Work Text:
Otherwise, it’s a normal Thursday.
Claudia Nowak spends the morning repotting orchids in one of the greenhouses at work, then takes the afternoon off for her yearly OB/GYN visit. She figures she’ll finally ask the doctor about getting an IUD, because as sad as it is, she’s not really any better than her seven-year-old son at remembering to take pills every morning. But no, instead she ends up sitting alone in a Subaru station wagon in the parking lot of the doctor’s office park with a referral for an oncologist and no fucking clue what she’s supposed to do now.
She thinks maybe crying is the answer. Or cursing. Probably both.
She could call Mom, but then she’ll immediately fly down from Portland, and Claudia doesn’t really know anything yet, not for sure, and it seems needlessly cruel to inflict Mom’s vegetarian casseroles on John for what might turn out to be a false alarm.
How is she going to tell John? She can’t just call him while he was on patrol, that’s for sure. This isn’t phone news.
How are they going to tell Stiles?
Fuck.
When she was younger, she figured by thirty-two she’d be a real adult. You know, somebody actually equipped to deal with shit like this. Maybe somebody tore the “So You’ve Got a Husband and a Kid and a House with Rose Bushes and White Fucking Picket Fences, but Now You Might Die” chapter out of the guidebook.
She doesn’t really know what else to do, so she drives to the elementary school to pick up the boys. It’s their night to watch Scott; in return Melissa always has Stiles on Tuesdays. Claudia sure as hell isn’t cooking dinner, so she lets the boys pick out whatever pizza toppings they want, and when John gets home they all sit down for pepperoni, pineapple, and broccoli pizza. When Stiles isn’t looking, she and John both pick the broccoli off their pizza. They have a pretty awesome kid, but who the hell knows where he got his awful taste in pizza.
~*~
It’s kind of cute, really, that Stiles’s idea of “what will make Mom feel better after surgery” is reading Go, Dog, Go to her with funny voices.
But maybe he’s really on to something, because even though she’s on some pretty kickass drugs, you can’t have a doctor open up your pelvis and remove several major organs without a little bit of absolutely excruciating pain, and the way Stiles can’t get through the “I do not like that hat” sections without giggling is too adorable for words and thus good for at least a momentary distraction.
He’s half asleep in the chair by her bed by the time Mom comes to collect him, and John has to carry Stiles down to the car once he realizes what’s going on, goes completely limp, and refuses to budge from the room. She’d laugh if it wouldn’t hurt like hell and just encourage Stiles’s behavior more. Plus, she’s aware John is giving her a free pass, because, you know, cancer, but they both know she’s the one who suggested Stiles do his social studies project last month about Nelson Mandela and non-violent resistance. She’s really proud of her son. Even his tantrums are precocious.
When John comes back upstairs he holds her hand gently and tells her about the break-in he’s investigating and gives her all the latest station gossip. She doesn’t really care about any of it right now, which isn’t really the point. John’s never been great at talking about his emotions, but it’s just nice to hear his voice. He tells her she looks beautiful, which she’s pretty sure if she looks half as bad as she feels has to be a lie, and doesn’t once mention Mandela.
~*~
Claudia can never decide whether the chemo sucks worse than surgery did, because they each, at the time, seem like the worst things that have ever happened to her. She hates being unable to keep up with Stiles, help John around the house, or just finish a damn conversation without getting exhausted. She hates that she’s run out of patience and snapped at both of them, and at her Mom, even though they’re all just trying to be helpful.
But John takes extra time off work whenever he can, which mostly means he’s not taking any overtime shifts, because as much as they could use the extra money, they want the time together more. Claudia knows her prognosis isn’t as bleak as she initially feared, but it’s not all unicorns and rainbows either.
Mom makes chicken soup, even though she feels like it’s violating some sort of vegetarian principle. She insists on finding a farm that will sell her a freshly slaughtered chicken, then glares at the dead bird, complaining about hormones and factory farms the entire time she's cooking. Claudia appreciates the gesture, and even eats some of the soup, despite not having much of an appetite. John and Stiles are somewhat less successful with their attempts to keep her garden under control, but watching them try from a cozy perch on the patio isn’t too bad.
When she finally gets so angry about losing large chunks of hair that she makes Mom drive her to her hairdresser to get it all chopped off, Stiles decides he wants his unruly mop of hair cut off too. Mom knits them matching red hats, because even in California you need something to keep the winter chill off a bald head.
~*~
She signs up for a subscription to Netflix, because there are a lot of days that even holding up a book takes too much energy. At first, she gets a lot of kid’s movies, thinking they’ll be good to watch with Stiles, and more cheerful than some of the more adult fare. Up until now she didn’t realize just how many dead mothers there are in Walt Disney’s ouevre. She had enough foresight to steer away from obvious stuff like Bambi, but damn.
Yeah, they do not need to watch anymore cute animated movies that end with her son wailing, “I don’t want Mommy to die.”
After that they stick to comedies and episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. By the time Claudia’s done with chemo, she and Stiles can quote Zoolander and Clueless extensively. John pretends to find it annoying, but she catches him smiling each time she calls him “really, really, really, ridiculously good looking.”
Stiles dresses up as Wesley Crusher for the next Halloween. He insists that John has to be Commander Riker, and Claudia is Captain Picard.
~*~
Claudia wears a Dodgers cap to nearly every one of Stiles’s little league games. It’s not that she’s a particularly loyal fan. In fact, she doesn’t give a shit about any baseball teams that her son isn’t playing for. She just wears it because John and Stiles are die-hard Giants fans and it both irritates them and amuses her.
She and John are sitting in lawn chairs just past third base at a game Stiles and Scott’s team is already losing terribly when John tells her that Sheriff Davis has decided to retire this year and wants John to take over for him. John’s not so sure running for office is a great idea right now. Mom’s gone home to Portland, Claudia’s recent doctor visits have all gone well, and she’s back to work at the nursery, but he’s worried that taking on more responsibilities might be too much.
“John, this is why we moved here in the first place, remember?” she tells him.
Sure, it’ll be tough, but they’ve adjusted to worse and survived, so Claudia thinks he should go for it, and John is wise enough to listen.
~*~
During John’s first year as Sheriff, he has to handle one of the worst cases Beacon Hills has ever seen when the Hale family’s house burns down. The Hales are a big family who’ve lived in Beacon Hills practically since the town was founded and have a bunch of land out in the middle of what’s now the Beacon Hills Preserve. Claudia’s never been to their house, but she’s sold them most of the plants in their garden. Their house catches fire under extremely suspicious circumstances, and almost everyone—three generations of the family—is killed.
Two of the Hale’s five children survive by sheer dumb luck. Laura Hale, the oldest, had dragged her little brother Derek out of bed early to go eat pancakes at the diner before school, and John has the unfortunate duty of pulling the two teenagers out of their morning classes to give them the news. John takes them to the station until a social worker can come talk to them. They don’t bother with the hospital, because their Uncle Peter, the only person recovered from the house alive, is in no shape to see visitors.
Cora Hale, the youngest, was in Stiles’s 4th grade class last year. The rescue workers never recover her body.
John comes home late that night, tired and shaking. “Who the hell does that, Claud? There were fucking kids!” She doesn’t know what to say to him, so she just holds him close instead. Stiles is already in bed upstairs, so they just cling to each other on the couch until they both fall asleep. She isn’t proud of herself, but Claudia keeps Stiles home from school the next day because she can’t bear to let him out of her sight right now.
~*~
Before Stiles starts middle school, they discuss the possibility of sending him to St. Teresa’s, where Julie’s daughter Heather goes to school. Stiles had a rough start to school, but with the combination of meds and therapy, he’s been doing much better overall, even with the giant interruption to his routines Claudia’s illness has been. (She shouldn’t feel guilty about making things tougher for him since she literally had no control over getting sick, but she does anyway.) Still, even if his grades have been good recently, Stiles is clearly still distracted a good amount of the time when he’s at school, and listening to him talk about it, it’s pretty clear he’s not being challenged enough.
Neither she or John are particularly religious, despite being nominally Catholic, but St. Teresa’s is a lot smaller than Beacon Hills Middle School. If Stiles gets some more attention in class, it might help him focus. He has other ideas about it, though. “Mom, if you don’t want me to be bored, don’t send me to Bible class,” is one of his favorite arguments. The main issue is that he doesn’t want to leave Scott, who's practically his only friend. Stiles doesn’t seem particularly interested in making new friends, and insists he’ll be happier at public school, so they table the issue. She knows he’d’ve looked cute in a little monogrammed polo, though.
~*~
The second low point of John’s career as County Sheriff comes several years later, when he answers a domestic disturbance call at the McCall’s house. John’s barely pulled into their driveway before it’s clear why the neighbors had called it in. Rafe McCall is in fine form, shouting at his wife for the whole neighborhood to hear. When Melissa answers the door, her husband leaves off screaming at her long enough to start fighting with the Sheriff instead.
John wouldn’t have felt too bad about hauling Rafe down to the station to cool off, except that Scott’s right there, hiding not so subtly at the top of the stairs, the whole time. McCall may be a Fed, but he’s an asshole and a shitty father, so he earns precisely zero respect in John’s book. Claudia would’ve agreed with him even if she and Melissa hadn’t gotten so close through their sons’ shared exploits.
When Rafe moves to Sacramento, they all breath a little easier. Melissa switches back to full time at the hospital, and Scott becomes even more of a fixture around the Stilinski house.
~*~
They go out for a big family dinner to celebrate on the day Claudia’s doctor officially confirms she’s been in remission for five years. Stiles congratulates her on kicking cancer’s ass, and neither she nor John bothers to correct his language.
Stiles sleeps over at Scott’s on Saturday night, so she and John go out again. She orders eight dollar deviled eggs and drinks ridiculous cocktails—she’s pretty sure one had prickly pear syrup and jalapeño—and John drives her drunk ass home, where they proceed to make out like teenagers in the back of her car.
She has an awful hangover in the morning, but it’s totally worth it, especially when John fries up some bacon and eggs for breakfast.
~*~
The lacrosse thing is Scott’s idea, but Stiles takes to it readily. The boys stopped playing baseball a couple years ago, around the time that the other players, and their parents—dear God, the parents were terrifying—started getting more serious. It’s not that either of them were terrible ball players, but they just wanted something fun to do over the summer, not a serious commitment to athletic excellence.
Claudia knows next to nothing about lacrosse—she always thought it was more an East Coast sport—but apparently it’s even more popular than football and basketball in Beacon Hills. (Stiles helpfully goes on one of his research binges and tells her more than she could ever want to know about the history of the game.) She can’t imagine her son being particularly good at it, since it seems to involve lots of running, which Stiles hates, and well-controlled reflexes, not really his specialty either. Lacrosse’s big virtue is it gets Stiles out of the house for two whole weeks of lacrosse camp during July. Claudia’s pretty sure that left to his own devices, Stiles would have spent the whole summer up in his room with his new laptop—his middle school graduation present—or playing Halo at Scott’s.
So she’s cool with their quest to become Beacon Hills’ Next Lacrosse Superstars until the first time they send a lacrosse ball crashing through the kitchen window. It’s only a matter of seconds before she’s out on the front porch ready to give them a piece of her mind. Scott and Stiles are turned to each other, clear “oh shit” expressions on both of their faces.
“What the hell is wrong with you two? There’s a reason this game is played on a damn football field on not in my front yard!”
“Sorry, Mom.”
“Sorry, Mrs. N.”
They’re idiots, but she forgives them. It doesn’t stop her making them help clean up the broken glass in the kitchen, and impressing on them very strongly that they should have her drive them up to the school the next time they want to practice, or else.
~*~
It’s unexpected, but Claudia actually misses parent-teacher conferences. It turns out, in high school, the teachers really only expect to see you if your kid’s having trouble in their classes, so after Stiles’s first semester as a freshman, she stops going.
Maybe it’s wrong, but it’s always so amusing watching the teachers squirm as they try to pronounce ‘Szczepan Stilinski.’ They give her these imploring looks, waiting for her to jump in and help, which she always refuses to do until after they’ve at least made a reasonable attempt. Instead she stares back, just daring them to make fun of her son’s name. She has more pity on the ones who hadn’t been confused when she introduced herself as Claudia Nowak because, Jesus Christ, it’s 2009, it’s not really that weird that she and John don’t have the same last name.
It’s not that the subject of Stiles’s first name has never come up at home. It has, repeatedly, since Stiles started kindergarten and found out that other kid’s thought his name was funny. Honestly, when he was a baby she’d thought he’d eventually end up going by Andrew, his middle name, but once Scott started calling him Stiles, it stuck. Not that it stops him complaining from time to time, until she finally snaps one afternoon on the drive home from school, “I’m sorry, okay? Is that what you want? My Dad was dying and he was never going to meet my son, so I promised him I’d name you after him, okay?”
Claudia starts to cry, and Stiles starts to cry. She apologizes for snapping at him, and he apologizes for being an asshole, and she pulls the car over in some parking lot so they can hug it out. They pick up burgers and curly fries and drive to the Sheriff’s station and all eat dinner around John’s desk.
~*~
Claudia starts re-reading A Song of Ice and Fire when she hears there’s a TV series in the works. Stiles is slumped sideways on the couch playing Pokémon on his Nintendo DS when she throws a paperback copy of A Game of Thrones at him. It was actually supposed to land on the cushion, but her aim sucks, so she accidentally hits him in the shoulder.
“Hey, what the hell, Mom?”
“Sorry. Read that. If you’re ever tempted to complain about me or your father again, let that be your reminder that we’re really pretty nice people.”
~*~
She’s nearing forty and that means—with some quick mental math—that she and John have been married for almost eighteen years. He still does this thing where he stops by the nursery more often than is strictly necessary when he’s out on patrols. You know, just to make sure everything’s okay. Like he’d do for any local business that his wife doesn’t run. He makes his obligatory protest to whoever’s working out front, “Nah, don’t call her up, I’m just checking in. But I guess since I’m here I’ll go say hi.” He’s not fooling anyone.
Claudia’s pretty sure she’s still not really mature enough to be this old. When she’s in a joking mood she says that chemo stunted her brain, and when she’s not she’s just happy to still be alive.
Anyway, it’s cute that John still comes by to flirt with her at work.
~*~
The first and last time Stiles and Scott try to pull the “tell my parents I’m sleeping at my best friend's” house switcheroo it’s for a party celebrating Beacon Hills' District Championship in lacrosse. They both get ridiculously drunk on bad beer—plenty of which ends up on their t-shirts, based on the smell—and can’t balance on their bikes long enough to make it out of the driveway, let alone home. In the end they call Claudia, judging her “parent least likely to murder slash arrest us.”
They’re right, and she’s glad Stiles was smart enough to call instead of trying to get a ride from some other drunk idiot, but that doesn’t mean she’s not livid. And it doesn’t mean she doesn’t call the Sheriff’s office to have a deputy dispatched out to break up the party. She can’t personally make sure all the kids get home safely, but somebody should.
They head back to Scott’s house first, where Melissa is less than pleased to be awakened in the middle of the night. The boys look pretty shamefaced by that point, but it doesn’t save them from getting an earful, before Melissa sends Scott to bed and Claudia drags her own son home. She gives him a glass of water and some Advil after he pukes his guts out, but refuses to coddle him through his hangover the next morning. If he thinks he’s such an adult that he can go out drinking, then he’s grown up enough to suffer the consequences of his own bad choices.
Both boys end up grounded and get another personal round of talks about the dangers of alcohol poisoning and drunk driving from the local Sheriff, and a reminder that just because ‘everyone else’ is behaving poorly isn’t a legitimate reason not to know better.
Scott and Stiles don’t get invited to many parties after that.
~*~
The summer between Stiles’s freshman and sophomore years he learns how to drive, and it’s one of the most terrifying experiences of Claudia’s life. Isn’t it bad enough that her baby boy has grown a full three inches taller than her in the past year, with no sign of stopping yet, without the State of California saying he’s responsible enough to operate heavy machinery?
He’s actually a pretty good driver, to be honest. These days, Stiles can be incredibly narrowly focused when he wants to be, and that summer learning to drive is the most important thing in the world to him. That and cutting lawns and helping around the nursery in an attempt to earn enough money to buy his own car. Claudia’s been thinking about getting a new car, but Stiles doesn’t want her old Subaru on the grounds that it’s ‘a Mom car.’ He learns to drive in it anyway, because he sure as hell isn’t practicing in John’s squad car.
(She’s fairly certain that Stiles won’t graduate from high school without his father citing him for at the very least attempting to steal a county vehicle. She knows her son and his lifetime fascination with lights and sirens. The temptation will eventually be too great.)
She makes John drive half of Stiles’s required hours with him. If she has to put up with the terror of their baby learning to drive, so does he. John jokes about how he’s going to start Stiles on pursuit driving tactics young.
He’d better be joking.
~*~
John’s out late on a call, and she doesn’t usually wait up for him, but it’s different when it’s a possible murder.
Stiles apparently takes the silence and the late hour to mean she’s fallen asleep, but at least he’s obviously trying to be stealthy as he walks down the stairs and unlocks the front door. Claudia sighs, sets her Kindle aside on the coffee table, and gets up.
“And where do you think you’re going?”
“Oh, uh, hey Mom. Didn’t know you were still up. I, uh, left one of my textbooks out in my Jeep?”
She doesn’t know who he thinks he’s fooling with that one. Stiles has had his winter break homework done since before Christmas. Eventually he confesses that he wanted to take Scott to look for the other half of the dead girl’s body. She tells him he is absolutely not running around the woods at night with Scott and marches him back up to his room to bed.
~*~
Has she learned nothing from sixteen years of parenting? She really should’ve guessed that if she told Stiles he couldn’t run around the woods with Scott at night, he’d just go and do it during the day. She works late on Wednesday since the boys’ll be awhile at lacrosse practice, but she still manages to beat them home and have dinner almost ready before they finally show up. By then she knows exactly where they’ve been.
Stiles does his faux innocent act, because “But, Mom, I didn’t do anything you told me I couldn’t” and, whatever. She rolls her eyes at him. Loudly. If he’s going to run around the preserve trying to get killed he should at least let her know where he’s going to be.
“I thought that guy was going to kill us,” says Scott, earning him a glare from Stiles.
“What guy?” she asks.
“You remember Derek Hale?” says Stiles. “He’s, uh, back in town and told us to get off his property. He’s, like, scary hot now.”
Scott decides that’s the perfect segue into gushing about a girl named Allison who just moved to Beacon Hills and is in their English class and is perfect. Laughing at Scott and Stiles when they talk about girls—and guys—has quickly become one of Claudia’s most favorite pastimes. So far this year the biggest targets of her son’s admiration have apparently been Lydia Martin (“gorgeous ice queen who doesn’t know Stiles exists”) and Danny Mahealani (“ripped lacrosse goalie who looks at Stiles like he has something weird on his face, sorry, bro, the truth hurts”). She thinks he’d maybe do better to set his sights on someone he can actually carry on a conversation with, but he hasn’t asked for advice yet, so she’s trying to hold off on giving it.
Scott may be lost in contemplation of Allison Argent’s perfect curls, but she hasn’t forgotten about the boys’ little forest excursion. She specifically forbids Stiles to look for any more dead bodies or in any way try to “help” his father with any investigations without John’s express permission. Then she tells him he can go back to the preserve for one reason only: to invite Derek Hale to dinner. It’s just sad is all, that he’s back here alone, apparently living on his family’s land, which if memory serves, doesn’t have an intact house on it anymore. He could probably use a good meal.
“You can tell him I’m making lasagna.”