Chapter Text
Talia Hale was seated around the small table on the porch of the Hale house, with her brother Peter and his husband Chris. The men were engrossed in a game of chess, while she was skimming through a book she had read one too many times. She needed to go to the bookstore soon for new material.
Her attention was drawn to the driveway as Noah Stilinski’s car pulled up to the house. It had barely parked, before the back door was thrown open and Stiles hopped out.
“Stiles!” Malia shouted, sprinting towards him as he ran for her with just as much enthusiasm.
Talia winced lightly as they smacked into each other and both hit the ground, the breath knocked out of their lungs from the force.
“You are both ridiculous,” Cora snorted as she and Allison went over to them. Cora offered a hand to Malia, while Allison offered hers to Stiles. They were pulled to their feet and into a makeshift group hug, with Stiles in the middle.
Talia couldn’t see him at this angle through all the bodies, but she could see the way his hands were squeezed out between the girls and he was petting their hair and hugging them. Finally, he managed to escape the hug and laughed, red-faced.
“You guys always squeeze me."
“That’s called love,” Malia told him, rubbing her face into his neck one more time, before letting him go.
“It’s my favorite,” Stiles assured them.
He was odd for a human. From the time he was very young, he had never had a problem with allowing the wolves to scent-mark him --no matter how aggressively the girls always attacked him to do it. He never appeared uncomfortable with it in the slightest. He even began mimicking scenting motions back on them, much to Talia’s surprise. It seemed to come naturally to him, as if he were made to be in a pack.
“He’d be a good wolf,” Talia said thoughtfully.
“He would,” Peter agreed, breaking his concentration on the chess board to look over at the boy. “He’s already got the mannerisms down flawlessly. Sometimes I wonder if he knows he’s not a werewolf.”
“Don’t even think about taking away my human...he’s helping me even the wolf-human ratio with Allie and Jax. We’re ridiculously outnumbered as it is,” Chris joked.
“Oh...you feel like a minority in this world full of humans?” Peter questioned, raising an eyebrow. “Let me take a moment to feel sorry for you.”
Stiles then ran up to the porch and hugged Peter. “Good morning!”
“Good morning, Miecz,” Peter smiled, holding him tightly and kissing the top of his head.
After a few seconds, Stiles pulled away and moved to the other side of the table to hug Chris.
“Next time, I get the first hug...you’ll make Peter feel too important if you let him have them,” Chris whispered to him, causing Stiles to laugh and Peter to throw him a playful glare.
After he greeted the man, Stiles turned to address Talia --but paused, looking just past her shoulder. She followed his line of sight to find Derek seated in front of a tree trunk, his legs pulled up to his chest and a book balanced over his knees as he read it.
“Is everything alright?” Talia asked Stiles, confused as to why he was just staring at the older boy across the yard.
Her voice seemed to pull Stiles attention back to her and he opened his arms to offer her a hug. She smiled and leaned forward to embrace him for a short moment, before relaxing back into her chair.
“Why is Derek upset?”
This got all three adults’ attention and they looked over at the twelve-year-old curiously.
“I don’t think he’s upset,” Talia told Stiles. He always looked that way...didn't Stiles know that? “He just gets very focused while reading sometimes.”
Stiles continued staring at Derek with furrowed eyebrows, then shook his head. “No, he’s sad or mad or something . I’ll go ask him.”
Stiles took off towards the edge of the woods and sat down in front of Derek. The werewolf didn’t acknowledge him, but that didn’t seem to deter Stiles in the slightest. The younger boy was talking just quietly enough for Talia to not be able to make out what he was saying, but his arms flailed animatedly as he spoke without stopping, so she assumed he was telling a story of some kind.
Talia couldn’t help but watch interestedly as Stiles shifted closer and casually shut Derek’s book. Derek looked at it for a second as if trying to figure out if Stiles had really just shut it while he was reading, before looking at the boy with his eyebrows raised. Stiles then slid the book off his knees entirely and let it fall to the ground.
The tenseness that Talia hadn’t even noticed in Derek’s shoulders relaxed slowly until he was leaning against the tree trunk, using it more as a back-rest than simply a means of protecting his back as he read. His legs fell open until he was sitting in a cross-legged position, effectively breaking the wall-like divide he had made between himself and the rest of the world. His hands fell to the grass of the front lawn and he brushed his fingers through it absentmindedly.
“Stiles is good with him, huh?” Chris asked, noticing Talia’s stare.
“The kid’s a godsend,” Peter said. “Derek doesn’t even have time to be stubborn, because he doesn’t realize that Stiles is taking the stick out of his ass until he’s already let down all his grumpy barriers.”
“Derek hasn’t said a word, but he keeps talking,” Talia noticed. Derek was just watching Stiles speak, obviously having no inclination to stop him or join in. He seemed almost interested in whatever was being said. It made Talia wonder if Stiles was a good storyteller, since Derek never really seemed interested in anything .
“Stiles talks enough for the both of them,” Noah chuckled. “That’s probably why Derek keeps him around --conversation comes easy, because he doesn’t have to say anything.”
Suddenly, Stiles got to his feet and ran a few yards further into the trees, before coming back with a fluffy, white dandelion in each hand. He sat in front of Derek again, his legs up against Derek’s in a classic display of his lack of personal space awareness. He handed him one of the dandelions and Derek just stared down at it, completely unimpressed.
“He just told Stiles it’s a weed,” Peter filled the adults in as he watched Derek and Stiles closely. Talia couldn’t hear the conversation at all, so she assumed Peter was at an angle where he could read Derek’s lips.
Stiles closed his eyes and blew on the dandelion, causing the hundreds of small white seeds to fly off of the stem and into the wind. Unfortunately, the wind was blowing towards them, so they all came back into Stiles’ face. Derek's lips stretched into an amused grin as Stiles coughed and wiped his face on his sleeves. With the way his shoulders were shaking just slightly, Talia wondered if her son was actually laughing .
Stiles fixed Derek with a look of betrayal, before he leaned forward and blew on the dandelion in Derek’s hand, causing the white tufts to cover his clothes, face, and hair. Derek’s face dropped into a hard line as Stiles took his turn to burst into laughter. Derek stood up and shook his head back and forth, shaking a few of the seeds out of his dark hair, then reached down and pulled Stiles to his feet. He gently held the back of the boy’s neck as he guided him towards the porch.
“This is yours,” Derek said once they reached the adults, lightly pushing Stiles towards Noah.
“Eh, you can have him. He likes you better, anyway.” Noah waved them off.
As if backing up the statement, Stiles grinned up at Derek. The wolf rolled his eyes, but it was obvious by the tightness around his mouth and the uncharacteristic warmth in his green eyes that he was fighting off a smile.
“Play with the girls,” Derek told him, before heading towards the front door.
“Are you coming back?”
Derek turned back to look at him for a moment, before going inside without a response.
“Derek is allowed to have alone time, Stiles,” Noah reminded him.
“I know that,” Stiles said. “But he’s coming back.”
“Stiles!” Cora shouted from across the yard. “We’re playing a game and you’re on my team.”
“Why would I want to be on your team?” Stiles smirked at her. “What if I wanted to be on Malia’s team?”
“ Malia? Over me?” Cora scoffed. “Just get over here!”
“Bossy, bossy,” Stiles mumbled as he walked down the steps of the porch and went over to the girls. When he reached them, Cora grabbed him by the front of the shirt and flashed her eyes. He pinched her side and she yelped, before pushing him and lightly punching his shoulder.
“If I yell for Derek to bring the watermelon when he comes back out, do you think he will?” Chris asked.
“Maybe, if he actually comes back out,” Talia said.
“If Stiles said he’s coming back, he is.” Peter shrugged. “He wouldn’t have said that if Derek hadn’t told him so.”
“We were right here--he didn’t say anything.”
“Derek rarely says anything,” Noah pointed out. “That doesn’t stop Stiles from reading him like a book. The kid is like a Derek Translator.”
Talia looked at Stiles running around with the girls and couldn’t help but be intrigued, yet slightly annoyed. The kid was not a wolf...he couldn’t possibly detect Derek’s chemosignals to figure out how he felt, the way the rest of the wolves did. Even with that ability, Talia was usually guessing to figure out what Derek was thinking or feeling. She couldn’t imagine having to rely on just Derek’s actions, because the kid was practically allergic to all kinds of communication and he almost never expressed any other physical reactions that weren’t grumpy and closed-off. The smile she saw him give Stiles by the tree was the first she had even seen in at least a month. The laugh...she honestly wasn't sure if she'd ever seen him do that. She couldn't picture the way it sounded, so she was guessing that she hadn't heard it before. Or at least, not often enough to remember.
Noah was right, though. Stiles knew that Derek was upset the second he caught sight of him. He saw the tenseness of his body...recognized the way he closed himself off with his legs...noticed that something was wrong, just by looking at him from across the yard. How was that possible? Talia didn’t even see that he was tensed until she saw him relax. Then again, she wasn’t sure the last time she had seen him so relaxed. What did that mean? Was Derek usually upset? He always looked that way to her, but his chemosignals rarely suggested it. For a child who expressed his feelings so seldomly, he felt things very strongly, which made it easy to read his scent. It was the only way she knew how to communicate with him, since ‘grumpy, growly, werewolf’ had been his entire personality since he was young. She wasn’t even overly aware that the version of Derek she had seen at the tree just now existed.
“You wanted this?” Derek asked as he came back outside with the container of watermelon.
“Yes, please ,” Chris said, reaching out to take it from his hands. “You’re amazing--I love you.”
Derek grabbed a piece from the Tupperware as soon as Chris had removed the lid, and then sat on the porch step. Stiles noticed Derek’s presence again as he ran from Allison and made a detour towards him. As he passed, he plucked the watermelon from his hand and sunk his teeth into it. Before he could make his escape, Derek fisted his hand in the back of his shirt and pulled him down to sit on the porch. Talia was shocked as Derek made no move to take the food back from him. Since when did Derek allow his food to be taken?
“Pause!” Stiles shrieked as Allison got closer to him. “Derek is making me sit, so this doesn’t count!”
“Fine,” Allison huffed. She wandered back over to Malia.
“You just wanted me to lose,” Stiles accused Derek.
“You eat, you sit.”
“I can’t choke on watermelon . It’s basically water. Why do I have to sit?”
“You can choke on watermelon,” Derek corrected. “And water.”
Stiles looked like he wanted to argue some more, but he settled for just glaring at Derek as he finished the piece of watermelon he had stolen. Once only the green rind was left, Stiles stood up and went over to the table to get two more slices --specifically, the two largest that he could find. He returned to the spot beside Derek and handed him the bigger of the two.
“Did you know that you can actually eat the green part? It’s food, just like the red part --it just tastes different," Stiles said, looking at the rind as if considering whether or not he should try it.
“Don’t,” Derek grunted.
“I didn’t say I was going to eat it...I’m just saying that I could and it would be okay.”
“Stiles.”
“I’m not!”