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Two weeks after the Hale fire, Peter Hale comes home.
That’s what people keep calling it, the Hale fire, or sometimes The Hale Fire like it has three capital letters, like it was the biggest event in the world, and that kind of bothers Stiles because all of the Hales lived but his parents are dead, and shouldn’t that be bigger, but at the same time the Hales are important and people care about them, the whole world cares about them, and the house still smells like smoke and Derek still looks like pain.
Stiles likes all of the Hales, but they’re all doing stuff all the time, and Stiles is helping too, but he’s human and most of them are bigger than him and sometimes he’s bad at focusing on stuff, and he doesn’t want to sit still but he also is having trouble doing things, and so he ends up cooking a lot because he can cook without his brain wanting to shake itself apart and pull him in other directions, and Derek ends up sitting in the kitchen watching him or sometimes helping him, because he’s tall and can reach things that Stiles can’t reach and also knows where everything is in the kitchen.
So he likes Derek most, or more, and sometimes when Stiles can’t sleep he makes himself small and quiet and goes to sit outside Derek’s room because Derek is a werewolf and if someone puts mountain ash around the house Derek will need his help more than Ry--the person Stiles is still sharing a room with--would.
He’s sitting outside of Derek’s room when Mrs. Hale walks out into the hallway and sees him, and she looks surprised or confused or maybe neither of those things, and she asks, “What are you doing out here?”
Stiles shrugs, tucking his feet under himself. “I couldn’t sleep.”
She crouches down in front of him, touching his hair. “You can always get one of us if you can’t sleep.”
“It’s fine.”
“You should be sleeping, Stiles.” She pushes his hair away from his face, like Stiles’s mom used to do, and Stiles jerks away, because she’s not his mom . She just keeps looking at him, her hand moving back to her side. “I know it’s hard, sleeping somewhere that isn’t home, not having your parents, but I want you to see this as home, Stiles.”
That seems kind of silly to Stiles, because he’s just going to be leaving soon, but he just shrugs. “Don’t you want to protect your home?”
Mrs. Hale looks startled, and then she frowns, and then she says, “Of course I do. But I’m the Alpha.”
Stiles shrugs. “I’ll sit here anyway.”
She looks like she wants to say things, but then she says, “Okay. But if you sit out here, you’ll be tired when Peter gets here.”
Stiles is usually fine, so he shrugs again, and Mrs. Hale goes back to bed.
--
Stiles is tired the next morning, but not more tired than usual, and he unfolds himself off of the floor to get changed and then start cooking food. Derek is downstairs by the time Stiles gets there, cooking about a million sausages and looking fidgety and sad.
“What do you want me to cook?” Stiles asks.
“You’ve been sitting outside my room while I sleep,” Derek says.
“That’s not a food,” Stiles says.
“Why are you sleeping outside my room while I sleep?” Derek asks. His eyes look a little crazy. Stiles thinks maybe he should be the one near the fire.
“That’s still not a food,” Stiles says. He walks over to the fridge and grabs the carton of eggs, carrying it carefully over to the counter so he doesn’t drop it. “Can you crack eggs for me?”
Derek starts cracking eggs for him. Stiles takes his spot in front of the stove. “Are you upset that your uncle is coming home?” Stiles asks.
An egg explodes in Derek’s hand. A bit lands in Stiles’s hair. He keeps poking at the sausages. He’s gotten egg on him before. He’s not great at cracking eggs, that’s why he asked Derek to do it. Also to get Derek away from the stove. He can multitask. It’s a skill of his.
“It’s my fault he was hurt,” Derek says.
Stiles pokes at a sausage. There are probably too many sausages in this pan. “You didn’t set your house on fire.”
Derek makes a hurt noise, then walks over and turns on the sink. He starts washing his hands, and when it seems like he’s spent a while washing his hands but still hasn’t turned the sink off, Stiles turns and looks at him. He’s standing in front of the sink, hands under the water, not moving them.
It’s better than him being near fire, though, so Stiles grabs the bowl of eggs and pulls the shells out of the egg from the one Derek exploded, then puts another pan on the stove for the eggs. Then he has to stir the eggs, which he forgot to do, because sometimes he gets so caught up in the things that he has to do that he forgets a step, and then he pours the eggs into the pan and starts moving them around.
Stiles isn’t great at making eggs, but they’re usually cooked at the end, which is better than them being raw, because raw eggs are bad for you. He pours in some salt and pepper, then mixes it around a lot so there isn’t just one big clump of salt and pepper that only one person gets and then chokes on it. He’s done that before.
He knows that Scott doesn’t know how to cook, and he thinks most of the other people he goes to school with can’t, but he had to figure out how to when his mom started getting sick and she would forget to buy food so they would run out of cereal and she would forget to cook, and so Stiles asked her to teach him how to make food when she remembered things so he could make food when she didn’t remember things.
He moves the eggs off of the fire, then remembers to turn the fire off, and then he decides the sausages look sausage-y enough and moves them off of the fire too, and then he doesn’t know what to do with himself so he turns around to start to try to find the plates that he can’t remember where they are, but he stops when he sees Mrs. Hale standing in the doorway, watching them.
Stiles waves at her.
Mrs. Hale smiles at him, but she looks sad. “You know that you don’t have to cook for us, right, Stiles?”
Stiles doesn’t really understand why she’s asking that, but he nods anyway. “Yeah. Derek made the sausages. Well, he didn’t make the sausages--I mean he could have, I don’t know, actually--but he cooked them.”
Mrs. Hale looks over at Derek, who is still at the sink, but the water is off now, so at least Derek isn’t still trying to drown his hands. “Thank you, Derek.”
Derek nods at the sink.
“Why don’t you both grab some food,” Mrs. Hale says. “Peter will be here within the hour.”
--
Almost everyone has finished eating by the time the door opens, and Mia and Alain finish jamming sausages in their mouths to hurry over to it. Stiles follows after more slowly. Derek looks like he’s unhappy, and he seems to like being close to people, so Stiles walks close to him, pushing his shoulder against Derek’s arm.
Derek puts his arm around Stiles’s shoulders, pulling him close, and Stiles stumbles a little but lets Derek move him under his arm. He seems like he needs something to hold onto.
Everyone crowds in near the door as Mr. Hale helps a man who looks a little bit like Mrs. Hale but with weird mottling down his cheek and neck inside. Mia and Alain scream, “Daddy, Daddy,” and run over, both of them colliding with the man. It looks like he flinches, but then he pulls away from Mr. Hale to kneel, wrapping his arms around them.
“Hello,” the man says. “Hello moje dzieci ,” he breathes, and Stiles jerks away from Derek because he knows those words.
“ Mówisz po polsku? ” Stiles asks before he can help himself, and the man’s eyes shoot up to him. He looks dark, and Stiles clenches his hands to keep from stepping back.
“You found a stray,” the man says. “ Moja żona była Polką .” He looks up at Ry, who’s standing near him. “You don’t have to stand all the way over there.”
A small smile grows on Ry’s face, and he takes a couple steps closer. “I just didn’t want to hurt you.”
The man stands, opening his arms up, and Ry steps into his arms, pressing his forehead again the man’s. “I’d take a little pain to know you’re safe,” the man breathes. “I’m sorry I was so out of it when you visited me.”
One arm wrapped around Ry’s shoulders, the man looks at Mrs. Hale. “The house looks good, Talia.”
“But it still smells like smoke.” Mrs. Hale nods. “I know.” She looks around. “Let’s move this elsewhere.”
“Let’s,” the man says. “And I want to hear more about the human you’ve dragged into our home.”
They all move to the living room, and the man sits on the couch with Ry on one side of him and Mrs. Hale on the other side, and Alain and Mia sit at his feet. Derek sits in one of the chairs, and Stiles isn’t sure where to sit so he ends up sitting against the base of the chair, his shoulder against Derek’s legs.
The man stares at Stiles, and his eyes look like they’re staring into Stiles’s head, so Stiles stares back at him to see if he can see back into the man’s head. He can’t, but he’s going to keep trying.
“So,” the man says, “where did they find you?”
“This is Stiles Stilinski,” Mrs. Hale says at the same time Derek says, “He’s an ashbreaker.”
The man’s eyebrow goes up, just one of them, and Stiles tries to do that back, but he can only make both eyebrows go up. That’s really annoying. Maybe later he can ask the man how to make only one eyebrow go up. “The sheriff’s son.” His nostrils flare. “I smelled you, during the fire. You were here.”
“He’s an ashbreaker,” Derek says again, and he sounds a little defensive, and Stiles leans against his legs. “He was the ashbreaker. He wasn’t here to hurt us, Uncle Peter.”
“Is that so,” the man says. “I’m not planning on hurting your pet, Derek, relax.” He looks at Stiles. “ Dlaczego chroniłeś moją rodzinę ?”
Stiles blinks at him. He doesn’t really understand the question. “ Dlaczego nie miałbym im pomóc ?”
The man stares at him for a minute, and then he bursts out laughing, hand clutching at his side like it hurts. Mrs. Hale grabs his hand, and Stiles sees black lines go up her arm.
Mia tugs at the man’s ankle, asking, “Daddy, what did you say to him?”
The man smiles down at her, saying, “Don’t worry about it. It was between me and Stiles.”
Ry is frowning, though, at Stiles, and Stiles leans a little more against Derek. He doesn’t think Ry is mad at him, but he’s not sure why Ry is frowning at him, and Derek feels...safe, kind of, as much as anything feels safe.
“I’m surprised to not see half the world camping out on our front lawn,” the man says, and he looks away from Stiles at Mrs. Hale now, and Stiles thinks maybe whatever had been happening has passed.
“Deaton hardened the wards significantly and then redoubled them when Deucalion arrived.” The man’s eyebrow goes up again. “We are safe, little brother, and nobody will encroach on our territory now.”
“And do we know how it was encroached on the first time?”
The man’s tone is mild, but Derek flinches , a low whine pushing out from his throat, and Stiles wraps his arm around Derek’s leg because he can’t reach anything else, and Ry asks, “Derek?”
“It has been sorted,” Mrs. Hale says, “and settled. Peter, I will speak of this to you later.”
“We have much to talk about, it seems.”
“Yes, but not here and not now.”
--
Peter finds Stiles when he’s sleeping outside of Derek’s room that night; Peter is fully dressed in real clothes instead of in pajamas, even though it’s sometime after midnight, and he doesn’t look surprised to see Stiles there. Instead, he stares down at Stiles, and Stiles stares up at him, and then Peter asks, “Why this room?”
“Derek is a werewolf,” Stiles says, and he’s not sure if Peter is stupid, because this is obvious. “If there’s mountain as, he wouldn’t be able to get out.”
“Yes,” Peter says, “but why this room?”
Stiles shrugs. “Derek is sad and gives me hugs.”
One eyebrow goes up. “And that is enough to win your loyalty, little ashbreaker?”
Stiles wants to argue about the ‘little’ part, but he guesses compared to Peter he is pretty small. “No. But I can’t sit in front of everyone’s door.” Not that he had considered sitting in front of every door, really. He just wanted to make sure Derek could get out. And maybe he should rotate what door he sits in front of, but he doesn’t want to, so he won’t.
“And if I told you that you should sit in front of the Alpha’s door instead?”
“Would you tell me why I should listen to you?”
“It’s an order,” Peter says.
“No, it’s not. You asked what if. That’s not an order. That’s a what if.”
“A hypothetical.” Peter is staring at Stiles the way people stare at him a lot, like he just answered a question that they didn’t ask and they don’t know what to do with it, but there’s something different about the way Peter looks at him. Like Peter wants to eat him, a little bit, except he’s not wolfy and there isn’t a full moon so he knows Peter isn’t going to eat him. Unless Peter is a cannibal.
“Are you a cannibal?” Stiles asks.
Peter blinks at him. “Excuse me?”
“A cannibal. A person who eats other people.”
“I have bitten other werewolves,” Peter tells him, “but never for food.”
“Why do adults say in nine words what they could say in one?” Stiles complains.
“Because we believe it makes us sound smarter,” Peter answers, and smiles. “Guard Derek as you will, little ashbreaker. I fear the danger has not passed.”
And then he disappears into the darkness, as quiet as Stiles can be.