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Six years, two months, and five days.
Peter stared at the stick in his hand and glanced at the box with the instructions, then back at the marks on the stick and the box again.
He wasn’t sure how many of these tests he’d taken in his life. Certainly fewer before he found his mate, his alpha, Stiles, seven years ago. It must’ve been two dozen, three, even, by now. And every time before they’d been negative, but now….
Six years, two months, and five days after they’d decided they were meant to be and cubs could come if they wanted to.
Peter sat heavily on the toilet lid and cried.
^^^
Stiles finished up work for the night at the sheriff’s station. Once, his dad had been the sheriff, and now Stiles carried that honor. His dad had been the first beta sheriff in Beacon County, ever. John had paved the way to other high official seats in and around the county to be opened to and pursued by betas. Stiles couldn’t be prouder, much like his dad was proud of him for making the youngest sheriff of the county in more than fifty years.
As an alpha son of beta parents, maybe he’d been raised differently, but even he knew that alphas and omegas were different from betas. Their ambitions were often different, but so was their need to procreate. For an alpha, having an heir was important on a cellular level. For an omega, carrying their alpha’s baby was vital for happiness. There just wasn’t a way around it. That was how their biology worked, and while times were certainly less savage and more modern now, those basic urges were still there, no matter what you did.
That’s why Stiles dreaded going home tonight. It was exactly one week since Peter’s latest heat. It was the day he’d take the test like he did every three to six months. His heats had started to become less regular in the last few years because of his age. He’d declined hormones, mostly because they didn’t really work for wolves anyway.
They still hoped. They couldn’t not hope. But seeing the heartbreak in his husband’s, in his mate’s blue eyes killed Stiles a little very time.
It was nobody’s fault.
That didn’t make it any less tragic.
^^^
Once, Peter had been sure he was carrying. It was years ago now, but he’d been so certain he hadn’t taken the test. Instead, he’d indulged in frivolity, gone to the mall and bought himself a shirt with a cute text on it, announcing his pregnancy.
He’d brought the shirt home and decided to wait a couple of days to put it on just before Stiles got home.
Then he’d decided to be absolutely sure and taken a test. It had been negative.
He’d tossed the bag with the shirt inside into the trash and wept for hours. Then, because some part of him was still optimistic, or just plain needy, he’d gone and dug it out. Then he’d hidden it in the back corner of what Stiles called Peter’s “hat shelf.” (There were four hats total, he’d gone through a phase.)
Now, he went to the walk-in closet and got onto the step stool there, and reached for the dusty plastic bag. He took it to the bed and sat down.
Peter could admit he wasn’t the most typical omega. He’d always been what his mother had called “alphaish” with a sneer on her face. He wasn’t soft, kind, and nurturing. At least not on the surface. Because his parents had hated having an omega son so much he’d decided early to not become that kind of an omega. He’d decided to be stronger, tougher, and more like his alpha sister.
Not that it had helped. His parents had gone to their graves disliking their weird son, after all, male omegas were a rarity in both wolves and humans.
It had taken him until he met Stiles to realize he could be soft and vulnerable sometimes. That he could be omega on his own terms, with his mate who would never tell him he was bad or wrong.
When Peter and Stiles first met, it had been in a fundraiser for a charity in town, few weeks after Peter came back from his travels. He hadn’t found himself—that was what Talia had assumed he was doing when he left town over a year earlier—at least not until he’d met the gaze of the sheriff’s son.
The fact that Stiles had been there on spring break from college and was only twenty-one to Peter’s thirty had been… well, a hindrance. It hadn’t meant much, just slowed things down, which, if he was completely honest, might’ve been a good thing, too. After all, both Peter and Stiles were known to make quick decisions, whether it was a good thing or not.
And now, the year Stiles would turn twenty-eight and Peter thirty-seven, they were finally pregnant.
^^^
Stiles parked the cruiser in front of their house and steeled himself.
Tonight, he’d talk to Peter about how long they would keep trying. He couldn’t let this go on for much longer, not when the closer to forty male omegas got, the bigger the risks for complications would become.
That was somewhat countered when the omega was a wolf, but after forty, the odds of losing the baby became astronomical, even for wolves. He couldn’t let his mate go through that. He didn’t care about himself, but he refused to let Peter go through a loss like that.
So he’d decided that he’d talk Peter into going on birth control the year he would turn forty. They had three years. He wouldn’t risk losing his mate to complications. He refused to risk his husband’s well-being, mental and physical, no matter what their stupid biology told them. Because some things were more important than procreating.
Having Peter, even with the two of them, for the rest of their hopefully long lives was more important than anything.
He got out of the car before he’d sat there long enough for Peter to register his pause. Wolf ears. You couldn’t hide much from them, and Stiles didn’t want Peter to think he was hesitant to come in for the bad news.
He pulled his shoulders back, plastered a pleasant smile on his face, and tried his best to feel optimistic.
^^^
The front door opened just as Peter stepped into the hall.
“Honey, I’m home!” Stiles called, then noticed Peter and flashed him a startled smile. “Oh, there you are, what’s—”
Peter didn’t give him time to form the rest of the question. Instead, he stepped closer to Stiles, until he stood in the middle of the entrance hall of their home. He smoothed the shirt down his front pointedly, until Stiles noticed and started to read the text.
“Keep calm and we’re having a cub—Peter!”
His strong, young alpha, the best person Peter had ever met, fell to his knees in front of Peter and pressed himself against Peter’s front, head against his stomach, still wearing his uniform.
He wasn’t sure how long their stayed like that, both crying, until Stiles tugged him down onto the floor and held him for long minutes as they calmed down.
It wouldn’t be easy, the next nine or so months. They’d butt heads a lot, knowing the protective streak Stiles had and how stubborn they both were. But at the end of it, they would have a cub, because Peter refused to let go of the life that was budding inside him until it was good and ready to exist outside his body.
^^^
Three weeks before the due date, twins Claudia Grace and Francis Alexander Stilinski-Hale were born at the local hospital. The group text Stiles sent to their friends and family stated that the babies and their papa were all “healthy, happy, and wolfy.”