Work Text:
Hale-Argent. Argent-Hale. Scott shrugged, looked slightly bewildered and said “I guess it sounds better if you have the name with two syllables first. You know, better rhythm. Or not. I don’t know. Why are you asking me?”
Chris assumed it was a werewolf thing, a tradition. Derek liked tradition. He needed it. And Chris willing to accommodate Derek’s needs, so the alpha had to be involved (whether the alpha liked it or not) and although Chris felt odd going to a teenager to ask permission to marry Derek, really odd, because he was basically – no, literally – asking Scott for Derek’s hand in marriage, he did it. Because it was Derek, and it was marriage, and he wanted to have those things, together, and soon.
Soon because it was Beacon Hills and he didn’t know if he was going to end up losing Derek the same way he lost his wife and daughter. But if he was, he’d rather have shared that moment at the altar, that experience of being bound together, so that whichever of them was left and under whatever circumstances, they would at least have the memory. They’d know they achieved that much. A ring, a common name. Perhaps, if they were lucky, a legacy.
Peter thought it was equal degrees hilarious and mortifying. Hilarious because of the poetic irony – “the hunter and the werewolf, united in matrimony. Tell me, do you use electric batons in the bedroom?” and mortifying for the same reason. Malia, not having the same history with the Argents and having enough already to be confused about, settled on being happy for her cousin and his weird old boyfriend “sorry, I mean fiancée. But hey, you are old.”
Scott, Stiles, Lydia and Kira experienced varying degrees of surprise, and expressed it in different ways. Kira, like Malia, had zero experience with the Argents as hunters, so for her it was the age difference. Lydia started listening extra close when she was around them “just in case”. The Stilinskis made bets on how long it was going to last, after surreptitiously making Deaton check for evidence of supernatural interference. Scott seemed to go through several stages of surprise; fear, anger, denial, and eventually a bemused sort of acceptance.
Melissa, on the other hand, was determined to be happy for them both. The more difficult the pack became, the more vocally supportive she was of the union. Every time Chris and Derek reached a new level of commitment (moved in together, got a joint bank account), she offered congratulations entirely free of scepticism. And under her influence, Scott was inclined to behave, and under their alpha’s influence, the pack became more at ease with Chris and Derek’s increasingly permanent-looking relationship.
So now, here they were. Engaged. And while Chris had mixed feelings about his name’s history, he wasn’t going to discard it, and neither was Derek going to submit his name when he was one of the last surviving Hales. So, either it was going to be Argent-Hale or Hale-Argent, and while Derek didn’t really care, Chris did. The more time he spent thinking about it, the harder it was to reach a decision.
‘Why not just put Argent first?’ Derek said. Chris hummed, running his fingers aimlessly through Derek’s hair. They were on the sofa, Derek having dropped sideways to place his head in Chris’s lap the moment Chris sat down.
‘You’re just saying that because you want me to make up my mind,’ Chris grumbled.
‘Yes,’ Derek freely admitted. ‘And because it doesn’t matter whose name goes first.’
Chris, in the absence of a reply to Derek’s flat and unromantic common sense, leaned down to kiss him.
Their kisses had evolved a flavour of practised ease and familiarity. Sometimes Chris recalled with fondness the strained way they had kissed in the beginning. Neither of them had been with a man before, and the lack of breasts or softness coupled with the new sensation of stubble had taken some getting used to. Their love had begun in the heart, not the body, and their bodies had struggled to catch up.
They’d had to learn how to kiss each other in a way that didn’t involve accidental biting or carefully aligning their faces. On the upside, that practice had exhausted their reserves of self-consciousness. Now their lips fit together like complimentary puzzle pieces. Not always easily, but neither of them cared anymore.
That’s not to say their relationship was without passion. Following their near-celibate phase, sexual desire had imploded and magnified instantaneously and all in one afternoon. Derek had bent over to pick up a dropped water bottle during a workout, and Chris, visiting on a whim, was struck immediately by such lustful desperation that he had to go sit on the couch and clamp his hands between his knees. When he looked up, Derek was standing shirtless over him, wearing such a pensive and pleasantly surprised look that Chris had forgone all effort to speak and simply yanked Derek down to meet him. There followed a sweaty groping session that paused only so they could move it to the bedroom.
After that, the weeks had been punctuated by frantic sex and forays into new positions and experimentation. Chris felt like his life was rebooting. Derek breathlessly admitted, mid-blowjob, that he felt excited about the future for the first time in years. He had looked so stunned as he said it, so innocently debauched with his lips shining and his pupils blown wide, that Chris had gone browsing for engagement rings the very next morning.
Because he hadn’t been thinking about the future either, until this thing with Derek stopped being a Thing that was happening and became a Thing they were doing.
Chris had stopped thinking about the future when his daughter died. His future, without her in it, had become suffocatingly bleak. Breathing was something he continued to do out of habit, not because he wanted to live or even because he didn’t particularly want to die. But now, with Derek, all passivity dissolved. Asking Derek to marry him was equally a product of love and need and vigorous energy. He needed to do something with this new will to live.
Derek had accepted the platinum ring with disbelief, and tentative questioning. His obvious hesitance to believe that Chris would actually want to marry him melted Chris’s remaining stoicism and he spent a whole weekend indulging every romantic impulse he could think of. Breakfast in bed, dancing in the living room to Sinatra on Derek’s shitty radio, driving out to the middle of nowhere to swim naked in a lake. He drowned Derek in his obsessive love, letting him smell the honesty in the air until Derek asked Chris what his ring size was.
And here, despite all obstacles, they were. Trying to decide what name was going to go on the certificate. Chris knew Derek didn’t particularly mind. But the name was important, and Chris didn’t want to put his own name first out of simple indecision.
It was the marriage itself, and the ceremony, that mattered to Derek. He was agonizing over whether or not to ask Scott to be his best man.
‘I don’t see why not. He’s your alpha.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well, you could pick Malia instead. She is your cousin.’
‘Malia’s the flower girl,’ Derek said, as if that detail was obvious and Chris ought to have figured it out himself.
‘Your uncle?’ Chris asked. Derek raised his eyebrows. They allowed themselves to bask silently in the mutual knowledge that Peter was not getting within a hundred yards of the reception.
Lydia was already buried in organizing matching fitted bridesmaid dresses. Stiles had likewise organized suits for himself and Scott. The Sheriff wasn’t adequately close to either man, though he had gotten his only suit dry-cleaned for the occasion. Chris had already had a conversation with Melissa about her being maid of honour, which appeased the twinge in his chest at the knowledge that the role would have, should have been filled by his daughter.
‘You could ask your sister,’ Chris suggested. Derek shook his head minutely. Chris turned his full attention to Derek instinctively.
‘Cora’s coming, right?’
Derek paused for a full minute before answering, and by then, Chris knew the answer.
‘It’s not that she …’ doesn’t trust you? Doesn’t like you? Isn’t happy for me? Suggesting any of those things would have been a blatant lie. Chris could suddenly feel Cora’s displeasure radiating all the way from South America to scald him.
‘She just has mixed feelings about a Hale marrying an Argent.’
Chris nodded slowly. Derek sounded resigned.
Chris pulled him close until they were lying pressed together, Derek half-atop him with his cheek resting against Chris’s neck, Chris’s arms around him. It was hard to remain upset for long when they were embracing like this. Feeling each other’s breathing, each other’s heartbeats. Derek was intimately attuned to everything about Chris’s body, every grey hair and minute scar and knotted muscle, and Chris had been trained from an early age how to see all of a person at once, to observe minute changes in facial expression and body language. They knew how to get lost in each other when they needed to.
Conversations about the wedding sometimes degraded like this at the merest mention of something difficult or hurtful, such as Peter’s ban from attending or Cora’s refusal to attend, or at the increasingly annoying subject of whose name should go first when they joined their names permanently. Mostly though, when progress did happen, it happened efficiently.
By the time the big day actually arrived, Chris was surprised by how many people attended. He had been in the pattern of thinking himself lonely and more or less low on friends and allies, but the ensemble that greeted them in the church (a rural, private scenic place out of town where Derek’s parents had married) was large and raucous enough to constitute a family gathering. The mere sight of it made Chris’s throat tighten.
He’d written his own vows. He’d memorized them out of a desire to look Derek in the eyes while speaking. To instil the moment with as much sincerity as possible. If he hadn’t spent his whole life keeping emotional control, he thought he’d cry. As it was, he could barely keep his voice from wavering.
Derek had also written his own vows and put small neat prompt cards into his breast pocket, which he discarded halfway through so he could return the favour and look Chris in the eyes when he swore to spend the rest of his life by his side.
Even if Derek thought his alpha being his best man was weird, Scott didn’t share the opinion. He grinned proudly throughout the ceremony. Melissa, standing opposite to Scott and behind Chris, was beaming so hard Chris could feel it without turning around. When the pastor declared Chris and Derek married and they sealed the moment with a chaste, lengthy kiss, Chris felt the wooden step vibrate as Scott bounced energetically on his heels. For some reason, that felt like vindication.
He imagined Allison watching. He imagined her smiling, maybe not approving, maybe not understanding, but smiling anyway. Not alive, he couldn’t trick himself into thinking she was alive. But present. If he let himself give in to a flight of fancy, he could almost hear her in among the amorphous woops and claps and cheers, a fleeting whisper giving him permission to be happy again.
He kept his name, for her sake. And he took Derek’s name, for his.