just rubbing her face against his shirt, Derek didn't know her well enough to be sure. He listened to her heartbeat slowing down from that burst of fear, and tried to steady his own. She would be soothed by it, if it were a soothing sound; he remembered being small and listening to the calm thump of his mother's heart, which had always seemed as regular as the tick of a clock. Now he wondered whether she had ever felt like this, scared for him, hurt for him, and had to make an effort to calm herself for his sake, for Laura's, for her pack.
Seeking calm, Derek became aware again of the third heartbeat in the room. He looked up to see Stiles watching them in silence, transfixed. He had one fist pressed to his mouth, though he didn't look like he was having to hold back words by force just now. He had one knee down, one up, awkwardly and unsustainably folded up in the way he usually was, only half conscious of his own body and oblivious to its best uses. Derek suppressed the temptation to direct him into a position he could hold without one of his feet going to sleep on him. Stiles wasn't his beta to train, wasn't his--anything, properly. And yet it was Stiles who was here for this.
After a second Stiles's gaze met Derek's, and the fascinated look turned a little sheepish and then calculating.
"If you want to take her home with you right now, you need to go outside and knock on the door," Stiles said quietly. "And then you're gonna have some explaining to do about why she didn't know where to find you and who left her alone at the grocery store. Also, by California law, you're going to need a car seat if you want to take her anywhere in a vehicle. Um. Do you think you can even fit a car seat in the Camaro?"
Derek's arms tightened around November, but the installation of a car seat was well down his list of priorities for ensuring her safety right now. Derek shrugged slightly and loosened his grip, shifting November back again so he could look her in the eye.
She seemed calmer now; he suspected she was more reassured by his closeness than anything he'd said, and he hoped it was enough, because Stiles was right--he couldn't leave with her, and he couldn't stay here.
"I need you to go back to the other room and sleep," Derek said softly. "The sheriff and Stiles will take good care of you for me, and I'll come back to get you in the morning."
November nodded obediently, and Derek leaned in and kissed her forehead. She kissed his cheek, unprompted, and then smiled and rubbed at his jaw with the palm of her hand. "You tickle, Daddy."
It was, Derek realized as a grin split his face, the first thing she'd said to him. He caught her hand and kissed the palm a half-dozen times in rapid succession, making her giggle, and then remembered that they were supposed to be quiet--but the sheriff's heartbeat didn't lift from the steady thudding of sleep, down the hall.
"Go on," Derek said, turning November toward the door by her shoulders. "Back to bed."
"Night, Daddy," November tossed over her shoulders, and detoured to Stiles on her way to the door. Stiles held out a fist for her to bump, and November darted under his extended arm for a hug and rubbed her face against Stiles's chest. He blinked and closed his arms gingerly around her, looking down with a bemused expression.
Stiles, Derek realized, was oblivious to the subtext of scents in play.
November kissed his smooth cheek, and Stiles rallied enough to kiss hers. "Good night, snuggle-pup."
November beamed and said, "Night, Stiles," and whirled away to the door. Stiles tried to stand and had to put his arms out for balance, but November managed the door just fine on her own, and Derek listened to her progress down the hall, into the other room, and into the bed on the other side of the wall he still knelt by.
Derek stood and went to Stiles's bedroom door, closing it silently. He stood facing it for a moment, trying to work out his priorities. Everything had to be done at once, and all of it before morning, if he was going to pull this off without running afoul of the human authorities again.
For now, at least, November would be safe. He'd told her that much truth; he was fully confident that Stiles and the sheriff would protect her tonight, no matter how badly things might go wrong in the next eight hours.
"Stiles," Derek said, frowning as he turned.
Stiles had his arms folded. He looked inexplicably obstinate, and Derek couldn't shift mental gears from figuring out the seismic shift that had just occurred in his pack to guess why.
"No," Stiles said. "Whatever you--I will not recite any kind of mantra about just being your kid's babysitter, Derek. I got enough of that from my dad, I'm not doing it with you. And I'm definitely not saying your stupid sex mantra when I didn't even get any sex."
Derek blinked, and then went on with what he'd been intending to say when he turned. "Stiles. Thank you."
Stiles looked taken aback and, after the space of a few speeding heartbeats, sheepish. A bright flush bloomed on his cheeks.
"November felt safe here even before I arrived," Derek went on. "I know that that's because of you."
"Well," Stiles said, and flapped a hand toward the bed. "You too, actually. She could smell you in the house. She could smell you on me, which is why she approached me in the first place."
Of course. That was going to be a mess to explain to a four-year-old, but he would think of something.
Derek nodded. "Still. You were good to her, and you kept her with you instead of letting her be sent off somewhere else with strangers, so. Thank you."
"Okay, yes, stop saying that," Stiles whispered loudly, his cheeks reddening further. He flapped his hands at Derek as if to ward off the words. "I was nice to your kid because she is awesome, okay, it wasn't a big deal."
Derek couldn't resist adding, "Thanks for the tip about the car seat, too," and, there, the tips of Stiles's ears went fully, deeply pink.
"Get out of here and hit the 24-hour Wal-Mart then," Stiles said, waving Derek toward the window and rolling his eyes. "Get clothes, too, she doesn't have anything but what she was wearing. My dad usually gets up around seven, just come by sometime tomorrow."
Derek nodded and made his escape. He moved steadily, focusing on his surroundings and not letting himself think, until he was in the Camaro and in motion.
Half a mile from the Stilinskis' house, he pulled over and leaned his forehead against the steering wheel to take a few long, deep breaths. November's scent was all over him. His child's scent was already burned into his brain, and it was irrevocably tangled with the smell of Stiles. They had met for the first time in Stiles's room, in Stiles's presence, and November had been wearing Stiles's clothes; every strand of her hair had carried the smell of Stiles's hands, braided for bed by those restless fingers. Stiles couldn't have marked her more thoroughly as his own if he'd been doing it on purpose.
So--obviously Derek actually had a lot of feelings about Stiles, which were only going to get intensified by November pretty much adopting Stiles as her coparent. November's trauma was going to come to the fore once she felt safe enough to freak out, and Derek wouldn't be able to detach her from Stiles, emotionally or sometimes physically, when he was one of the few people she felt safe with.
When Derek shows up the next morning--with the car seat already installed in the back of the Camaro, and bags of clothes in the trunk and a not-quite-disprovable story about a misunderstanding with a friend of November's mother's bringing her to town and dropping her off at the wrong house on the wrong day--the sheriff takes him aside and offers his support to a soon-to-be-struggling single father. He knows something about how hard that is; he knows that Derek needs a support system, and he feels responsible for November and therefore Derek. Derek is kind of flummoxed by that, but submits to it because he doesn't know what else to do, which means he's bringing November, and Isaac, over to the Stilinskis' for dinner on a semi-regular basis.
November would also become a rallying point for the pack (including, this being pre-S3, a redeemable Peter who had lost his own young children in the fire), pulling them together into an actual cohesive unit who spent a lot of time judging Derek's (totally werewolf-appropriate) parenting style, which included a lot of benevolent neglect interspersed with bursts of authoritarianism and a lot of cuddling, food-sharing, and co-sleeping.
Co-sleeping being especially a thing, November sometimes demanded that Stiles also share a bed with her and Derek. Derek had totally called off their sexual relationship (with a helpful exhibition of his even-more-intense issues about having been a teenager used for sex by adults, since it happened to him kind of a lot with this backstory), because it was the one aspect of his life he could push Stiles out of, and ironically now they were actually sleeping together. And then came the time when Stiles couldn't get away from the house, and November was inconsolable, and Stiles said, "Bring her here, we'll have a sleepover, it's fine, Dad worries about you, he'll be glad to see you guys."
So Derek and November and Stiles bed down all properly in sleeping bags in the living room, which is fine until the part where Derek wakes up spooned around Stiles with November happily squished between them, and the Sheriff standing behind the couch eyeing all three of them thoughtfully as he drinks his coffee. He tilts his head toward the front door, and Derek lets go of Stiles and November--shifts November into Stiles's grip so she won't feel lonely--and then follows the Sheriff out to the porch, already anticipating the worst; the clinch was pretty obvious and obviously not new.
So before the Sheriff can say a word, Derek offers to plead guilty to whatever the Sheriff wants, as long as November can stay with him and Stiles while Derek is in prison.
The Sheriff responds by slapping Derek soundly on the back of the head and telling him never, ever to say anything that stupid to law enforcement ever again, Jesus, kid, have you never heard of the right to remain silent? He then proceeds to break down how useless it would be for him to arrest Derek--Stiles would never testify, there's no actual case, it would just look like the Sheriff carrying out a grudge. And Stiles didn't look unhappy or scared in his sleep. He looked like he trusted Derek, the same way November does. Derek looked like he wanted to hold on to his family. The Sheriff can respect that.
Then Derek confesses that he and Stiles actually sort of broke up already. The Sheriff doesn't even dignify that one with a verbal response, just a skeptical look. And Derek and Stiles negotiate getting back together (it mostly involves both of them promising that Stiles will still be November's other parent even if the relationship goes south--Stiles won't leave her even if he leaves Derek, and Derek won't keep her from Stiles even if Stiles fucks up their relationship really badly). That is the pre-nup, basically, and a year and a half on Stiles gets adoption papers for his eighteenth birthday to make it official.
And... oh my God I had so much stuff figured out for this story. Stiles making Derek take November to storytime at the library so she can socialize with the kids she'll be going to preschool with, and not start off as The Kid With The Weird Antisocial Dad, a tag which could well stick with her through high school.
And eventually November would mention missing her brother and sisters, and Derek would find out that his (four, there were a set of twins) bio-kids had all been raised knowing each other as siblings (to prevent SERIOUS AWKWARDNESS when they all wound up in high school together). So they figure out how to find the other kids--November remembers her birthday-twin's Skype name--and they find out all the details of the pack-infighting that destroyed November's mom's pack. And in the epilogue there is a trip to New York to get all the kids back together, yay!
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1
Stiles was pretending he'd already fallen asleep, resisting this part of the night's encounter like he always did. It was just habit, Derek was pretty sure--pure stubborn Stilesian contrariness. Derek worried about that occasionally, about whether it was counterproductive to keep insisting on this and so give Stiles something to dig in his heels against. But he couldn't stop now that it was established as a ritual, and he wasn't going to leave open any possibility of ambiguity. If Stiles broke his own heart over Derek that was fine, as long as Derek never gave him reason to believe that it was going to be anything else.
Derek poked Stiles in the shoulder, and heard the little guilty-annoyed jump in his heartbeat.
"Say it," Derek ordered, in a low, patient tone.
Stiles dropped the arm he'd flung over his face, giving up the pretense of post-coital dozing. He glared through half-open eyes at Derek.
"Your pillow talk is seriously the worst."
"If you want pillow talk, get a boyfriend," Derek replied implacably. "Or girlfriend. If you want to keep fucking me, say it."
Stiles gave a put-upon sigh but didn't argue, didn't even latch on to some semantic detail about who fucked who more often. Derek had worn him down at least that far with repetition. Or maybe it was just that he was too tired to argue; his feigned sleep would have been real if Derek had given him another five minutes, which was why Derek hadn't.
They only fucked. They didn't sleep together. Derek wasn't going to give Stiles even the illusion of some greater intimacy by staying in bed until Stiles fell asleep.
"Say it," Derek repeated, knowing full well that Stiles was gathering himself to do so.
"Jesus, I'm just trying to remember all of it so you don't turn it into a fucking call and response again," Stiles snapped, waking up a little further.
"Let's see: It's just sex. It's totally meaningless sex. You don't have any special feelings for me and never will. If I start thinking I have special feelings for you, I don't, it's just endorphins and hormones and the fact that I'm a dumb kid who's never fucked anyone else and doesn't know any better."
Stiles's heartbeat, slightly elevated by familiar annoyance, didn't alter as the words--relentless, heartless, and by now utterly routine--poured out of his mouth. There was no flicker of a lie, no defiance, no hidden hope or complicated emotional entanglement behind them. Derek had made sure of that.
"You're only fucking me because I'm conveniently close to the pack but not one of your betas, and because I'm--"
Stiles made a face. On this, of all the declarations Derek had insisted on from the start, Stiles's heartbeat persisted in stuttering.
"Irresistibly attractive," Derek prompted. "Hot. Eminently--"
"Eminently fucking fuckable, yeah, okay," Stiles grumbled, because apparently the idea of his own appeal still stuck in his throat even though he'd gotten entirely accustomed to the idea that he was being used for convenient, loveless sex.
"And flexible, and easy, and have a refractory period almost as short as a werewolf's. And sooner or later one of us will get bored or find someone to have an actual relationship with and then the no-strings sex will be over, forever and ever amen. Okay? Was that all of it? Can I go to sleep now?"
"Do whatever you want," Derek replied in a tone of indifference as rehearsed as Stiles's recitation. He yanked on his jeans and grabbed the rest of his clothes to put on as he walked out.
"Lock the door behind you." Stiles flipped over, not even looking in Derek's direction as he sprawled out to take up the whole bed. "My dad still has not quit freaking out about that time he came home and it was open."
"I will lock the door," Derek agreed on his way out of Stiles's room, gritting his teeth a little. It was, he supposed, only fair that Stiles got to say that every single time, no matter how much Derek wanted to protest that it had been one time and he knew better. He was never going to be as distracted again as he had been the first time Stiles fucked him, but he wasn't about to explain what had happened to his head that night--not even to get Stiles to stop reminding him.
He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, silently dressing while he listened to Stiles's heartbeat descending into sleep. When he was sure Stiles was out he made a silent circuit of the house, checking every window and door to be sure everything was locked before he let himself out the back door, double-checking the lock from the outside.
He walked the three blocks to the Camaro with a comfortable sense of having his bases covered. Whatever else he fucked up, he'd left Stiles safe tonight, physically and otherwise. Derek wasn't going to be any sixteen-year-old boy's Kate Argent.
2
Stiles and his dad had long since hammered out the division of labor when it came to grocery shopping: Stiles took the aisles (dangerously full of processed foods) while his dad handled the outer edges of the store--produce, meat, dairy. They traded off a cart and a basket, and whoever had the basket found the cart to dump stuff into it when they filled it up. They each had a list for their respective area of responsibility, and on a good day they could finish in half an hour and have food for weeks.
Today was going to be a good day--Stiles could feel it in his bones. They'd come to the store after dinner on a Friday, when neither of them were hungry, the heat of the day was easing off, and the after-work crowds had dissipated.
Stiles had the cereal aisle more or less to himself. He was squinting at the nutrition information on a box of Honey Nut Cheerios when somebody tugged on the pocket of his jeans.
Stiles looked down at the kid looking up, and she said calmly, "You smell like my dad. Where is he?"
Stiles blinked, but there was actually no merciful moment of incomprehension or disbelief. The kid had black hair, neatly combed into two little pigtails, and wide gray-green eyes surrounded by long black eyelashes. She had round cheeks and warm olive skin and a patient, serious expression. She looked exactly like what Derek's four-year-old werewolf daughter would look like if Derek had a four-year-old werewolf daughter, which apparently he did.
Stiles crouched down, wondering what she would make of his thundering heart, to say nothing of what her daddy's teenaged booty call must smell like to her. He'd showered twice since he'd last touched Derek, but he'd learned, to his eternal embarrassment, that that didn't make much difference to werewolf senses.
"I haven't seen him today. Did you get separated from him?"
She shook her head. "I've never met him. I'm supposed to find him. Are you going home soon? Can you take me? I have these so I can find him."
The girl held out a Ziploc bag to Stiles; it contained a folded piece of cloth and some papers, also folded. When Stiles opened the bag even his feeble human nose recognized the smell of familiar sweat. Derek.
One of the pieces of paper was a birth certificate--an original, with the seal and everything. The kid's name was November Diana Hale, according to this, and her parents were Guadalupe Gray and Derek Hale. She'd been born four and a half years ago--January 2, 2007, so her name wasn't a reference to anything obvious--in some town Stiles had never heard of in New York State.
The other piece of paper was a death certificate for Guadalupe Gray, dated two weeks ago.
"Oh, man," Stiles said, feeling a horrible pang of empathy for this half-orphaned kid, his throat going tight at the thought.
But November didn't seem to notice or care. She just repeated, "Can you help me find my dad?"
"Did you," Stiles said, looking around, but there wasn't an adult in sight. Not that a werewolf would need to be in sight to be keeping an eye--ear, nose--on her. "You didn't come all this way by yourself, did you?"
November pressed her lips together and a deeply familiar stubborn look took over her face, her tiny black eyebrows drawing down tightly. Not telling.
"Stiles?"
Stiles twisted without standing up to see his dad standing at the end of the aisle with the cart, the kid-seat at the front piled up with bags of brightly-colored produce.
"Hey, Dad," Stiles said, and looked back only to find that November had crouched down as well, hiding behind him to keep out of his dad's sight. "Hey, it's okay. That's my dad."
November didn't look especially reassured, scooting closer to Stiles and practically trying to burrow between him and the shelves when his dad rolled the cart up to them.
"Uh, Dad," Stiles said, looking up helplessly. "This is November Hale. Derek's daughter."
His dad's eyebrows went to heights normally reserved for Stiles telling really incredibly bald-faced lies. "Derek Hale has a daughter?"
Stiles gave him an I know, right? face and offered the papers without standing up; the second his dad's gaze shifted down Stiles stuffed the Ziploc bag into his pocket, turning toward November again as he did it.
"Hey, come on. It's okay, my dad's a good guy," Stiles coaxed.
November squinted her eyes almost all the way shut, so that only a hint of blue escaped when they flashed bright.
Stiles shook his head and touched his finger to his lips.
November nodded quickly.
When Stiles turned back, straightening up, his dad was still staring at the papers, frowning. November grabbed Stiles's shirt, tugging, and when Stiles looked down at her, she just started climbing him. He scooped her up--crap, she was heavy, were normal little kids this heavy?--before she could show off any too-obvious werewolf skills.
The sheriff looked up, and his frown didn't lighten. "So, you two know each other pretty well?"
Stiles shook his head, and November's flying pigtail brushed his cheek as she shook hers. "She just walked up to me and asked me if I could help her find her dad. I found out who she is two minutes before you did."
His dad gave him and November a long, skeptical look, and then said, "When's the first time you saw Stiles, sweetheart?"
"What's Stiles?"
His dad snorted, but pointed at Stiles. "This guy, his name is Stiles. Didn't he even introduce himself?"
November shook her head again.
The sheriff sighed. "Did you come here with your dad?"
November mixed it up by shrugging and then hiding her face against Stiles's shoulder.
"I didn't see that Camaro," his dad muttered, and then he shook his head. "Come on, we'll take her to the front, they can make a PA announcement. Somebody's gotta be looking for her, she didn't just walk in here by herself."
After five PA announcements, Stiles switching November from one hip to the other eight times to try to keep his arms from falling off, one ear-splitting shriek when his dad tried to take November from Stiles, and several minutes of the flustered assistant manager fiddling with the security cameras, it turned out that November had walked in by herself. His dad's expression had turned from grim to quietly furious by the time he led Stiles and November out to the cruiser.
There was, as it turned out, a car seat in the trunk for this sort of situation. His dad hooked it up and left Stiles to buckle November into it while he radioed in about an abandoned child.
Stiles's phone was heavy in his pocket. But he hadn't had a hand free--and his dad's attention diverted--long enough to even text Derek, and how the fuck could he sum this up in a text? If Derek had known that his daughter he'd never met was in Beacon Hills looking for him, he'd be here already. As desperate as Derek was for pack and family, he'd never let his own kid go begging. Which meant he didn't know she was in Beacon Hills.
Did he even know he had a kid? Four and a half years ago Derek had been barely eighteen and Guadalupe Gray, if the birth and death certificates were to be believed, had been twenty-eight. Stiles kind of doubted that had been a long-term relationship.
If Derek didn't know he had a kid, Stiles wasn't going to try to break it to him by text, especially when it would probably come out sounding like Stiles was making some kind of dumb joke about Derek having knocked him up. And if he actually just busted out his phone and called with his dad right there, he'd have to explain why he had Derek's phone number in some way that didn't involve getting Derek arrested for a bunch of felonies he actually had committed. So: not an option.
Also not an option: getting out of November's reach. She got a hold of Stiles's fingers and didn't let go, and Stiles was pretty sure he wasn't breaking her grip before he broke his own bones. He buckled in in the back seat, giving his dad a nod when he looked back to check that they were ready to roll.
Stiles sat with his head down all the way there, wiggling his fingers occasionally in November's ferocious grip and trying to figure out how he was going to get her to Derek without anyone getting arrested.
When his dad parked the car outside the Sheriff's Department, he sighed and then turned and said, "Son, do you know anybody who knows exactly where Hale is living right now, or how to get in touch with him?"
The question contained an out, which made it almost certainly some kind of trick question. Stiles wasn't going to point his dad at Scott or Isaac or Boyd, and no way was he opening the can of worms that was Peter Hale.
Stiles put his hand on November's knee and gave it a reassuring squeeze as he shook his head.
His dad sighed again, and Stiles said, "We should take her home with us, though."
"Stiles, she's not a puppy--"
Stiles bit his tongue for a second, and then said, "No, I mean--you're still on the list as an emergency foster parent, aren't you? Mrs. Robinson took that baby in the spring and the Garcias got Isaac Lahey. It's probably your turn, right? We haven't had a foster kid in the house in forever. And I mean, it's 8:30 on a Friday, she's a little kid, she should be in bed. Isn't Kathy from the CPS office covering Trinity County this week? She'd have to drive all the way back here, she wouldn't get in until like midnight--you're not going to keep November hanging around here until midnight, right?"
"You'll feed her and take her for walks, I won't even know she's there," his dad muttered, but held up a hand when Stiles tried to defend himself. "No, you have a point, and it's obvious she doesn't want to be separated from you, either. But I still have to call Kathy and fill out some paperwork. Come on."
So Stiles unbuckled November and led her out of the car. She walked beside him exactly as far as the front desk and then made a tiny alarmed noise, staring at the exact spot where Stiles had seen the first of way too many dead bodies fall four months ago.
Stiles picked her up immediately, cradling the back of her head in his hand while she tucked her face into the side of his throat. If she could smell Derek on him, there was no way she wouldn't pick up traces of what had happened here, no matter what kind of industrial cleanup they'd done.
Stiles hurried her through the corridors in his dad's wake, and shut the door firmly when they were in his dad's office. Nothing too bad had happened here, and even to Stiles it smelled like his dad and home; he could feel November relax as he sat down in his usual chair. After a few minutes she relented enough to pick her head up and look around a little.
His dad was filling out a form while talking on the phone--to Kathy, Stiles assumed, since he was saying, "Yeah, my CPR's up to date, of course it is. Yeah, same address, nothing's changed there. Just me and Stiles. I think this is going to be short term, anyway--once we track down Hale...."
Stiles wished for werewolf hearing, because his dad glanced up at him and didn't say anything after that except repeating "Mm-hm," a lot. Stiles looked down at November to see if she was picking up any useful information, but she was either asleep or doing a good impression of it, slumped heavy and hot against Stiles's chest. Even in the air-conditioned office he was sweating where she rested on him.
"Okay," his dad said finally. "Thanks, Kath. Good luck over there."
He hung up and signed the form with a quick flourish. "Kathy's got a situation over in Trinity, probably can't get back here before late tomorrow, so we'll see about doing some family reunification before CPS gets officially involved, if Hale turns up before she does."
Stiles squeezed November but didn't say anything to her or to his dad, who leaned in and said, "What do you think, Miss Hale? Would you like to sleep over at Stiles's house, since we're not sure where your dad is right now?"
November broke cover immediately to nod and smile.
***
November was back to pretending to sleep by the time they got to the house. She wiggled all over and hugged Stiles a little as soon as they stepped inside. If she could smell Derek on Stiles, she could definitely smell him in the house.
"I'll make sure the guest room is okay," his dad said quietly. "Wake her up and get her changed into a t-shirt for PJs, okay?"
Stiles nodded and carried November into his room, where she immediately slid down to her feet and dashed over to his bed. He winced, hoping she at least didn't know what it was she was smelling when his bed reeked of sex. He dug through his drawers, grinning when he found the perfect thing.
"Hey, November, you want to wear this one to sleep in? Your dad borrowed it one time, can you smell him on it?"
November leaped off the bed and came running back, burying her face in the blue-and-orange striped t-shirt.
"Mostly it smells like you," she informed him. "I like it, though."
"Cool," Stiles agreed, and helped her take off her little pink sandals and her green shorts and white t-shirt with a butterfly on it, leaving her Dora underpants in place as he helped her into his t-shirt. It covered her nearly to her ankles and the sleeves went down well past her elbows, the collar sagging nearly all the way off one shoulder.
"There you go, you're all nightgowned up. Time to brush your teeth."
Stiles coached November through the process of getting ready for bed, since she still seemed pretty shy of his dad. Luckily she was totally potty-trained and even remembered to wash her own hands without being reminded; less luckily, she demanded that Stiles convert her pigtails into braids so her hair wouldn't get all tangled while she slept. Stiles figured out how to do the braids; his dad came back in just as he finished the first one and offered him a couple of hair elastics.
Stiles took them without meeting his dad's eyes and carefully fastened the ends of November's braids with them, remembering his mom leaving them around everywhere, putting her hair up into a ponytail before she started cooking or working in the yard, tugging them out at random times and letting her hair fall down loose. And then... not, toward the end. No more ponytails, and no more ponytail holders. Stiles hadn't noticed exactly when they all disappeared from the counters and end tables and bathroom drawers.
November turned and hugged him when he finished, and Stiles hid his face against the top of her head for a few seconds and then said, "Okay, all ready for bed now? Do you need, um, a story or a song or prayers or anything?"
November shrugged and then shook her head.
"Okay," Stiles repeated, looking helplessly toward his dad, who stood in the doorway of the guest room, watching them with a weird, unreadable expression on his face. "Uh, right. Hop in, then."
His dad had already pulled back the covers of the guest room bed, a big double bed with plain pale blue sheets and a striped comforter. November clambered in, and Stiles helped her get covered up.
"Okay, well, my room's right next door," Stiles said. "I bet you can hear me in there if you listen--" heartbeats would be comforting to a little werewolf kid, right? She'd expect to hear her family's heartbeats all around her. "And if you need anything, just yell out, I'll hear you."
November nodded again and cuddled into the pillow, and Stiles stood there for another minute, watching her, feeling like he should be doing more and totally at a loss for what that might be. Finally he headed to the door and shut off the light.
His dad pulled the door nearly closed but not quite, settling a hand on Stiles's shoulder and steering him firmly down to the kitchen in silence.
Stiles tried to figure out what he was about to get asked, or told, but he really wasn't prepared for what his dad came up with, which was, "I need you to tell me, right now, if Derek Hale is having sex with Isaac Lahey."
Stiles just stared for a second and then said, "Dad, what kind of--"
His dad raised his hands placatingly. "I'm not asking you to get any of your friends in trouble. I'm not going to go swear out a warrant. But right now, tonight, I am November's foster father, which means I'm as responsible for her safety as I am for yours. More, in fact, because she's younger and more vulnerable. I need to know what kind of person I might be handing her over to tomorrow."
"And, what," Stiles demanded, guilt and fear and anger curdling in his stomach. "What, if he's gay then he's some kind of child molester?"
"No," his dad said, rolling his eyes like that was crazy, waving it away. "Stiles, no, come on, you know me better than that."
"I don't--what are you even talking about, Derek Hale and Isaac Lahey?"
His dad snorted. "Stiles, I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm the sheriff of this county, and when people in this county are concerned about something possibly illegal happening, sometimes they get the idea to talk to me about it. So when Derek Hale invited himself over to the Garcias' house to tell them that Isaac Lahey would be spending most of his time at Hale's place--wherever exactly that might be, Hale was never specific and Isaac has never said either--they talked that over with me, being concerned, just like I am, for the safety of their foster child for whom they are responsible."
"He," Stiles opened and closed his mouth a few times. He knew Isaac was supposed to live with the Garcias and he knew Isaac pretty much didn't. It had never occurred to him that the Garcias--or his dad--knew why.
"Apparently," his dad went on, in an I'm-humoring-you-by-pretending-to-explain-this kind of tone, "the two of them bonded over being orphaned at sixteen and being falsely accused of the murder of a family member, and Derek helped Isaac stay hidden after he fled the jail that night. No one's going to press charges against Hale for that when we're not pressing charges against Isaac for running. No one wants to encourage Isaac to run away completely from his court-appointed guardians, and since they do see him at least once a day, since he's stayed in school and continued to participate in extracurriculars, finished the school year with better grades than he's ever had before and seems to be in better physical and mental health than he's ever been--the Garcias, and I, feel it's best not to force the issue.
"But if Derek Hale is in the habit of exploiting or manipulating vulnerable children for his own... satisfaction, then that's something I need to know about him before I hand over a four-year-old into his sole custody."
"I don't," Stiles said, and had no idea how to follow that up.
"Don't tell me you have no idea," his dad said. "Isaac's working at Deaton's now, he's friends with Scott, and I know you've crossed paths with Hale more than a time or two. I'm not swearing you in to testify, Stiles, but I know you kids hear things about each other, I know you know Hale, and I need to know what he's like. For November's sake. You accused him of murder, remember? And now you think I should hand this kid over to him?"
"Derek wouldn't," Stiles said, and that one he could finish. "He wouldn't hurt Isaac, and he wouldn't hurt November, either. He's--he just wants a family again. He had little cousins and stuff. Isaac's like that to him, he wouldn't ever--they're not. Sleeping together. Derek's not a bad guy. I was wrong about him before, I didn't know him then. He'll--"
Stiles couldn't quite promise he'll be a good dad, because the very idea of that broke his brain.
"He'll try really hard," Stiles said. "He'll do his best for her."
Stiles held his dad's gaze as it turned searching.
"Okay," his dad said finally. "Well, so far we haven't gotten any database hits on missing kids matching November's description, so for the moment we'll go with the theory that she is what she says she is. If she's Derek Hale's child, he has a right to custody as soon as we can find him and tell him so. But I suppose you don't have Isaac's phone number, either?"
Stiles took a page from November's book and didn't say a word, just shook his head.
His dad's lips quirked. "Uh-huh. Well, I've got a few more phone calls to make."
"I should go upstairs. So I'm close by if November needs anything," Stiles announced.
His dad nodded again, waving him away, and Stiles bolted.
Up in his room Stiles immediately pulled his phone out and then hesitated. If he was going to call Derek and drag him into a confrontation with the sheriff, he should have just done it two hours ago and saved a few steps. If he wanted to keep Derek away from his dad--or at least give Derek a chance to find out about this and decide what to do before he was dealing with the sheriff--he had to wait at least until his dad was asleep.
That gave Stiles nothing but time to think.
Could this possibly be for real? Could Derek really have a kid without knowing--or did he know? Was Derek running around searching for her, unable to find her? Would it occur to Derek to call the police about his missing kid, like a normal person? But if he were searching for her wolf-style he would have to pick up her scent mingled with Stiles's and figure it out, wouldn't he?
And if he didn't know, if this were as much a surprise to him as to Stiles, was there any chance that November was really only an orphaned kid coming to live with her dad? Why was her last name Hale if she'd never met Derek? For that matter her purported mom's purported name--Guadalupe Gray--was pretty much the most obvious I am a werewolf name since Remus Lupin. That couldn't possibly be for real.
But what was she, then? Some kind of evil shapeshifter? Bait? An alpha pack trick to get Derek off his guard, make him vulnerable, give him something to lose?
Stiles's brain wandered all too readily down that path, imagining all the horribly inventive ways a little girl who looked just like him could be a liability for Derek.
November herself couldn't be lying--that would be too easy for any werewolf to spot. Whoever she really was, she must believe that Derek was her dad, which probably meant her mom was really dead. Had the alpha pack killed some werewolf lady and stolen her daughter just to set this up? Had they somehow made November just for this purpose, magicked her up out of a piece of Derek's hair or something and then told her he was her dad and she had to go find him? And if they'd done either of those things, was there any limit to what they would do to get to Derek and his pack, such as it was?
It shouldn't have been a surprise by now--they hadn't drawn the line at Erica, and Stiles still didn't know, or want to know, what Boyd's silences meant about what else they'd done--but it was still a sick, horrible jolt in the pit of Stiles's stomach.
If she was only going to be used against them, should he even tell Derek at all? Shouldn't he....
This, Stiles realized, was what he got for advocating killing Jackson to solve the kanima problem, and for all those times he'd insisted their lives would be easier if Derek were dead. Now trouble was here in the shape of a four-year-old girl who'd cuddled and clung to him and trusted him to help her, and now his respect for human--well, tiny werewolf--life was kicking in with a stomach-turning vengeance.
Stiles got up, shoving his phone into his pocket, and the Ziploc bag crinkled. He pulled it out again and unfolded the piece of cloth, pressing it to his face. It did, he was positive, actually smell like Derek--like Derek's sweat, specifically, which was a smell Stiles had gotten to know intimately over the last couple of months of (totally meaningless and convenient and no feelings involved, yes, Derek, shut up) sex.
The piece of cloth was the sleeve of a shirt, light blue, nothing he could picture Derek wearing, but obviously he had. Not anytime recently, Stiles was pretty sure--but then how would anyone have gotten it? For that matter, if the alpha pack were capable of magicking a kid out of nothing, or killing a woman, stealing her kid, and forging identification and a scent object to connect her to Derek--why hadn't they just killed or captured Derek and the rest of the pack already?
Stiles tucked the shirt sleeve back into the plastic bag and dropped it on his desk, sitting back down with his head in his hands. Maybe this wasn't so bad. Maybe for once the worst possible thing wasn't happening here. It would be weird, but hey, Jackson had survived, right? He'd even managed to stop being the kanima. Sometimes things turned out okay. Maybe November was going to be one of those.
And maybe they were all going to die horrible deaths on the tiny claws of the most adorable kid Stiles had ever met.
***
Stiles had gone back and forth on it about a hundred times when his dad knocked on his bedroom door and then stuck his head in to say good night.
"Don't stay up too late," his dad said, smiling slightly. "I might need you awake to babysit in the morning."
"Yeah, no, totally, got it," Stiles agreed, a little frantically.
His dad just shook his head and said, "Whatever you're thinking, don't go getting too attached, Stiles. She's not a puppy, and we're not keeping her."
"You keep saying that like I don't know that," Stiles replied, trying to summon up some kind of normal exasperation and not this tangle of guilt and doubts and heartsickness mixed with a certain frisson of outright terror.
"I know, okay? She's a kid. She's got a dad. Kids belong with their own parents. I get it."
His dad sighed. "I just don't want to see you get hurt, son."
Stiles was tempted to launch into an edited version of Derek's sex mantra--it's just foster care, it's meaningless babysitting, November doesn't have any special feelings about me and if I think I have any about her it just means I'm playing into the alpha pack's hands--but that wouldn't help right now.
"I know," Stiles repeated.
"Okay," his dad sighed. "I'm gonna get some sleep, I have a feeling tomorrow's going to be an interesting day. Wake me up if November needs anything, okay?"
Stiles nodded.
"Good night," his dad said, and then, "I love you, son."
Stiles looked up, startled. "I love you too, Dad." He summoned up a smile. "Thanks for never abandoning me in a grocery store."
His dad smiled back. He opened his mouth like he was going to make a joke about having come close, but then he shut it again and nodded, and shut the door.
Stiles waited until he'd heard his dad's bedroom door close, and then waited until he'd heard the toilet flush and the sink run, and then made himself wait another five minutes after that, and then he pulled out his phone and sent a text.
This is not a booty call. I need you here asap. Important.
He had no idea what to expect. Derek responded pretty promptly to offers of sex--as did Stiles, when he could, when it was Derek asking/offering/demanding--except when he didn't respond at all. Stiles hadn't had any other reasons to try to get hold of Derek lately, so he had no idea how to predict this. Ever since Boyd turned up and Jackson left town in the midst of all the confusion over whether he was actually dead or not, things had been pretty quiet.
Stiles got up to pace, telling himself it was too soon to send another text at the same time he was berating himself for waiting so long to let Derek know something was going on--that his daughter was looking for him--and then berating himself for playing into the alphas' hands by telling Derek at all.
There was a tap at his window, and Stiles jumped, whirling toward the sound. He nearly fell over before he regained his balance. He scrambled over to the window and pushed it up to find Derek giving him a deeply dubious look from the other side.
"Your dad's home," Derek said quietly, making no move to come in.
"Yeah, and we're not having sex, this is a whole other thing," Stiles whispered. "Get in, come on."
Derek sighed, like he was doing Stiles a huge favor by actually coming inside instead of lurking on the roof, but he climbed through the window and shut it behind him. He looked around the room and then stared, frowning, toward the guest room. Obviously he could hear the new heartbeat in the house.
"Who is that?"
"Yeah," Stiles said. "That's kind of the million dollar question right now. She says she's your daughter and she's supposed to find you and stay with you, but she won't say who brought her to Beacon Hills or anything about her mom or her family. Pretty sure she's a werewolf, though. She flashed her eyes at me."
Derek's frown deepened a little, but he looked... not surprised. Really not at all surprised.
"Did she tell you her birthday?"
"She had a birth certificate with your name on it," Stiles said. "I think my dad's got it now. Mom's name was Guadalupe Gray but that has to be fake, right? I mean--"
"Her birthday," Derek repeated impatiently, turning his attention to Stiles.
"Right, yes. 2007. January, um--January second."
"Wolf moon," Derek replied, his gaze settling on the wall again. "That's what we were aiming for. That's the luckiest birthday."
Stiles blinked, his brain going blank. Of all the things he'd tried to imagine, he hadn't imagined anything like this. "You... wait, what?"
"She has a lucky birthday," Derek said slowly, with exaggerated patience. "She was conceived in April because her mom wanted her born in January. The January full moon is called the wolf moon--it's a lucky time for a werewolf kid to be born."
"Okay," Stiles said. "No, I'm going to need more than that. You have a kid, how--"
"Do you actually need me to explain how babies get made?" Derek smirked.
Stiles threw up his hands. "Dude. Come on, give me something here, my dad is fostering her because she's technically been abandoned, I am unavoidably involved. Who is she, who is her mom, what--what the hell, Derek, you were eighteen."
"Seventeen at the time," Derek corrected, and Stiles flailed his arms wildly and felt his face contort into an expression that must have looked shocked or murderous or something because Derek added quickly, sounding rattled for the first time, "Seventeen is legal in New York. I was--like a sperm donor, okay? Werewolf packs, especially the old packs out East, sometimes they want to add fresh blood without adding a strange wolf. They make a deal. Laura and I needed to settle down somewhere so I could finish high school, but we weren't going to join a strange pack and we couldn't hold our own if another alpha challenged Laura. We made a treaty--I helped make some babies, I guess. I never saw them, they just told me I didn't have to do any repeat performances and that was it."
"Some?" Stiles echoed, unable to get his head around the magnitude of this. Performances. "Babies?"
Derek's shoulders slumped. "There were three packs whose territories converged there. That was what made it work. We stayed balanced between them by making a deal with all of them, so each one had the other two keeping an eye out. Three nights, three...."
Derek trailed off, waving one hand, and didn't say babies again. Or performances.
"She--November had a death certificate, too. For her mom. But seriously that name can't be--"
"No," Derek agreed. Stiles could see him pulling himself back together from that little flash of discomposure. "None of the packs were named Gray. They were old, though. Established. Any of them could have a fixer who arranged that identity for her to cut off the connection. One of the packs must have collapsed--otherwise they would have kept her even if her mother died. She's their blood, too. But we agreed at the time that the--the kid would come to us, to the Hale pack, if anything happened and the mother's pack didn't want them. I gave them a scent object so they'd know me if--"
Stiles stumbled over to his desk and grabbed the Ziploc bag, throwing it at Derek, who turned it over in his hands and nodded.
"This is a piece of it. She's--what did you say her name was?"
"November," Stiles repeated. "The birth certificate said November Diana Hale."
Derek nodded. He looked down at the Ziploc bag again, and Stiles watched him take a couple of deep breaths; Stiles got a weird, inappropriate flash of the way Derek had hesitated before taking his clothes off in front of Stiles for the first time. Then Derek walked over to the wall and crouched down beside Stiles's dresser. He knocked gently on the wall, pretty close to where November was lying on the other side.
"November Diana," he said quietly, but with an unmistakable alpha resonance in his voice that made the hair on the back of Stiles's neck stand up. "Wake up. Come here."
Derek turned without straightening up and stared at the door. Stiles moved toward it and opened it just in time for November to dart through.
She stopped short right beside Stiles, staring at Derek--at her dad.
Stiles shut the door silently and looked at Derek, who had a look on his face Stiles had never seen before--definitely not directed at him, but not for Isaac, not for Erica back before everything went so wrong, not for Boyd miraculously returned alive from the alphas. Derek was looking at November with actual genuine happiness, without any wariness or pretense. His eyes lit up red without a hint of violence or threat. Stiles looked down and realized that November's were glowing blue.
"Come here, bright eyes," Derek said, barely above a whisper, and November ran straight into his arms as he tipped onto his knees.
3
When Laura had mentioned the remote chance that any or all of the treaty offspring could end up belonging to the Hale pack, Derek had asked her how he would recognize them. He'd wondered how he could ever be sure the child handed over was really his own.
"Oh," she'd said airily. "You'd know."
At the time it had seemed like superior alpha-big-sister mysteriousness. As an alpha himself, and remembering that Laura was barely nineteen at the time, he thought it might have included an element of determined bluffing.
Still, it turned out to be true. He'd been able to pick out the little girl scent in Stiles's room even before Stiles mentioned his daughter. Between that and her heartbeat he'd felt a strange click of recognition, not unlike first seeing his betas after the change took hold, but more. Deeper.
That had been strange and wonderful and terrifying, but before he'd had time to think that through, November had dashed through the door. The fact of her in front of him, looking like his own and Laura's baby pictures, like one of his cousins miraculously alive again, was overwhelming. And she was so much more: his, and smiling, and safe, and staring at him adoringly as her eyes lit....
Derek's throat felt like it was going to close up, the top of his head felt like it was going to float off. It felt, he thought dizzily, like falling in love, but all at once and without fear, bone deep and undeniable.
"Come here, bright eyes," he managed, and even as he was thinking, oh God I sound like my dad, November was scampering into his arms and he was folding her in against his body as if he could press her right into himself.
Mine mine mine, pack and family, alive and whole. She squirmed around in his grip, getting herself well covered in his scent, and him in hers. Derek was thankful for the mildness of the summer night, which meant he was bare-armed for this, only separated from his daughter by a t-shirt as he mingled his scent with hers, running his hands from the crown of her head down to her heels.
At last he pushed her back a half-step. "Let me look at you, pup."
And now he sounded like his mother as well, but he supposed that was inevitable--he would be both father and alpha to November.
She was grinning, and she threw her chin up and shoulders back under Derek's fond scrutiny. She really did look like him, as round-cheeked as he'd been until he grew into his face, with the same muddle-colored eyes and black hair.
Four and a half, Stiles had said, which made her a year older than Derek's youngest cousin had been at the time of the fire. Derek hadn't had much contact with children since.
He touched her chin, making a show of studying her smile. "Have you got your big teeth yet?"
She shook her head, smile undimmed, and Derek looked down at her hands. "What about your claws, have those come in yet?"
She shook her head again, flexing her fingers instinctively as if to shoot her claws out.
A child-yet-to-change was effectively an infant within the pack, not even really a beta. Derek took a deep breath and flicked a glance toward Stiles, who was watching in rapt fascination.
Derek settled his gaze on November again. It was good to have a witness, but it wasn't as if the truth wouldn't be obvious to everyone, and his promises were for his daughter alone.
"November Diana," Derek said quietly, and he felt his eyes light again. Hers shone blue in instinctive response. "I claim you as my child and as the child of my pack. You will have place and protection among us for as long as I live and as long as the pack endures."
Neither of which was really much of a guarantee, Derek thought grimly. November's heartbeat stuttered a little, and he realized that she had already known the death of a parent and the demise of a pack. She knew exactly how hollow and temporary that protection might be, even if she didn't know anything about the Hale pack.
Derek folded her into his arms and held her tucked against him until her heartbeat evened out. When she made a tiny squirming motion toward escape, Derek set her on her feet again and looked her in the eye.
"Stiles told me that you didn't tell anyone anything about your mom," Derek said. "Or about your pack."
Her former pack, now, but Derek wasn't going to press that point with her.
November nodded, darting a slightly anxious look toward Stiles.
"When I was little, the first thing my parents taught me was not to tell outsiders anything about my family or the pack," Derek said quietly, and November's attention settled back on him. She stood a little straighter, taking confidence from his sideways reassurance.
"I know you know better than to tell," Derek said softly. "I won't ask you to. But I need you to tell me if anyone hurt or scared you, or if you're scared now about anything that might happen because of what happened before you came here."
November blinked, started to shake her head, and her eyes filled with tears. Derek had to reel her in again before they fell; even so it felt like being stabbed to know that he had made her cry, to know that such awful things had already happened to her. He couldn't help imagining--what if it hadn't been him and Laura who survived? What if only Lizzie had been left alive afterward, and Deaton or someone had dragged her halfway across the country to dump her on some distant kin she'd never met?
Then he would have been dead, and November would never have been born, and he would not be here now with her in his arms.
"You're safe now," Derek whispered. "You're safe. I'm here."
November nodded against his chest, agreement or confirmation or just rubbing her face against his shirt, Derek didn't know her well enough to be sure. He listened to her heartbeat slowing down from that burst of fear, and tried to steady his own. She would be soothed by it, if it were a soothing sound; he remembered being small and listening to the calm thump of his mother's heart, which had always seemed as regular as the tick of a clock. Now he wondered whether she had ever felt like this, scared for him, hurt for him, and had to make an effort to calm herself for his sake, for Laura's, for her pack.
Seeking calm, Derek became aware again of the third heartbeat in the room. He looked up to see Stiles watching them in silence, transfixed. He had one fist pressed to his mouth, though he didn't look like he was having to hold back words by force just now. He had one knee down, one up, awkwardly and unsustainably folded up in the way he usually was, only half conscious of his own body and oblivious to its best uses. Derek suppressed the temptation to direct him into a position he could hold without one of his feet going to sleep on him. Stiles wasn't his beta to train, wasn't his--anything, properly. And yet it was Stiles who was here for this.
After a second Stiles's gaze met Derek's, and the fascinated look turned a little sheepish and then calculating.
"If you want to take her home with you right now, you need to go outside and knock on the door," Stiles said quietly. "And then you're gonna have some explaining to do about why she didn't know where to find you and who left her alone at the grocery store. Also, by California law, you're going to need a car seat if you want to take her anywhere in a vehicle. Um. Do you think you can even fit a car seat in the Camaro?"
Derek's arms tightened around November, but the installation of a car seat was well down his list of priorities for ensuring her safety right now. Derek shrugged slightly and loosened his grip, shifting November back again so he could look her in the eye.
She seemed calmer now; he suspected she was more reassured by his closeness than anything he'd said, and he hoped it was enough, because Stiles was right--he couldn't leave with her, and he couldn't stay here.
"I need you to go back to the other room and sleep," Derek said softly. "The sheriff and Stiles will take good care of you for me, and I'll come back to get you in the morning."
November nodded obediently, and Derek leaned in and kissed her forehead. She kissed his cheek, unprompted, and then smiled and rubbed at his jaw with the palm of her hand. "You tickle, Daddy."
It was, Derek realized as a grin split his face, the first thing she'd said to him. He caught her hand and kissed the palm a half-dozen times in rapid succession, making her giggle, and then remembered that they were supposed to be quiet--but the sheriff's heartbeat didn't lift from the steady thudding of sleep, down the hall.
"Go on," Derek said, turning November toward the door by her shoulders. "Back to bed."
"Night, Daddy," November tossed over her shoulders, and detoured to Stiles on her way to the door. Stiles held out a fist for her to bump, and November darted under his extended arm for a hug and rubbed her face against Stiles's chest. He blinked and closed his arms gingerly around her, looking down with a bemused expression.
Stiles, Derek realized, was oblivious to the subtext of scents in play.
November kissed his smooth cheek, and Stiles rallied enough to kiss hers. "Good night, snuggle-pup."
November beamed and said, "Night, Stiles," and whirled away to the door. Stiles tried to stand and had to put his arms out for balance, but November managed the door just fine on her own, and Derek listened to her progress down the hall, into the other room, and into the bed on the other side of the wall he still knelt by.
Derek stood and went to Stiles's bedroom door, closing it silently. He stood facing it for a moment, trying to work out his priorities. Everything had to be done at once, and all of it before morning, if he was going to pull this off without running afoul of the human authorities again.
For now, at least, November would be safe. He'd told her that much truth; he was fully confident that Stiles and the sheriff would protect her tonight, no matter how badly things might go wrong in the next eight hours.
"Stiles," Derek said, frowning as he turned.
Stiles had his arms folded. He looked inexplicably obstinate, and Derek couldn't shift mental gears from figuring out the seismic shift that had just occurred in his pack to guess why.
"No," Stiles said. "Whatever you--I will not recite any kind of mantra about just being your kid's babysitter, Derek. I got enough of that from my dad, I'm not doing it with you. And I'm definitely not saying your stupid sex mantra when I didn't even get any sex."
Derek blinked, and then went on with what he'd been intending to say when he turned. "Stiles. Thank you."
Stiles looked taken aback and, after the space of a few speeding heartbeats, sheepish. A bright flush bloomed on his cheeks.
"November felt safe here even before I arrived," Derek went on. "I know that that's because of you."
"Well," Stiles said, and flapped a hand toward the bed. "You too, actually. She could smell you in the house. She could smell you on me, which is why she approached me in the first place."
Of course. That was going to be a mess to explain to a four-year-old, but he would think of something.
Derek nodded. "Still. You were good to her, and you kept her with you instead of letting her be sent off somewhere else with strangers, so. Thank you."
"Okay, yes, stop saying that," Stiles whispered loudly, his cheeks reddening further. He flapped his hands at Derek as if to ward off the words. "I was nice to your kid because she is awesome, okay, it wasn't a big deal."
Derek couldn't resist adding, "Thanks for the tip about the car seat, too," and, there, the tips of Stiles's ears went fully, deeply pink.
"Get out of here and hit the 24-hour Wal-Mart then," Stiles said, waving Derek toward the window and rolling his eyes. "Get clothes, too, she doesn't have anything but what she was wearing. My dad usually gets up around seven, just come by sometime tomorrow."
Derek nodded and made his escape. He moved steadily, focusing on his surroundings and not letting himself think, until he was in the Camaro and in motion.
Half a mile from the Stilinskis' house, he pulled over and leaned his forehead against the steering wheel to take a few long, deep breaths. November's scent was all over him. His child's scent was already burned into his brain, and it was irrevocably tangled with the smell of Stiles. They had met for the first time in Stiles's room, in Stiles's presence, and November had been wearing Stiles's clothes; every strand of her hair had carried the smell of Stiles's hands, braided for bed by those restless fingers. Stiles couldn't have marked her more thoroughly as his own if he'd been doing it on purpose.
So--obviously Derek actually had a lot of feelings about Stiles, which were only going to get intensified by November pretty much adopting Stiles as her coparent. November's trauma was going to come to the fore once she felt safe enough to freak out, and Derek wouldn't be able to detach her from Stiles, emotionally or sometimes physically, when he was one of the few people she felt safe with.
When Derek shows up the next morning--with the car seat already installed in the back of the Camaro, and bags of clothes in the trunk and a not-quite-disprovable story about a misunderstanding with a friend of November's mother's bringing her to town and dropping her off at the wrong house on the wrong day--the sheriff takes him aside and offers his support to a soon-to-be-struggling single father. He knows something about how hard that is; he knows that Derek needs a support system, and he feels responsible for November and therefore Derek. Derek is kind of flummoxed by that, but submits to it because he doesn't know what else to do, which means he's bringing November, and Isaac, over to the Stilinskis' for dinner on a semi-regular basis.
November would also become a rallying point for the pack (including, this being pre-S3, a redeemable Peter who had lost his own young children in the fire), pulling them together into an actual cohesive unit who spent a lot of time judging Derek's (totally werewolf-appropriate) parenting style, which included a lot of benevolent neglect interspersed with bursts of authoritarianism and a lot of cuddling, food-sharing, and co-sleeping.
Co-sleeping being especially a thing, November sometimes demanded that Stiles also share a bed with her and Derek. Derek had totally called off their sexual relationship (with a helpful exhibition of his even-more-intense issues about having been a teenager used for sex by adults, since it happened to him kind of a lot with this backstory), because it was the one aspect of his life he could push Stiles out of, and ironically now they were actually sleeping together. And then came the time when Stiles couldn't get away from the house, and November was inconsolable, and Stiles said, "Bring her here, we'll have a sleepover, it's fine, Dad worries about you, he'll be glad to see you guys."
So Derek and November and Stiles bed down all properly in sleeping bags in the living room, which is fine until the part where Derek wakes up spooned around Stiles with November happily squished between them, and the Sheriff standing behind the couch eyeing all three of them thoughtfully as he drinks his coffee. He tilts his head toward the front door, and Derek lets go of Stiles and November--shifts November into Stiles's grip so she won't feel lonely--and then follows the Sheriff out to the porch, already anticipating the worst; the clinch was pretty obvious and obviously not new.
So before the Sheriff can say a word, Derek offers to plead guilty to whatever the Sheriff wants, as long as November can stay with him and Stiles while Derek is in prison.
The Sheriff responds by slapping Derek soundly on the back of the head and telling him never, ever to say anything that stupid to law enforcement ever again, Jesus, kid, have you never heard of the right to remain silent? He then proceeds to break down how useless it would be for him to arrest Derek--Stiles would never testify, there's no actual case, it would just look like the Sheriff carrying out a grudge. And Stiles didn't look unhappy or scared in his sleep. He looked like he trusted Derek, the same way November does. Derek looked like he wanted to hold on to his family. The Sheriff can respect that.
Then Derek confesses that he and Stiles actually sort of broke up already. The Sheriff doesn't even dignify that one with a verbal response, just a skeptical look. And Derek and Stiles negotiate getting back together (it mostly involves both of them promising that Stiles will still be November's other parent even if the relationship goes south--Stiles won't leave her even if he leaves Derek, and Derek won't keep her from Stiles even if Stiles fucks up their relationship really badly). That is the pre-nup, basically, and a year and a half on Stiles gets adoption papers for his eighteenth birthday to make it official.
And... oh my God I had so much stuff figured out for this story. Stiles making Derek take November to storytime at the library so she can socialize with the kids she'll be going to preschool with, and not start off as The Kid With The Weird Antisocial Dad, a tag which could well stick with her through high school.
And eventually November would mention missing her brother and sisters, and Derek would find out that his (four, there were a set of twins) bio-kids had all been raised knowing each other as siblings (to prevent SERIOUS AWKWARDNESS when they all wound up in high school together). So they figure out how to find the other kids--November remembers her birthday-twin's Skype name--and they find out all the details of the pack-infighting that destroyed November's mom's pack. And in the epilogue there is a trip to New York to get all the kids back together, yay!
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