Chapter Text
It only takes Stiles ten minutes to get to the school, which means there was probably a lot of speeding involved, but it's worth it to know that he hasn't spent an extra ten minutes moving at a lawful speed and working himself into a righteous froth of worry and rage. He thinks he deserves some serious kudos for not turning on the lightbar on his cruiser and screaming through town at eighty miles an hour. So he's only agitated instead of full-on furious when he bangs his way into the middle school's administration office and finds his kid sitting on one of the Chairs of Shame outside the principal's office, holding a wad of tissues to her bloody nose. The expression on her face is one of flushed, practically apoplectic fury, but there's a guy in scrubs crouched in front of her, talking softly, and she's nodding at him like she's receiving some sort of wartime pep talk about keeping a stiff upper lip.
There's another kid sitting right beside her, presumably the one who gave her the bloody nose, because he looks like he probably has a low tolerance for bullshit, if the eyebrows are anything to go by. The door to the principal's office is firmly shut, so most likely the principal is waiting for all of the parents to be present before the tongue-lashings commence, but both kids look like they're prepared to settle the matter with an actual fight to the death.
The second she sees Stiles appear in the doorway, his kid completely abandons whatever conversation she's having with the school nurse — Stiles didn't even know the school had an actual nurse; when he went here the 'nurse' had just been a vice principal's daughter, who had a degree in physical education and was a closet sadist — and launches in on Stiles, instead.
"This is bullshit, Dad," she says, and her voice is hilariously nasally, makes the curse come out like budshid. She doesn't seem to notice the way the kid next to her shoots an apprehensive look at the nurse like he's waiting for the nearest adult to go nuts over the curse word and wants to make sure he's not in the yelling radius. Like fist-fights are okay but profanity isn't, which just goes to show what's wrong with the youth of today, as far as Stiles is concerned. The nurse doesn't say anything, though, probably because Stiles' kid is rolling on like it's no big thing. "Mr. Hollywell said they're going to expel me this time and it wasn't even my fault, you have to do something."
Stiles snorts. "What, like with my dad powers or something? There's only so much I can do when you're determined to start your street-fighting career at the tender age of eleven, Emmy. School's been in session for a month, seriously, what the hell."
"I didn't start it this time, Dad," Emmy says, with the trademark Stilinski whine. Well, it's not really necessarily a Stilinski trait, because Stiles' dad has never whined, possibly in his entire life, was probably perfectly stoic and square-jawed even as a baby, but Emmy takes after Stiles in a serious way, is the point.
"This time?" the nurse says, a disapproving tone in his voice as he smoothly pushes himself to his feet and turns on Stiles like he's going to deliver a lecture personally, before the principal can even bother.
"My dad always used to say, once is an incident, twice is a coincidence, three times is a... uh."
He might've lost his train of thought there, but it's not his fault. Because the nurse has turned completely around and he's... he's kind of... Stiles is having trouble thinking beyond his intense regret that he didn't check out the guy's ass when he had the chance. He was distracted. By a bleeding kid. He's going to make her pay later. Because the nurse is hot. He's got absurd muscles and an attractively bestubbled jawline and eyes that are like a million colors in the most aggressively handsome face Stiles has ever seen.
"Three times?" the guy prompts, when it becomes clear that Stiles is going to continue staring.
Stiles thinks it's a proposition for a second, and he almost says something mortifying about refractory periods, before he realizes the guy's just waiting for him to finish his stupid saying. "Oh. Three times is, um, a pattern. Probably a pattern indicating that I shouldn't be paying for those martial arts lessons anymore."
Emmy, predictably, goes apeshit. She jumps out of her chair and starts with the one-armed gesticulating and everything. Nurse McHotness actually has to step back to get out of range. "But Dad you can't! It's not my fault the kids here are douchebags!"
"A month, Emmy," Stiles repeats. "Three fights. You know what Sensei Reyes said after the second one."
Officially, Erica had given Emmy a hell of a dressing down, started pushing her harder on workouts, given her actual homework to do on her own time, and threatened to kick her out of the dojo if there was any more fighting. Privately, she'd gotten a certain glint in her eyes, made Stiles promise to let Emmy compete in some real tournaments this year to "put all that pre-teen angst to good use," and told him to lighten up because his kid was teaching herself to fight crime.
To be fair, her first two targets were fairly deserving of the fist of justice. On the other hand, he isn't sure his kid needs to become Batman at this particular point in her life. She's not even an orphan. Thematically it just doesn't work out.
"We don't have to tell her about it," Emmy says, slumping back into her seat. "You have parental discretion, you know."
The nurse actually snorts at that one. "I said your nose doesn't seem to be broken, I didn't say you weren't going to have some pretty incredible shiners. Anybody with eyes is going to be able to tell you've been in a fight."
"Awesome," Stiles says, heaving a put-upon sigh because he is so put-upon. His fucking kid, seriously. "It's going to be the great shunning all over again. You're staying home until your face looks normal again; I don't need anybody judging me like I'm an abusive dad. Again. If you need to leave the house, you're going to have to put a bag over your face."
"You're the worst," Emmy tells him, putting on a sullen face to match the dour little shit sitting next to her. "You never take my side."
"I always take your side, when your side isn't stupid," Stiles points out, reasonably.
The nurse smirks, and it looks unfairly good on his face. He's also standing there watching like their family drama is entertaining to him personally.
"So everybody's okay, right?" Stiles asks him, trying to figure out why the guy's even still there. It's just after lunch; surely somebody's suffering from food poisoning by now. "Emmy's nose isn't broken, she doesn't seem to have permanently traumatized that kid — at least this one's not limping — so..."
The guy doesn't take the hint, he just raises one of his impressively intimidating eyebrows. "So?"
"So..." Stiles says, and can't bring himself to actually say it. 'Don't you have someplace else to be' sounds too douchey, even in his own head. Plus, if the guy left, then Stiles wouldn't be able to look at him anymore. He can take a little extra embarrassment if it comes with that kind of trade-off.
"Oh my god, Dad, he's not the school nurse," Emmy says. She buries her face in her hands like he's so embarrassing she can't even stand to exist anymore, but it's a short-lived gesture because touching her own face makes her wince and recoil. Yeah, she's going to have awesome bruises later. "He's Ben's dad."
"Oh," Stiles says, eloquently. He's assuming Ben is the other kid, because said kid scowls and sinks a little deeper into his seat. And yeah, okay, he can see the family resemblance in the eyebrows, definitely. And the ears. On Ben they're huge and kind of adorable, but if he's anything like his dad he's going to wind up looking like he's stepped from the pages of GQ.
"Derek," the nurse says, and it takes a second for Stiles to realize that that's the guy's name, because usually this is the part where the other parent starts threatening lawsuits or whatever. Stiles is getting really familiar with the routine. Maybe coming straight from work was his most awesome idea ever; he's still in his deputy's uniform, and this Derek dude is being seriously chill about the whole thing. Could be the sidearm. He'll definitely have to come to all parent-teacher conferences packing heat from now on.
"Stiles. Uh, sorry my kid tried to beat up your kid."
Emmy says, "Dad!" at the same time that Ben and Derek frown simultaneously and say, in eerie unison with practically the same voice (Ben's just hasn't dropped yet), "She didn't."
Stiles is completely, fantastically confused, so of course that's when the principal's door swings open. Dr. Banerjee leans out, with her usual unreadable look, the one Stiles likes to call her thousand-yard stare, like she's been through the education wars and seen horrors they can't imagine. Her voice is just as flat and unimpressed when she says, "Everyone's here, then? Come into my office."
There are already people in there, when they file in, so it gets a little tight. Stiles pulls Emmy to one side with him, looping an arm around her shoulders and giving her nose a quick look himself. It looks like it's more or less stopped bleeding — she tossed her wad of bloodied tissues into a garbage can on the way in — although the front of her shirt is pretty much ruined. Stiles has plenty of experience getting blood out of clothes, but he's thinking this one's a loss. Derek and his kid take the opposite wall, Ben looking at the floor with his hands jammed in his pockets, Derek with his frankly massive arms folded forbiddingly across his chest. The guest chairs are occupied by a pair of parents and another kid, maybe a couple years older than Emmy or maybe just an early bloomer. The kid looks worse for wear, though, his face scuffed and blooming with at least one new bruise, his clothes stretched and dirt-stained, like somebody used a grip on his shirt to fling the kid around like a rag doll. Stiles has seen Emmy do it before, in practice. He has no idea what's going on right now.
The second Dr. Banerjee closes the door, the kid's mom looks back and forth between the Hale camp and the Stilinski camp, pulls a face like she's equally disgusted with both of them, and says, "I hope you're prepared to discipline these animals for attacking my son."
Stiles can't help but suck in a quick breath, eyes snapping to Derek's face, taking in the way he tenses and bristles. Ben bites his lip and looks like he actually physically shrinks. Derek looks like he's considering ripping throats out first and asking questions later. Werewolves. No wonder Derek's supernaturally attractive. He's Derek Hale, as in the Hales, the biggest pack in the county. As in Laura Hale, who works in the werewolf division at the sheriff's office and likes to butt her nose into Stiles' personal life. God, this is going to be a nightmare.
"You do realize that speciesist slurs are legally classified as hate speech," Stiles says, casually, leaning back against a bookcase. Emmy squeezes a little tighter into his side in solidarity.
The dad's eyes narrow, and so do the kid's; it's obvious where the little shit gets his attitude from. "Figure of speech, I'm certain that's not illegal," the dad says. "Assault, on the other hand, is definitely against the law, Deputy. Maybe you'd like to take your daughter out of here in handcuffs, because I think we're interested in pressing charges."
"I have a policy in situations like these," Dr. Banerjee interrupts smoothly, before Stiles can cut a bitch, "in which the parents are not allowed to speak until the children have explained themselves. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas, I've already heard from your son — at length — and I'd like to hear what Benjamin and Emily have to say."
She looks first, expectantly, toward Ben which is a good call, because once Emmy gets going the kid probably wouldn't get a word in edgewise. Ben freezes like he feels the gaze of a thousand predators, which is kind of silly because he is a predator, but when he finally looks up, it's not his dad he looks to, or his principal: he looks right at Emmy. Huh.
He must receive whatever signal he's asking for, because he finally opens his mouth and says, "Connor was giving me a hard time, and Emily stepped in. Connor threw the first punch."
"Yeah, and I threw the last one," Emmy says, before Stiles can slap a hand over her mouth. She takes after him in almost every way, which is really unfortunate for her and her future.
"You're the one who started it!" Connor shouts at Ben, pointing an accusing finger like he thinks he's in a over-dramatic reenactment of the Salem witch trials.
"What, by existing?" Emmy says, and she probably learned that sneer from hanging around with the Hale kid because it's more impressive than anything Stiles has ever mustered up. He's clearly failed her as a role model. "You harass him every single day because you know he can't fight back!"
"Please, he's a werewolf, all he knows how to do is fight," Mrs. Thomas says.
"Yeah, right, because the Werewolf Control Act is no big deal, I'm sure werewolves can do whatever they want," Emmy says, her voice dripping unconcealed venom.
Mr. Thomas opens his mouth and Stiles doesn't even want to hear what the guy's going to say, because Derek's starting to look like he doesn't personally care about the Werewolf Control Act at all, and has no concerns about the kinds of stiffer-than-ought-to-be-legal penalties imposed on werewolves implicated in violence against humans. Anyway, Stiles doesn't really want his first up-close encounter with Derek's incredible body to involve trying to physically pull the guy off the bloodied corpses of his enemies. That seems like fifth-date material, at least.
"Alright, calm down," Stiles shouts in his best cop voice, which is seriously good if he says so himself. He has to clap a hand over Emmy's mouth to stop her talking, but the Thomases shut up, at least, and Dr. Banerjee gives Stiles a cool nod, like they're bros in crowd control.
"Thank you, Deputy," she says, and then turns back to Ben, who's practically hiding behind his dad, looking like he'd rather be anywhere else. "Benjamin, were you physically involved in this fight?"
A yes would mean mandatory temperament and stress testing, and probably at least three days confinement for behavioral observation. If the kid was mixing it up, he'd be insane to admit it.
"No," he says, after a long pause. "I tried to pull Emmy off of him. That's it."
"And has Connor been harassing you, as Emily says?"
The kid bites his lip, looking back and forth between Emily and Connor, both of whom are wearing thunderous expressions. Pointing to another kid for starting a fight is one thing; admitting to long-term bullying is another. They're only a month into their first year of middle school, with a whole new group of people and a whole different social dynamic. Stiles doesn't envy them; his middle school experience was hell, and he only had to worry about his own social ineptitude and the sudden activation of his hormones. He can't imagine going through all that with discrimination and a monthly furry situation, on top of everything else.
For all that Ben seems a little meek, though, he stands up where it counts. He rolls his shoulders back and his chin up and says, "Every day since the beginning of term."
Mrs. Thomas scoffs. "He's just lying to cover up for his—"
"That's enough," Dr. Banerjee says. She doesn't look amused. "Benjamin, I realize that due to your lycanthropy status you have... limited options, for dealing with bullying. That said, the other young adults here are supposed to be laboring under the same restrictions." She turns her withering gaze on Connor, and then Emily. "It should not be considered a viable option for anyone in this school to resolve disputes through violence. Am I understood?"
All of the kids look at the ground and murmur their agreements with varying shades of surliness.
Dr. Banerjee sighs, looking three thousand shades of done with their shit. "I expect that if these problems continue, I will hear about it personally. But I also expect them not to continue. Emily, Connor, one week of out of school suspension for the both of you. And your teachers and I will be keeping a very close eye on you. See to it that we don't have any cause to bring you back into this office. That's all."
She turns back to the paperwork on her desk in the clearest dismissal that Stiles has ever seen, and the way he figures it Emmy's getting off light, this time, so he hooks his arm around his kid's neck in an almost-headlock and drags her out the door. Derek and Ben follow them, and the Thomases file out last, after trying to argue their case again. Stiles can't hear what Dr. Banerjee says in response, but it's brief and steely-voiced. When the Thomases leave, it's with glares and sneers that Stiles ignores completely, because he has that blessed luxury. They slam Dr. Banerjee's office door behind them as they go.
"If I'm grounded, I just want you to realize how much enforced togetherness is going to be involved," Emmy says, before Stiles can even say anything. "Also, I'm really super into retro cartoons now. There's going to be a lot of My Little Pony in your future."
Stiles props his hands up on his utility belt. It's a classic cop pose, but it's also practically the only pose cops can manage; the stuff on the belt kind of gets in the way of most other things. He could put his hands on his pockets, but then his handcuff case would dig uncomfortably into his forearm and nobody wants that.
"Friendship Is Magic?" he says, raising his eyebrows. "That's retro now? Oh my god I'm seriously old. I love that cartoon, though. Love, it's not even past tense, I am actively interested in ponies right at this very second. You're going to have to try harder than that if you want to scar me for life."
"Oh, I will," Emmy says, her brown eyes narrowing dangerously.
"And anyway, you're not grounded," Stiles says, ignoring her frankly awesome threatening stare. He looks over her head at Derek and Ben, who are having their own quiet parent-child conference on the other side of the room. Ben looks dejected as hell, like his whole life is ending and nothing's ever going to be okay again, but it looks a lot like his dad is comforting him rather than berating him, which is good. Guys who are assholes to their kids are not attractive, so Derek's apparent sensitivity means Stiles is free to continue to want to climb all up on that.
"I'm not grounded," Emmy says, repeating the words like she's expecting them to start making some kind of sense once she's tasted them in her own mouth.
"Nope," Stiles says. "You'll have to explain to Sensei Reyes exactly why you were fighting, but I'm pretty sure she'll be understanding." She's probably going to give Stiles an embarrassingly drawn-out hug and start getting soppy about how he's raising his kid right and how she should get to take at least half the credit as unofficial co-parent. "As for your week off, I'll pick up your homework for you, so you'll have that to do. I don't need you driving me crazy all week so you can pick out a few new video games to keep you occupied. And I'm so exhausted by the stress you put me through that I'm definitely not cooking tonight. We'll swing by home and get you cleaned up, then we can go to that pizza joint you like, the one with the arcade and the laser tag."
"Really?" Emmy says, and her eyes go all huge and sparkling like a cartoon character. She's ridiculous. Of course she is; Stiles helped make her.
"I'm not rewarding you for fighting," Stiles points out. "Fighting is bad. But unofficially I'm proud as hell. There's nothing wrong with sticking up for somebody who needs you, kid. We just have to work on making you more of a sneaky little shit about it."
It's not exactly a surprise when Emmy throws her arms around his waist and does her best to hug him in half, but it's still awesome, so he bends down and kisses the top of her head, hugs her back, and then says, "Why don't you go invite Ben and his dad?"
What with the werewolf hearing, they probably both hear the invitation from across the room, but Emmy still says, "Okay!" and races over there like she's afraid they're going to get away. It only takes a few seconds for Emmy to issue the breathless invitation, and Derek spends the whole time staring at Stiles like he's from another planet.
He finally leaves the kids to their own devices — Emmy seems to be explaining each of the arcade's games to Ben in detail — and crosses the room, slipping in next to Stiles to lean against the empty reception desk.
"You don't have to do that," Derek says, apparently referring to the invitation. "I mean, I appreciate the gesture, but you don't have to."
Stiles snorts. "No, I totally have to. They're friends. You don't get in the way of something like that."
"No, I guess not," Derek says, but there's a soft note in his voice that says plenty of things have gotten in the way of his kid having friends before. Probably things like claws and fangs and people's shitty attitudes.
"And anyway, it's my totally underhanded way of asking you on a date," Stiles says. "Did you know I work with your sister Laura? She has this really irritating habit of stopping by my desk to complain about her brother and how moronic and single he is, and I always thought that was just a thing she did but I've just realized it's only a thing she does to me. While asking really invasive questions about my personal life."
Derek sighs like he's been there and done this. "So you've just realized she's been trying to set us up, and you want to get her off your back?"
"Noooo, I've just realized she's a genius and I want to climb you like a tree," Stiles says, and grins his grin that he likes to think is Han Solo levels of cocky charm. "But I'll settle for a pizza date and a duel at tabletop Pac-Man."
"Dad!" Emmy says, and suddenly the kids are right in front of them, red-faced with embarrassment and both wearing sour expressions. "You are so gross. Can we go before you embarrass me any more?"
"Kid, I'm only just getting started," Stiles says, and gives her a shove toward the door. "Just wait until I convince him to make out with me. Every time you turn around you're going to be scarred by the sight. I'll make sure of it." He shoots a look at Derek, wondering if he's gone too far too soon with that, but Derek's actually grinning back at him, fucking licks his lips like he can't wait. Stiles might be in over his head with this guy. "Meet you there in half an hour?"
"You're on," Derek says, grinning, and it sounds like a challenge.