Staying afloat
There was a warmth next to him to which he thought he could get used to. A thick veil of sleep was wrapped around his conscious but he was still aware of the warmth so he reached out to it. It was surprisingly solid. And apparently had a life of its own, considering how much it moved around.
He wrapped his arms around it and tugged it closer. It uttered a noise that sounded close to “Umph!” and then its weight dropped on him, which was heavier than he had expected. But the weight was comforting, he decided.
Not to mention the smell! Who could have known that warmth would smell this great?
He pressed his face into a surprisingly soft surface and inhaled.
Something hit his head and he grumbled lowly to express his annoyance.
Then the warmth started to talk and the veil was slowly slipping away.
“Come on, get up! I’ll make you coffee!”
He made a noise that was supposed to convey that the offer didn’t convince him. Not when he could stay with the warmth in his arms and his head in dreamland.
“A whole pot of coffee, just for you! Think about it! And also pancakes if you want?”
The offer was becoming more tempting but could it honestly beat the state he was in now? He doubted it.
“Come on! Jackson will be up soon and notice that I’m not where I’m supposed to be! Do you maybe want to explain to him that I snuck away to a haunted house with you?”
His eyes cracked open out of their own accord, not because he wanted them to. The warmth suddenly took on the shape of a person. But it was still too early to think about that.
“Do you have any idea what it will look like, me coming out of your room in the morning?! Think of all the teasing!”
Not good enough, he thought. That argument would never convince him to get up.
“‘m jus’ gonna tell’em I caught you tryna sneak out,” he muttered, his face half-hidden by the pillow. “So let it go.”
The warmth his brain had by now identified as Stiles sighed. “Why can’t you be a morningwolf?”
He rolled his eyes which had closed again. He was still hanging on to sleep by a thin thread.
“‘Cause you dragged me out till past two in the morning and then we talked until sometime past 4. Now let me sleep,” he grumbled, not in the mood to argue.
With one eye cracked open slightly, he took in the form of his bed partner. He took in the way he had wrapped his own arms around the human, with his faced pressed into brown hair, but his brain was still too tired to connect any of what he was seeing with sense.
“‘Sides you smell like me anyway. No denying where you’ve been,” he conceded, taking in faint traces of Stiles’ shampoo. Peaches.
“Great, just great. How can I ever show my face again when I’m bathed in Eau de Derek? This is all your-” His breath hitched when Derek’s lips ghosted across his forehead. “ fault. You forced me into bed!”
Even his sleep-addled brain could understand the insinuation so he growled. “You were dead on your feet. Just wanted to make sure you got at least a few hours of sleep. You needed it.”
“I could’ve snuck back into Jackson’s room! Now he’s probably gonna kill me for stealing away,” Stiles argued which sounded less impressive since his voice was muffled by Derek’s shirt.
The alpha patted his head in what was meant as a comforting gesture. “Don’ worry. I’ll protect you. Told you. Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down. Never gonna run around and desert you.”
A sharp breath was taken in and hands pressed against his chest in defiance. “You just rickrolled me! How dare you?! Malia was right. You really are unpleasant in the morning."
The alpha hid his smile by burrowing deeper into his pillow.
“I’m just gonna tell everyone that you’re a fan of the Beach Boys. Let’s see how mean they think you are then,” Stiles said, triumphant.
Once again, the alpha opened an eye and groaned. So much for hanging on to the thin thread. He was becoming more and more awake now.
“Good, that got your attention,” Stiles exclaimed with a smile too bright for the morning. “Maybe I’ll keep your little secret to myself then.”
The alpha slowly sat up and rubbed a hand over his tired face. He grumbled and scowled but Stiles still managed to get him out of bed and downstairs anyway.
He was leaning against the kitchen counter, his sight still as blurry as his mind was. A look at the clock on the stove told him it was barely seven o’clock. In the morning!
As promised, Stiles immediately set to brew him a large pot of coffee and put butter in a pan. The quiet sizzle and the drip-drop made his heart heavy. He remembered mornings like these when he was standing half-awake in the kitchen with only the smell of breakfast keeping him in the land of the awake. His mother used to give him time to find his way back slowly. She had always called him a dreamer at heart.
When the pot was full, Stiles handed it to him and turned around to reach for a cup but halted when he saw Derek directly drinking from the pot. The teenager opened his mouth to reprimand him but then seemed to think better of it and turned back to the pan with the sizzling bacon in it.
A pleasant hum started up in his stomach as he clutched the pot to his chest as a drowning man would cling to a lifebelt.
One floor above, he heard someone stomp around, then a door slammed shut. Without bothering to be quiet, Jackson thundered down the stairs.
Derek should have known he would be up. Lydia always did her yoga at 8 o’clock sharp and Jackson always made sure to be up before her to make her favourite blend of tea. This habit had started shortly after their break-up when he was trying to be the better boyfriend he should have been before.
For a moment, it was funny to see his distraught face. But then he found them in the kitchen and his features twisted in rage.
With an accusing finger pointed directly at Stiles, he stalked into the kitchen, his nostrils flaring in barely suppressed anger.
“You!” he hissed to which Stiles raised his eyebrows.
“Me?”
“Where have you been?! You were supposed to be sleeping!”
Stiles shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a morning person. Unlike this fellow here,” he pointed towards Derek who just grumbled in response, taking another long sip from his very own elixir of life.
Jackson let his hands fall loudly on the kitchen counter. Derek’s face darkened at the audacity to interrupt his quiet morning with too much noise.
“Don’t fuck with me! Where have you been all night?”
Jackson, apparently, was more observant than Stiles had given him credit for. “Don’t get your panties in a bunch. I was with your alpha so I’m sure he won’t punish you for neglecting your duties. Right, big bad?”
Stiles turned questioningly to Derek who just grunted, having realized that his coffee pot was now empty. Stiles replaced it with a plate of bacon and eggs.
Jackson stood very still, only his nostrils flared again but this time it wasn’t in anger. He was taking in the scents around him. “Of course,” he muttered to himself and closed his eyes briefly as if to berate himself.
Derek, who looked suddenly wide awake, sent Jackson a warning glare.
Stiles chose to ignore their silent communication. “I heard you’re the guy who would have my head if I were to break into The Order’s headquarters,” he mentioned casually.
Jackson’s head snapped around so suddenly, one could almost be scared that the motion broke his spine. “YOU WANT TO-” He stopped himself there and did the breathing exercises Lydia had shown him for when he had another temper flare. “Okay, first, how do you know they even have an HQ?”
“That’s what all evidence points to, it’s obvious,” Stiles said. “Besides, every self-respecting, potentially evil organization should have one.”
“Evidence,” Jackson repeated, his voice sounding incredulous.
Stiles waved around with the spatula. “You can’t just keep a corpse in a fridge, Jackie! Well, I guess you could, but their fridge is tiny and, besides, you wouldn’t do that with a child at home! Won’t somebody please think of the children, right?”
Jackson only managed to ignore the way he was addressed by focusing on his confusion. Looking for help, he stared at the alpha in a way that seemed to communicate “Can you translate from crazy to English please?”
This caused Derek to look at Stiles in a way that said “Could you please start at the beginning. Not everyone’s brain works like yours.” The look must be common enough between them since Stiles’ face immediately lit up in realization.
“Oh yeah, right. Sorry. Okay, from the beginning. PI Yukimura was on the crime scene before any of the policemen even though the police station is closer than her house. Now we all know that she is not really a PI but then why was she there? Who called her in? Why would she even pretend to be a PI? Well, she didn’t plan to which was evident by the way she avoided to show her badge. Whenever someone asked, she deflected very expertly, as the deputies I interviewed confirmed. She was not there to investigate, therefore, she was there to…?" Stiles looked expectantly at both werewolves, hoping for some input. When they just stared at him, he sighed. "She was there to hide evidence. She was also able to claim the body for forensics but guess where it ended up instead? If you're thinking the Order's HQ, then Ding, Ding, Ding, we have a winner!"
With his curiosity now awakened, Jackson sat down on one of the barstools on one side of the kitchen island.
“Evidence for what?”
“Probably that she or her goons were the ones to steal the body in the first place. Don’t have the evidence to support that claim yet, though,” Stiles said. He dug into the pan a little harder than necessary to turn over the bacon.
"But why would she place the body there in the first place? Why even steal it?" Jackson asked.
“Don’t know yet.”
“Then how are you sure that the body is at the HQ?”
“Well, I can’t be sure until I’ve been there to investigate. Why else would I want to break in?”
Stiles looked at Jackson like he was the one being unreasonable.
“You want to break into the HQ because of a hunch?!”
“Yes,” Stiles said simply. Jackson was surprised when a plate of bacon and eggs was placed in front of him. He stared at it suspiciously for a few seconds before reaching for cutlery. “So your answer is no?”
Jackson almost dropped his fork. “Of course my answer is no! Have you ever stopped to think what this would mean for the pack? They would assume we had something to do with it and since you’re their wonderkid, we will be the ones getting punished for what you’ve done!”
Stiles looked over to Derek who had taken the opportunity to refill his coffee pot. “You were right.”
Derek raised his eyebrows in a way that said “Of course I was.”.
Now, Jackson stopped chewing. He lay down his cutlery and stared at them wide-eyed. He turned to Derek. “Did you give him permission to do it anyway? Why the hell would you even ask me then? For the heck of it? So you can have your fun?”
Contrary to his expectation, Stiles only grinned while it was Derek who responded. “I told him the exact same. But since you were the one in charge concerning this matter, I told him to ask you.”
It took a moment for the turn of events to sink in but when it did, Jackson picked up his cutlery and continued eating.
“My answer is still no,” he said, pointing with the knife towards Stiles. “No break-ins. We are trying to keep everyone alive here.”
“Including me?” Stiles asked because he simply couldn’t pass up this opportunity.
“I said everyone, didn’t I,” Jackson grumbled.
It was in the way he resumed eating without looking up that made this statement valuable to Stiles. In fact, the moment was so memorable to him that fate seemed to decide that a little emphasize through pain was necessary. That was probably the reason why he caught his finger in the closing cupboard. He hissed and sucked on his poor wounded index finger.
“Good luck with that. God knows that keeping Stiles out of harm’s way is harder than finding a good barber,” said Peter, who was just at that moment walking by and grabbing an apple from the fruit bowl on the way.
As if to support that statement, Stiles turned around and hit his head on the other cupboard door he had left open.
***
In order to spite the comparatively relaxed morning Stiles had had, the afternoon apparently decided to throw his heart for a loop.
After breakfast, he had been roped into playing parts of “The Nutcracker Suite” for two hours straight while Laura showed Malia some ballet movements to prepare her for her upcoming class. Malia was very eager to learn and to not embarrass herself in her first class. After all, she would join the class in the middle of the semester without any prior knowledge of ballet.
It was training for Stiles as well, considering that he had to accompany the ballet class on the piano once the holidays were over. Burly biting Vincent felt like a lifetime ago, so it was no wonder that he had already forgotten his punishment for it.
Laura’s movements were graceful and looked so natural while Malia looked like she was one tendu away from biting someone’s head off.
“Ballet is about making the hardest and most unforgiving positions look deceptively easy,” Laura told her. She took hold of Malia’s arms and put them in the correct position.
Malia moved in a way that seemed as if she was fighting an invisible enemy. There was strength in every movement, determination visible in her brow. Meanwhile, Laura moved as if she had all the time in the world. Her arms formed a bow above her head as her knees bend, holding an invisible vase. Her body moved like it knew no other way. She looked free and weightless. A leaf in the wind.
And Malia was the storm.
Stiles contemplated as he watched whether ballet was the right sport for Malia. Discipline and highly contained strength displayed with every movement didn’t seem to fit Malia’s brash character.
“Ballet is not about showing off strength,” Laura said, a comforting hand on Malia’s shoulder. “You have a lot of strength in you but this is about the movement itself, not the strength it takes.”
Malia nodded and blew a strand of hair that had gotten free of the bun out of her face.
Laura squatted down so that she was eye to eye with her niece. “I think the world’s greatest irony is that it takes real effort to make something look easy and by making it look easy, no one will ever understand the number of tears and sweat it took to get there. This is why you have to do this for yourself only. Not to prove anything to others.”
“I want to dance ballet,” Malia said with determination.
Laura smiled. “And you will.”
They called it a day after that. Malia gave Stiles a high-five, then she ran outside to play. She skipped the steps leading up to the porch and instead jumped right over the newly built railing. Burly was right at her heels.
Stiles took the chance to talk to Laura about Malia’ choice in sports.
“Don’t you think she should rather be enrolled in a karate class or something?”
Laura barely looked up as she untied her ballet shoes. “Oh, so you think ballet is too girly for her?”
The teenager winced. “No. I just think that she’s a fighter so why force her into the role of a dancer?”
Laura looked up sharply, her eyes glinting in a way that made shivers run down his spine. “She’s been fighting for a long time. Now it’s time for her to channel all that energy into something beautiful. Besides, she chose this for herself. No one forced her. And we’ll support her decision, won’t we?”
As intimidating as she looked, all Stiles could feel was offended. “I would support her even if she chose to grow a second head! Which, knowing her power of will, is not as impossible as one might think.”
Laura laughed in agreement with that statement as she zipped her bag close.
“One of a kind, isn’t she?” She stood up and walked over to the piano, resting there with her elbows on the instrument with her head in her hands. “She doesn’t admit it but knowing that someone’s there for her is all she really needs. No superhero gestures or solutions to her problems. Just support, that’s all. And aren’t we all in need of that?”
Her gaze found his own and seemed to reach beyond the surface. Her dark eyes pierced his soul and awakened a yearning he thought he had snuffed out like a candle ages ago.
After that, he couldn’t get her words out of his head. Support, she said. He found even the word insufficient. What was support when one was faced with existential threatening problems? He thought of the times he felt the depths of despair swallowing him whole and how he felt like someone had dropped him off in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight. He kept on swimming but he would get tired eventually.
This feeling had changed for a moment after Derek had declared that he would be having his back no matter what. For a second, someone else was there with him in the water. Someone who could hold him up for a while when he got too tired. Someone who would not let him sink.
Laura’s words had caused him to have an epiphany of sorts.
“Even so, this is still a bad idea,” Cora grumbled after he had told her about having an epiphany. Of sorts.
“Well, my dad took my car keys after Derek snitched on me. What a goody-two-shoes, that one. Besides, I think you’ve already gotten better.”
Him clutching the seat as if it could turn into dust any minute belied his reassurance. Cora grimaced and gripped the steering wheel so hard that her knuckles turned white.
“We just ran a red light!” she screeched.
“Yeah, well, nobody’s perfect.”
Despite her seeing better than any human ever could, Cora drove with her head as close to the windshield as it could be, looking like an old woman with glasses that made her eyes the size of tennis balls.
“This is highly illegal, not that I’d usually mind that aspect but if we get caught I can say goodbye to the license I don’t even have yet. I only had one driving lesson with Derek up to now! Why couldn’t you rope somebody else into giving you a ride?”
“Because, Cora-kins,” Stiles said, pausing for dramatic effect. “you are part of my support system. And that’s part of my epiphany which I was trying to tell you about. Before you almost gave me whiplash when you hit the break for a plastic bag.”
“It looked like a child!”
“It was one of those Tesco carrier bags, I think. You know, the white ones with the blue stripes?”
“Children can be white!”
“But they don’t have to. Let’s not discriminate.”
Eventually, despite driving below the speed limit and a few sudden breaks, they reached their destination. The building of the hospital towered over Stiles like a giant ready to strike. He felt so small all of a sudden. Too small to carry the burden. Too inconsequential to even try making a difference.
In a hospital, the natural enemy was death and sometimes people managed to beat him. At least for a while. But a lot of them also lost.
And here he was. One small, not even very strong human, trying to find ways to delay the defeat.
Stiles swallowed and suddenly couldn’t find the strength to leave the car.
“Don’t be the shitty part of the support system, Stilinski! That’s what your epiphany was all about, wasn’t it? There’s a little boy inside waiting for someone to finally show up.”
The guilt weighed heavy on him, keeping his head and arms hanging low even as he was already walking toward the elevator.