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Argent’s car is outside of Nolan’s building when he gets back from the corner market, which can only mean one thing.
Nolan stares at Argent’s hulking beast of a vehicle, and then looks up towards where he knows his own apartment to be, and finally exhales out slowly and shifts his grip on his groceries. He heads inside.
“Hey,” Argent murmurs, when Nolan shoulders open his front door. He gets a hand on the side of it to hold it open, stepping back and pulling the door open further so that Nolan can slide past; Nolan thanks him absently. Gonzalez is in the corner of Nolan’s kitchen when he gets there. He quirks Nolan a sympathetic grimace and holds his hands out for Nolan’s bag of groceries, which Nolan hands over.
“Pasta still go in the cabinet by the oven?” Gonzalez asks.
“Cabinet by the fridge,” Nolan corrects absently. “I had a moment a month ago and rearranged everything.”
Gonzalez laughs but Nolan barely hears it. Back out in the main section of the apartment Argent is back to standing with his arms carefully folded, leaned back against a bare section of wall and watching…
Watching the hunched-over shoulders of a dark-haired man, sat—probably having been placed there—on Nolan’s couch, and with his hands twisted together between his knees.
“Nolan,” Argent says, when he sees Nolan has reentered the room. “Meet Alec.”
Alec’s eyes flare when Argent says his name. Nolan doesn’t need to see them to know it; he recognizes the way the quality of the light in the dim apartment changes.
“Nice to meet you,” he murmurs quietly. Alec just flinches.
Nolan looks back up at Argent as Argent jerks his chin. Following him out onto the balcony isn’t going to prevent Alec from hearing them unless Alec is that new—and who knows, he could be—but the semblance of privacy probably helps. Alec, that is; not Nolan. Nolan glances back through his own balcony door as Alec shifts to bury his face in his hands.
“Rogue alpha,” Argent tells him once Nolan has slid the door shut behind himself. Nolan nods, acknowledging.
“I assume the rest of your people...?” He prompts. Argent nods.
“And I need to get back to them. You going to be okay?”
“Yeah,” Nolan answers immediately. Any hesitation at all and Argent would probably leave Gonzalez, or himself, behind at the apartment to help babysit. And Nolan will be okay.
It’s not—it’s not himself he’s worried about.
“Anything you can tell me other than his name?” Nolan wonders, looking back at Argent from where his gaze had drifted back into the apartment; to Alec’s hunched-in shoulders.
“Wish I could,” Argent answers. “He wasn’t exactly an expected development.”
Nolan sees Argent and Gonzalez out less than two minutes later, Gonzalez holding up one of Nolan’s newly-purchased apples and thanking him—smarmy, but harmless—through a mouthful of fruit. Nolan rolls his eyes, and closes the door after them. And then he spends a few seconds with his hands on the knob, his lip between his teeth.
When he gets back to the living room, Alec has dropped his hands, and is looking up at him through guarded eyes. “So,” Alec says. “I take it you’re the dog-sitter.”
He’s looking for a reaction. And not, Nolan thinks, a good one. Nolan just shrugs, light and easy. “Something like that. You hungry?”
The sharp smile twists off of Alec’s face. “You’re—seriously?” He asks, sounding baffled, and uncomfortable with being baffled; his nails are lengthening. Nolan wonders if he realizes.
Oh, you are new, Nolan thinks, and keeps his own heartbeat steady.
“Seriously,” Nolan confirms, and then heads for his kitchen without waiting for an answer.
He’s in the middle of digging through his cabinets looking for the box of pasta that he literally just bought—which he finally finds in the cabinet by the oven, which means Gonzalez put it there on purpose, the ass—when Alec finally joins him. He doesn’t say anything, but Nolan can feel Alec’s attention on the back of his neck, and more than that; he can feel the way his own instincts start to clamor. He shoves them away with the ease of long practice, and straightens up.
“There should be a package of chicken breasts in the fridge,” Nolan says, giving Alec a flicker of a smile when their eyes meet. “Would you mind?”
He starts retrieving the various things he needs from around the kitchen after, purposefully not looking at Alec or acknowledging him in any way. It gives Alec the time, and space, that he needs to make up his own mind about what he wants to do next, but Nolan—he tips his head down to hide a smile when Alec finally pushes out of the doorway, and heads for the fridge.
But Alec still sets the package of chicken breasts on the counter instead of handing them to Nolan, and Nolan feels his chest twist. You hurt someone, he finds himself thinking, sneaking a look at Alec from underneath his ducked brow. You didn’t mean to.
“What are you making?” Alec finally asks, leaning back against the counter and bracing his hands on either side of his hips as he watches Nolan slide a cutting board free of a different cabinet. He also puts his claws through the bottom of fake granite when Nolan retrieves a knife from the block next to the coffeemaker. Nolan pretends not to notice.
“About the only thing I can that won’t result in a call to the fire department,” Nolan answers easily, keeping his head low and his eyes focused on the cutting board to give Alec the time to free his claws from the wood, and shake them back into human nails. Alec shoots him a searching look—Nolan feels it on the side of his face—but when Nolan doesn’t say anything, Alec doesn’t either. “Pasta with grilled chicken. That work?”
Now Nolan looks up at Alec. Alec blinks; he clearly hadn’t expected to be asked. He looks a little wary, but after a second he says, “Sure.”
He’s silent through most of the dinner prep. He’ll hand something to Nolan if Nolan asks for it directly, but otherwise he keeps to the other side of the kitchen; shifting when Nolan does so that they’re always a few feet away from each other. What happened to you? Nolan wonders, and wishes Argent would have had something more to give him. Literally anything in addition to a name.
But Nolan learns one thing soon after he dishes the modest meal into bowls, and slides one along the counter so that Alec doesn’t have to break his unspoken rules about space to come retrieve it: this is the first time Alec has eaten in a while.
Werewolf metabolism, some optimistic corner of Nolan’s mind tries to argue as he watches-without-watching Alec all but shovel forkfuls of pasta into his mouth, but Nolan knows what a hungry werewolf looks like versus a starving werewolf; he’s friends with Liam, after all. And Alec—if Alec isn’t the latter, he’s much closer to it than the former.
After a few minutes Nolan picks up his bowl, and purposefully wanders away from the pan still sitting on the stove. He leaves the serving spoon still inside. And once he’s in the living room, he hears it when Alec—after a full half-minute of hesitation—adds more to his already-almost-empty bowl; Nolan can hear the creak of the floor, and the spoon clattering quietly against the edge of the pan.
Alec joins him in the living room after, no prompting needed. At first he stays on his feet and keeps his body turned away from Nolan’s, blocking Nolan’s view of his refilled bowl. But after a while—after Nolan doesn’t say anything, just keeps eating his own pasta, and eventually clicks on the TV to some mindless cop serial—he relaxes enough to stop holding himself so awkwardly, and after even longer he finally takes a seat.
In the armchair, of course. Nolan is on the couch.
“Look,” Alec finally says, dropping his bowl into his lap. His all-but-licked-clean bowl; Nolan has to hide another smile.
“That Argent guy, or whatever. He didn’t really explain much beyond saying he was bringing me somewhere where I could—” he hesitates, “—stay.” Nolan wonders if he’d been about to quote could be safe; it sounds like something appropriately Argent-like: declaratory and a little dramatic. “But that was it.”
Nolan raises his eyebrows expectantly: so?
“So what the hell am I doing here?” Alec finally spits out, like Nolan had asked the question aloud. “Who the hell are you? Who the hell was he?”
What happened to me, Nolan hears, though Alec doesn’t say it.
Nolan also stays very carefully still, because Alec’s eyes are golden, and his gesturing hands are clawed, and he’s snarling his questions through a mouthful of fangs.
Alec realizes it fast. The shift drops away from his eyes and mouth and hands so fast it’s like someone had taken hold of the edges of it and yanked it away. He spends a quarter-minute or so just sucking in uneven, heaving breaths of air, letting them shudder back out, and then he looks at Nolan.
“How are you doing that?” He wonders hoarsely. “You’re not—aren’t you scared?”
Nolan just smiles, small and quirked. “I’ve spent a lot of time around wolves.”
Alec stares at him, clearly hearing what Nolan isn’t saying aloud. You’re not dangerous. You’re not beyond control. There’s a way to live with what’s happened to you.
“I’ll explain whatever you want me to explain,” Nolan offers quietly, after Alec has had the time to suck in, and shudder back out, a few more breaths. “Just ask.”
Alec doesn’t respond right away. His eyes keep searching Nolan’s face, and his fingers keep rhythmically tightening, and relaxing, around the bowl in his lap. But finally he stills, and leans forward, and sets his bowl very deliberately on the coffee table. He looks up at Nolan, still half-bent at the waist and his expression solemn.
“Everything,” Alec finally requests. “I want you to explain everything.”
---
The next day Nolan takes Alec a few hours outside the city, and to the farm.
“So what is this, exactly?” Alec asks, peering through the windshield of Nolan’s beat-up old sedan. Nolan grins.
“If I’m the dog-sitter,” he says, and shoots Alec a close-mouthed, clever smirk, “then this is the—” he tips his head back and forth a few times, “—kennel.”
Alec winces. “I should probably apologize for that,” he mutters, but the look he shoots Nolan is thoughtful; speculative. He doesn’t look sorry.
He looks intrigued.
Nolan just smiles. He also finishes pulling through the gates onto the property, keeping a sharp eye out for any furry flashes of color. There aren’t any, but as he eases his car—the suspension complaining and the engine wheezing—onto the stretch of dirt very optimistically deemed the ‘parking area,’ two figures break off from the main farmhouse, and start making their ways towards the car. One is two-legged, and the other four. Nolan grins, and finishes stepping out of his car, and pushing his door shut.
“Hey, Liam,” he calls to the two-legged figure. He also grins wider, and opens his arms as the big black wolf breaks off from Liam’s side and bounds towards him.
“I wouldn’t,” Liam calls back, a warning. “He was rolling around in—” Liam cuts himself off, his voice going dry as tinder. “Too late.”
Nolan just laughs as Theo’s big—and, admittedly, muddy—paws come down on his shoulders, and Theo very deliberately snuffles his chilly, damp nose underneath Nolan’s jaw, behind his ear. “Hey, Theo,” Nolan greets quietly, scratching his hands roughly over Theo’s ribs and sides before sliding his fingers up, and burying them in the fur behind Theo’s lupine ears. He digs his fingers in, and Theo rumbles happily, and presses a little more against him. The additional weight sends Nolan staggering back a step, into the side of his car.
Behind him, there’s a sharp inhale of breath.
Nolan jolts, and looks around. Alec stares at him from over the roof of the car—he’d gotten out while Nolan was greeting Liam and Theo, apparently, but that and closing the door behind himself was as far as he’d gotten—and his expression is wide, startled; his eyes keep flicking down to Theo’s big, lupine head now buried in the space between Nolan’s shoulder and neck. Squeezing apologetically at Theo’s ruff, Nolan gently pushes him back, so that Theo falls back onto his four paws.
“Alec,” Nolan introduces belatedly, “this is Liam—” Liam grins, and gives a sloppy little salute, “—and this is Theo.” Nolan reaches down, helplessly, to run a hand over the top of Theo’s head. Theo presses up into it, his eyes slipping shut as he rumbles again.
“Hi,” Alec offers, a little blankly. He at least comes around the hood of Nolan’s car, even if he does it very slowly. He glances down at Theo, and then up at Nolan, and from the pinched look on his face he clearly knows that he’s being overheard, but can’t help it, as he hisses at Nolan, “I thought you said Theo was a person, not a—”
“Oh, he is,” Liam interrupts, at the same time that he reaches forward and gets a hand around Theo’s tail, and tugs. “We’d have him shift back, but the Sheriff’s already warned us that he’s not covering up any more accidental public indecency charges.”
Theo whips around and snaps his teeth next to Liam’s tugging fingers. They’re not anywhere close to actually landing. Liam just rolls his eyes, and shifts his hand so that it’s buried in the fur behind Theo’s head, instead. Theo takes a few steps forward in response, so that his muzzle is buried in Liam’s stomach.
Alec still just stares, then: “We can become actual wolves?”
“You probably can’t,” Liam replies, not unkindly. He has both hands threaded deep in Theo’s fur now, and from the drunken way Theo is sagging against him, is massaging his fingers. “I can’t,” he offers, and frees one hand to tug at one of Theo’s ears. “This guy’s just…unique.”
He gives the top of Theo’s head the dopiest smile. Nolan feels it echo on his own face as Theo lifts his head to nose at Liam’s wrist.
“Anyway,” Liam finally says, shaking himself a little. “Everyone’s inside. C’mon.”
He turns, leaving the hand he’d had threaded through the fur of Theo’s ruff where it is as he starts walking towards the farmhouse. Theo follows immediately, close enough to Liam’s side that it’s actually a wonder that he isn’t pushing Liam over. Ease of long practice, Nolan thinks to himself, grinning softly as he watches Liam absently adjust, and then he looks at Alec.
He still looks positively dumbfounded. He also, after a moment, looks a little panicked. “Everyone?” He hisses, sounding a little wild.
Nolan just grins wider. “Everyone,” he confirms. He tilts his head. “C’mon.”
---
By the time they catch up with Liam and Theo, the two of them have already climbed the front porch steps, and are making their way through the already-open front door.
There are voices inside. Liam and Theo—and Alec, for that matter—can probably hear every word, and Liam and Theo at least can probably identify every speaker, but Nolan’s human ears just catch the comforting background hum of it. From what he can tell, it’s coming from the huge, open-air dining area at the back of the farmhouse, and that’s certainly where Liam and Theo seem to be leading them.
But partway there, they get intercepted.
A happily-shrieking, miniature figure barrels into Theo’s side. He gives a lupine oof and staggers into Liam, who yelps and trips over his own feet into the far hallway wall. He also starts laughing, immediately afterwards, and Theo just twists his head around as he regains his feet to press the tip of his nose to the tiny cannonball's cheek, but beside Nolan—who’d started grinning himself—Alec’s gone stiff. Nolan glances over.
“Hey,” he murmurs, catching sight of Alec’s gold-flecked eyes, and clenched-tight jaw. Chances are he’s cutting open his gums on his fangs with how tense he’s holding his teeth together. “Hey, it’s okay,” Nolan breathes, still in that same, soothing tone. “It’s just Ally.”
And it’s Ally, bless her, who—oblivious to Nolan or Alec or Alec’s difficulties behind her—starts trying to clamber on top of Theo’s back. Theo oofs again as he’s kneed repeatedly in the ribs by Ally’s less-than-effective efforts, and then he lowers himself to the ground. Ally babbles in approval and immediately takes advantage to finish climbing up on top of him, and she stays laying flat—her chubby fingers clutched in Theo’s fur—as he straightens back up.
Nolan watches Alec watch all this. “Is she…?” Alec finally wonders, glancing at Nolan. The gold is gone from his irises, and his speech isn’t lispy at all; he’d managed to retract his fangs.
Nolan nods. “Yeah. Luckily for all of us—” he says, as Liam pretends to make a grab for Ally, and she shrieks in delight and digs her feet into Theo’s sides like she’s spurring a horse; Theo jumps obediently forward, and then keeps gallivanting around and dodging as Liam gives chase, “—she’s pretty indestructible.”
Caught up in their game, Liam and Theo apparently forget their escort duties. As they disappear from the hallway—Ally’s laughter echoing back at them—Nolan doesn’t bother following. In fact he doesn’t move at all, just stays standing where he is next to Alec, hands tucked loosely in his pockets and the curve of his shoulders relaxed, sloped; easy. Alec may have dropped the shift away from his eyes and teeth and—probably, though Nolan hadn’t seen to confirm—hands, but Nolan knows from experience, painful and otherwise, that it takes longer for the adrenaline to fade. He waits, idly studying the framed photos of the pack lined throughout the hallway. There are some new ones that Nolan hasn’t seen before; he squints a little at them, lips quirking.
“Alright,” Alec eventually murmurs. He gives Nolan a flicker of an embarrassed, apologetic smile as Nolan looks back over. “Okay, let’s—let’s go meet this everyone.”
Nolan had been right; the voices had been coming from the dining area. And Liam commenting that everyone’s inside hadn’t been that much of an exaggeration: the big oak table, which runs nearly the full length of the room, is practically full. Alec comes to another stunned stop just inside the entryway, so Nolan stops with him, but he nods to Derek and Stiles when they nod to him, and he waves when Corey and Mason wave. Jackson, Lydia, Amelia, and Ethan are in some four-way argument that they each seem determined to win; they don’t look up, but then Nolan hadn’t expected them to. He just laughs quietly under his breath.
But then he has to dodge back a little, because Theo—Ally still clinging to his back and shrieking with laughter—goes streaking by, Liam in hot pursuit. Nolan laughs, too, helpless and bright and out loud this time, and then he jolts a little and looks up at Malia as she appears at his and Alec’s sides, her expression dry as she stares after Theo’s disappearing tail.
“Somehow, somewhere, Peter knows this is happening, and will call me at any moment to demand to know what I’m letting his granddaughter do,” she predicts. As if on cue, her pocket starts to buzz. The expression on her face gets even drier, and she trades an unimpressed look with Derek—whose lips twitch—before fishing her phone from her pocket and answering with a preemptively irritated, “What?”
“I know this is a lot to take in,” Nolan tells Alec quietly, after Malia has wandered away.
A good ninety percent of the people in the room can hear him regardless of his volume, but supernatural etiquette—and just their general good-naturedness—has them all acting like they can’t. Giving Alec a small, wobbly smile when Alec looks over at him, Nolan wonders if maybe he should have waited to bring Alec here, if it was his own subconscious desires that had led him to propose this trip last night—something light, and fluttery, taking flight in Nolan’s chest, even as something else settles in his feet, grounding him to the wood of the floors and the earth below it; to the people sharing the same in this farmhouse; in this little pocket of the world—but then Alec just smiles back at him. It’s barely more than a twitch of his lips, the curve of it more than a little shy, and he ducks his head.
“No, it’s,” he starts to say, then cuts himself off and corrects: “I mean yes, it’s a lot to—I mean.” He stops himself, and takes a deep breath. “This is a pack, right?” He asks, like he’s double-checking his own interpretation. “This is what a pack is.”
And Nolan just finds himself grinning right back, because: “Yeah,” he agrees. “This is what a pack is.”
---
Scott swoops in not long after—swooping his daughter off of Theo’s back as he does it, much to both Ally’s and Theo’s vocal disappointment—and the chaos of the morning becomes slightly more orderly.
“You,” he instructs Theo easily, casually adjusting his grip on his daughter as Ally tries to squirm out of his arms, and back to her playmate, “go get dressed, please.”
Theo tips his big head slightly down, and then turns to start trotting off towards the stairs to the second floor. “I’ll help,” Liam offers, and immediately takes off after him.
“You’ll help him get dressed?” Malia wonders skeptically, coming to stand by Scott’s side and automatically reaching out to take Ally when Ally notices and demands it. She also calls, “If you two aren’t back down here in ten minutes, I’m coming up to get you!,” after Theo and Liam.
“Shield your eyes when you do,” Corey mutters into his mug of coffee, sotto voce. Mason grins and knocks him in the shoulder in an easy rebuke.
Scott gives him a dry look, too, though it’s rendered slightly less effective by the fact that Ally has now climbed back over to him from her mother’s arms, but only halfway, so she’s suspended between the two of them and clearly amused by the experience. Scott reaches out without looking to clasp her by the ankles—Malia shifting her own grip to help—and dangle her upside-down. Ally shrieks with laughter again, her arms dangling over her head and her feet dolphin-kicking in her father’s grip.
“Forgive the chaos,” Scott requests smoothly over the top of all this, his smile wry as he looks directly at Alec. Then, in one easy movement, he swings Ally up, and back into his arms. She settles onto his hip, burying her continued giggles in his neck. His smile as he keeps looking at Alec becomes a little more of a sympathetic grimace. “The unfortunate circumstances that led to it aside, it’s nice to meet you.”
He lets his eyes bleed, not flash, red. As the color slowly fills his irises Alec’s shoulders seem to ease in direct proportion; he takes in, and then shudders out, a huge, shaky breath.
Nolan ducks his head, hiding a smile.
“Hungry?” Scott asks next, doing Alec the immense favor of pretending he hadn’t noticed Alec’s reaction.
Beside Nolan, Alec swallows noisily. He has to clear his throat before he can speak, but he manages to reply, “Pretty much constantly, now, seems like,” only a second or two late, and just a little roughly.
Scott grins. “I know that feeling,” he commiserates. He nods towards the table where most of the rest of the pack is already sat, and when he speaks next he’s addressing Nolan as well. “Grab a seat. Breakfast is almost ready.”
And then he looks away, refocusing on his daughter as he shifts her so that she’s laid back in the crook of his arm, and he can press his mouth to the strip of skin revealed by her shirt, rucked-up and wrinkled by all Ally’s squirming. He blows a loud and silly raspberry, Ally shrieking with laughter again—and several of the supernaturally-sensed members of the pack wincing—and wriggling like she’s trying to get away. Scott just sucks in a deliberately-loud, comically-huge breath, and blows another raspberry against her stomach.
And it’s cute, it’s charming, and Scott’s absolute adoration for his daughter comes through in every inch of it, but that’s not the only reason Scott had done it. None of them are high-schoolers anymore and Scott isn’t a teenaged True Alpha in way over his head any longer, and by placing all his focus on his daughter, Scott had therefore taken all of it away from Alec. Grab a seat, Scott had said, and especially for a newly-bitten werewolf lacking an established pack or an alpha, being talked to by a powerful alpha, it could have been interpreted as a request or it could have been interpreted as an order. By looking so completely away, Scott had given Alec the room to decide which Alec wanted it to be.
Alec looks at Nolan, and smiles. It’s a small thing, more than a little shy. He tips his head towards the table. Request, Nolan thinks, and smiles back.
Liam and Theo do reappear back downstairs eventually, and just as Malia is starting to eye the large, decorative clock hung on one of the dining room walls. They’re not flushed or bearing any other bitten-red, potentially incriminating marks, but that’s clearly only because of their healing; Theo’s hair is sticking up at odd, strange angles, and Liam’s is even more of a mess than usual. Malia makes a disgusted noise low in her throat and Liam just grins, wide and unapologetic and leaning in to smack an offensively loud kiss against her cheek before he scoops up Ally from her lap, and carries her over to where Theo had grabbed the last two free chairs at the end of the table.
He also says, “Devon was starting to wake up when we were on our way back down,” to Mason and Corey. Mason frowns and leans on his chair’s two legs to check the baby monitor emitting nothing but white static on a cabinet behind himself, but Corey makes a face.
“Don’t traumatize our firstborn with your antics,” he orders, pointing a strip of bacon accusingly in Liam’s and Theo’s direction; Liam just rolls his eyes and, quick as a snake, reaches forward to snatch the strip from Corey’s grip.
Corey squawks and makes a lunging grab for it, but it’s a lost cause: Liam’s already stuffed it in his mouth, chipmunk cheeks bulging as he grins in triumph back at Corey. Sat in his lap with Liam’s arm banded around her waist to hold her steady, Ally giggles, and reaches forward to grab at Liam’s plate; Theo intercepts her, pressing a small piece of cut-up toast into her hand instead.
Tucked away at the end of the table and half-hidden behind Nolan, Alec watches the controlled chaos with a narrow, thoughtful look. Every now and then he’ll raise his right hand to his left shoulder, even though the bite wound from the rogue alpha is long gone. But where last night, and even earlier this morning—Nolan watching, and pretending not to watch—Alec’s searching fingers were harsh, probing, now they’re gentler; exploratory.
He glances over at Nolan, apparently sensing Nolan’s attention. He smiles. This is what a pack is, Nolan can almost hear him thinking again.
Nolan smiles back. He nods.
---
“So how often have you done this?” Alec wonders that night, raising his voice a little to be heard over the sounds of Nolan rummaging through the absolute mess of one of his desk drawers. Nolan hums absently, not fully absorbing the question, and he can hear Alec drawing in breath to repeat it when it fully penetrates.
It’s about the same time that he finally locates the phone charger in the tangled-up knot of cables and cords in the drawer, and so he winds up replying, “You make an even half-dozen,” as he’s sitting up, and tugging the charger loose.
He holds it over his shoulder, offering it to Alec. Alec comes forward to take it, picking his way around the couch and the coffee table because Nolan’s desk is, admittedly, inconveniently shoved into the far corner of the living area of his apartment, near the windows. Their fingers brush as Alec accepts the charger, and Nolan’s skin goose-pimples in sympathetic response to the scrape of skin; he wonders if Alec notices. The room’s dim, but Alec’s way more settled than he was last night. He’d probably already started getting a better handle on his senses, even if only subconsciously.
But if he does notice, he doesn’t comment. Instead he just lets out a soft, considering huh, and then moves back a step when Nolan straightens. He grins at Nolan when they’re both on their feet, and Nolan can’t help grinning back.
But he also asks, “Will that fit your phone?”
Alec blinks, apparently having been thinking of something else. Now it’s Nolan who can see the slight dusting of color across Alec’s cheeks as Alec glances down at the charger, the dim light from the streetlights below mixing with the single lamp that Nolan had clicked on just barely providing enough illumination that Nolan can catch it. It twists something in Nolan’s chest even as Alec is twisting his fingers to look at the connector on the end of the cable and frowning, apparently mentally comparing it to his phone.
“Yes,” Alec says, with total confidence, then: “Maybe,” added with a slight grimace. He glances back up at Nolan, the curve of his mouth a little secret; a little sly.
Nolan just laughs a little, quiet, and moves out from behind Alec to start making his way towards the kitchen. They’d gotten back from the farm a half-hour or so ago, and the werewolf-sized breakfast—and lunch—they’d enjoyed there aside, Nolan at least can feel his stomach starting to rumble again. He calls over his shoulder:
“What do you think about ordering out?”
He starts digging through the kitchen drawer where he keeps the takeout menus even before Alec replies. He also ends up focusing enough on it that he jumps when Alec agrees, “Sure,” from the kitchen doorway.
They settle on Thai, primarily because Nolan’s ordered enough from the place—and tipped generously enough—that they tend to load all his portions up to a size that even manages, on rare occasions, to defeat Liam. Alec doesn’t exactly look, or eat, like he’s starving anymore, but it’s been less than twenty-four hours since he had. Nolan orders extra spring rolls, too.
He wraps up the order and hangs up his phone, and turns around to see Alec now sat at one of the barstools lining the opposite side of his kitchen counters, Alec’s tongue between his teeth as he wrestles with his phone and the charger that Nolan had handed him. His old charger—beat-up and frayed enough to only work in unpredictable spurts—sits coiled at his elbow. Nolan watches the confrontation, his lips twitching.
But Alec doesn’t seem to mind, his lips twitching in turn. He finally manages to get the new charger hooked into his phone, and plugs the other end into the wall. He glances back up at Nolan after, and his expression is a little more serious. Nolan finds himself straightening up, some.
“A half-dozen, huh?” Alec probes, picking back up on their previous conversation. His eyes search Nolan’s face. “How’d you wind up being the,” he hesitates, something thoughtful and something sharp crossing his face, and then he concludes, “dog-sitter, anyway?”
His lips flicker slightly; slightly unsure of the use of the term as a joke now, rather than the attempted insult from last night. Nolan’s lips flicker right back, but then he has to drop his eyes away from Alec’s. The pattern of tile in his kitchen isn’t all that interesting, but he stares at it anyway.
“It’s a—penance, of sorts,” he finally admits quietly. He’d had one hand left on the counter from when he’d slid the paper Thai takeout menu back into its drawer, and now that hand tightens; the scrape of his nails against the fake granite must be louder to Alec than it is to Nolan.
“Penance?” Alec repeats carefully, but he doesn’t keep going until Nolan glances up at him. “Penance for…?” He trails off, and then blanches, suddenly. “I mean! You don’t—don’t actually have to—”
“It’s okay,” Nolan interrupts gently, cutting him off. He dredges up a shaky smile. “I wouldn’t have brought it up if I wasn’t—willing to talk about it.”
Still, it takes him another few seconds studying the tile in front of his feet before he really feels ready to say:
“When I first really got to know Scott and Liam and the others, it—wasn’t as friends.” Alec’s brow is furrowed when Nolan sneaks a look up at him. Grimacing, Nolan explains, “I was terrified of them. And that led me to—” he hesitates, but: “—try to hurt them. To do—a lot worse than that.”
Alec’s expression blanks a little. He blinks a few times. “Oh.” He touches the tip of his tongue to his bottom lip, and wonders hesitantly: “What…changed?”
Nolan looks away, twisting sideways so that his back is to the counter behind himself. He brings his hands up to curl around the edge on either side of his hips. “I guess I learned that it’s not what someone is, but what they choose to do, that can make them a monster.” His lips flicker as he looks back over at Alec. “And in a room with Scott, or Liam, or one of the others, and me, I realized it wasn’t them who’d turned themselves into the monster.”
Alec’s mouth drops softly open. He stares. Nolan clears his throat and looks blinking away, then shoves off the counter and heads for the sink. He’d stacked their coffee mugs and plates in the sink earlier that morning, and now he opens up the dishwasher, and starts slotting them inside.
It leaves his back turned to Alec, and so he jumps when Alec clears his own throat. Nolan glances over his shoulder at him. Alec just gives him a lopsided grin, and observes:
“They don’t seem to be holding a grudge.”
A pained smile breaks over Nolan’s face, entirely beyond his control. He agrees, “No, they’re—not really the type. And anyway, It’s not them who’s holding the grudge.” He turns back to the dishwasher, and gives himself a full second to squeeze his eyes tightly shut, and suck in a deep breath, before he closes the dishwasher and pivots back around to Alec as he explains, “I’m the one holding it against me.”
This isn’t really a conversation conducive to having between two people who’ve known each other for less than twenty-four hours, let alone when one of those people has just suffered a major, life-altering experience. Nolan doesn’t know why he’d told Alec what he’d told him. He thinks about apologizing, about making some excuse and saying sorry, but he—doesn’t.
Because he isn’t.
And Alec—Alec just closes his mouth with a mutated click. He visibly considers his reply, Nolan feeling oddly strung-out, and tense, as he waits for it, and then Alec seems to find what he wants to say. His expression settles into another of those small, secret smiles that he wears so well.
He says, “So. So a half-dozen.” His small secret smile gets a little wider. “And counting?”
Nolan feels his own smile break across his face. Something heavy and twisted-up in his chest twists itself the opposite way; unwinding. He agrees:
“And counting.”
---
Liam and Theo come to get Alec the next morning for what Scott and the pack tend to refer only half-jokingly as Werewolf Orientation, so Nolan escorts Alec down to the street to meet them and then heads back up to his apartment, where he gets an entire, blissfully silent hour to himself before Stiles bursts through the door.
Almost literally: Nolan hears a key in his lock and has just managed to glance over in surprise before his front door is flying open, and Ally is charging through. It leaves Stiles framed in the open doorway, Devon in a baby sling attached to his chest and an absurd assortment of bags—undoubtedly stuffed with kids’ supplies—slung over his shoulders and arms.
“Morning!” He greets cheerfully, inviting himself in and tucking the key he’d used—the key that Nolan had given Scott for emergencies—back into his pocket. He twists around to close the door just as Ally finishes practically slinging herself across the length of the living room, and into Nolan’s knees from where Nolan’s sat at his desk chair.
“Uh, hi,” Nolan echoes, more out of reflex than anything else. It’s also primarily reflex that has him pushing back from his desk even further so that Ally can finish clambering into his lap as she so clearly wants to. She plonks herself down once she’s there, and starts exploring the top of Nolan’s desk. Nolan prudently reaches over her to push his laptop farther away, out of reach.
“Don’t get too comfortable there,” Stiles instructs Ally, mock-sternly. “We’re going to the park, remember?”
Nolan is clearly being included in this ‘we.’ “We are?” He asks, squinting at him over the top of Ally’s head.
“We are,” Stiles confirms. Against his chest, Devon yawns and squirms and knuckles at his eyes. “You and me are on mascot duty for the day, while the rest of the supernatural horde runs around teaching your new stray how to keep the shift in his metaphorical werewolf pants.”
“When was this decided?” Nolan wonders, but he knows he’s speaking it mostly to himself. “I do have work, you know.”
“Call in sick,” Stiles orders, breezing right past that obstacle. He also drops the bags in his hands so that he can duck forward and tickle at Ally’s stomach and ribs as he says, “Because we’re going to the park, right, little monster?”
Ally grins and squeals and kicks Nolan repeatedly in the thighs and shins with her heels as she squirms away from Stiles’ fingers. She also flashes golden eyes and snaps suddenly needle-sharp teeth up at Stiles, who pretends great offense and scoops her up—careful of Devon still in the sling on his chest—to whirl her around. This time, her delighted laughter is mixed with Devon’s.
Nolan just rolls his eyes, and snorts a little to himself. But he also snags his laptop with the tip of a finger so that he can send an email to his boss.
They head to the park a few blocks down from Nolan’s apartment, Stiles’ and Nolan’s cars left in their spaces on the street and Ally running repeatedly ahead of them, and back, as they make their way there. Nolan had taken charge of all the bags since Stiles still has Devon strapped to his chest, though Devon’s wide awake now and staring up at the city around them, one tiny hand raised and grasping absently at Stiles’ face. Stiles alternates pretending to bite at Devon’s fingers, dramatic noises and all, and leaning his head back to dodge them as he carries on his conversation with Nolan.
Once they get to the park both Stiles and Nolan know from hard-learned experience that they’ve got a limited amount of time before Ally is just going to take off for the playground equipment, so Nolan quickly drops the bags so that he can take Devon as Stiles unbuckles the sling, Ally literally bouncing on her toes nearby. But as soon as the last buckle is unsnapped, she books it; Stiles groans dramatically and gives chase. Nolan grins after them, and then he switches his grin down to Devon.
“What say you and I find some shade?” He proposes, and then switches Devon onto one hip so that he can bend down and retrieve the bags he’d dropped, sliding the various straps back over his opposite shoulder.
They’ve settled into the shade of a tree on top of a blanket that Nolan digs out of one of the bags by the time Stiles throws in the towel, and comes to collapse first down onto his hands and knees, and then flat on his belly, next to them. Cradled in the center of Nolan’s crossed legs in a little nest of other blankets, Devon watches curiously, his eyes briefly flashing a ghostly, pale blue. Nolan runs a gentle finger over his brow, wondering at the fact that even through the filter of the surrogate, he’d ended up with some of his fathers’ various gifts. Though he won’t envy Corey and Mason when and if it turns out that Devon had inherited Corey’s chameleon skill in addition to some of Mason’s lingering, chimeric abilities from the Beast. Likely challenge level of trying to corral an invisible baby: high.
“Christ,” Stiles mutters, still face-down in the blanket. “I should have made Derek come, or Theo. No one warned me that supernatural toddlers have supernatural energy reserves.”
Nolan laughs. “Uh, I’m pretty sure Derek warned everybody about that,” he counters, unsympathetic. Stiles rolls his head sideways just enough that he can glare at Nolan through one unimpressed eye.
But then he apparently lets it go, sitting up so that he can lean over and start making faces at Devon, who gives a toothless grin and burbles with laughter. Stills grins, then tells him: “We’re going to be especially screwed when you start walking around, and join her Highness’s grand army.” He waves a hand back towards where Ally is successfully amusing herself on the equipment. “Not to mention whenever Scott finally manages to make enough puppy-dog eyes at Malia to convince her to have another one.”
Nolan just snorts, and gives Devon his finger when Devon reaches for it, his tiny fingers wrapping around it and bringing it to his mouth so that he can gum at it. Stiles flops back on an elbow so that he can stay somewhat upright and watching Ally critically, but also mostly-horizontal as he finishes catching the last of his breath.
“So what is this, now, anyway? Nine? Ten?” He wonders, apropos of nothing. He glances over and clarifies when he sees Nolan’s confusion. “Strays.”
“Six,” Nolan corrects, skipping over that strays because he’d never actually won that argument, and also: somewhat accurate.
Stiles scoffs. “No way. Only if you don’t count those Council fugitives that you and Argent have successfully spirited away on your secret supernatural Underground Railroad.”
Nolan makes a face, a bolt of reflexive anxiety jolting through him. In his lap, Devon squirms and closes his toothless-gums a little harder around Nolan’s finger, his eyes flaring. Nolan forces himself to breathe soft, and slow, until the blue fades. “That is the point of it being a secret,” he points out after it has, but toothlessly.
Stiles waves that away, but he also drops that line of inquiry. Or at least Nolan thinks he does, at least until Stiles looks at him shrewdly and asks, “You think Alec will want to stay?”
Something hot shivers down Nolan’s spine. He’s probably blushing, because there’s very little justice in the world. Resigning himself to it, Nolan mutters, “How should I know? I’ve only known him two days.”
“That’s not a ‘no,’” Stiles points out. He’s got a self-satisfied little grin on his face, and if Nolan didn’t have Devon in his lap he might do something about it other than roll his eyes.
As it is he doesn’t get the chance: Ally appears out of nowhere, skidding the last few inches on her knees as she comes to a stop just in front of Nolan. She peers up at him with golden eyes.
“You okay, Uncle Nolan?” She asks, very seriously.
Nolan blinks at her. “Yeah, Ally. I’m good.”
Ally just squints at him, unconvinced. “Your heartbeat said—” She starts to argue, which is definitely something she picked up from Liam, who’d had to learn an entire second language called Theo’s subconscious body signals, since Theo seemed to have a deathly allergy to discussing his own emotional wellbeing.
Nolan gapes at her a little, but Stiles comes to his rescue. “Hey, little monster,” Stiles interrupts, reaching out and snagging her and starting to dig his fingers lightly into her sides. “What’d your dad and Uncle Derek say about being too nosy with your nose and ears, huh?”
Ally shrieks with helpless laughter at the tickling, but she also protests, “Mom said.” She has to cut off on another peel of laughter. “And Grandpa Peter said—”
Stiles makes a face at Nolan at the mention of Peter’s name, but out-loud he just says, “Yes, but what’s the rule about anything and everything Grandpa Peter tells us?” He stops tickling Ally to give her a chance to respond.
She stares up at him with round, solemn eyes, and dutifully recites, “Always check with dad or mom or Uncle Derek before accepting any of Grandpa Peter’s advice.”
“Always,” Stiles agrees, nodding just as solemnly back at her. Nolan has to turn his head to hide his grin in his shoulder.
They end up spending a little longer at the park, and then detour by a little cafe on the way back to Nolan’s apartment for lunch. They switch charges again: Stiles takes Devon, setting him up back up in the sling, and Nolan sits with Ally on his lap, alternating eating his own meal with helping her eat hers. Back at Nolan’s apartment, Nolan retrieves the collapsible mesh crib he has shoved in the guest bedroom closet and helps Stiles get it set up for Devon, and then he leaves the three of them alone with his TV and remote and goes out on his balcony with his laptop to get a few more hours of offline work.
It’s why he’s outside to hear the sound of Liam’s asthmatic car come wheezing down the road, and into a—miraculously free—spot of street parking almost right in front of Nolan’s building. At first Nolan had been half-expecting that they were just going to drop Alec off, but when instead Liam spends an agonizing few minutes navigating his oversized, rusted-out monster of an SUV into the spot, he grins, and closes his laptop, and heads inside to prepare.
He’s warned Stiles and started searching through his kitchen cabinets for potential meal options when there’s a resounding knock at his door. Ally calls out—shrieks out, really—that she’ll get it, already babbling at Liam and Theo through the doorway because she knows that they can hear her. Chances are, though Nolan can’t hear it, Liam and Theo are talking right back, which Nolan knows from the experience of standing right next to one of them when something similar happens is going to make them look positively deranged.
Liam and Theo and Alec spill through the doorway soon after, though only after Stiles gets up to help Ally with the door, since she can’t reach the lock. Nolan had been right about the through-the-doorway conversation: Liam and Ally pick right back up on it as Liam comes through the door, Liam sweeping her off her feet and into his arms as he goes. Theo beelines it for the living room, clearly headed for Devon.
Alec leans against the kitchen doorway, and grins softly at Nolan.
“Hey,” he greets quietly.
“Hey,” Nolan echoes, and grins right back.
But Alec’s clearly had a long day, and it only takes Nolan three times, max, of insisting that Nolan has it covered for Alec to surrender and go join the others in the living room, where cartoon sounds and occasional singing are once more bursting forth from Nolan’s TV. Soon after, Stiles comes into the kitchen to help.
“I’ve been muscled out of babysitting duties,” he announces dryly. Nolan laughs, and points him towards the pile of vegetables on the counter waiting to be chopped.
Nolan had gone for quantity over anything complicated when he’d decided on a meal, so it doesn’t actually take him and Stiles long to make it. Once it’s done and waiting to be dished out on the stove, the burners off but the pots left on them to keep the food warm, Nolan frowns.
“Honestly, I would have expected them to be hovering over us long before this,” he comments. Stiles makes a considering face, granting the point, and he follows after Nolan when Nolan heads out to the living room to see what could possibly have kept three and a half hungry supernaturals from realizing dinner was ready.
The answer is, apparently: exhaustion. They’re all passed out. Liam is horizontal on the couch with Ally tucked into the curve of his body, and Alec is flat on his back on the floor right in front of them. Theo had apparently retrieved Devon from the mesh crib and then shifted, because he’s curled up in his wolf-form around him, Devon sound asleep and clutching at fistfuls of Theo’s fur.
“Well,” Stiles predicts, his eyebrows almost at his hairline when Nolan glances over at him. “That probably settles that is-he-staying question.” He’s looking at where Ally had stretched one hand down over the edge of the couch to curl it in a tight fistful of Alec’s shirt. He turns a blinding grin on Nolan, and claps him on the shoulder as he steps forward to start waking everyone up. “Congrats, Holloway.”
“Shut up,” Nolan mutters, flushing.
But he’s grinning, too.
---
Later that night after everyone else has left, Nolan lets Alec help with the dinner clean-up for exactly as long as it takes him to spray himself in the face with water reflected off the rounded cup of a spoon, and then he presses a dish towel into Alec’s hands and gently herds him sideways, and takes over.
Alec grins ruefully, but he’s also doing it with a dripping face, so he accepts the towel and goes to drop down on top of one of the bar stools on the other side of the kitchen counter. He dries his face as he goes, and then drops the towel onto the counter as he slumps over, his chin propped up on one hand. Nolan continues to slot plates and forks and the offending spoon into the dishwasher, but he’s aware of Alec watching him through sleepy eyes.
“What?” Nolan finally wonders, laughing a little as he glances up at Alec, one eyebrow climbing.
Alec flushes a little; he maybe hadn’t realized how blatantly he’d been staring. But then he just grins, soft and apologetic, and asks what’d apparently been on his mind: “Do all of your strays end up leaving?”
He’d caught the pack’s tongue-in-cheek terminology for Nolan’s various house guests, apparently. Nolan’s expression goes a little dry, but then he shakes his head, and answers, “Not all of them. You met Amelia at the farm house, remember?”
Alec’s eyes flick up to the ceiling and then narrow as he apparently recalls this. “Right,” he agrees. But then he flicks his eyes back down, his chin left tilted up just a little, and he presses, “But the rest?”
Nolan decides the big pan he’d used can soak. He flicks the faucet on and lets it fill with water, adding a few drops of liquid soap as he goes. “The rest did leave, yeah.” The pan finishes filling with water and bubbles so Nolan shuts the water off and then looks at Alec, his expression thoughtful. “Why do you ask?”
Alec doesn’t answer. Instead he asks in turn: “Why’d they leave?”
Nolan blows out a slow, soft breath, and leans sideways so that he can rest his hip against the perpendicular counter, and cross his arms. “Different reasons. Rogue alphas like the one who attacked you are actually pretty rare. Usually the reasons supernaturals end up in need of the kind of help I can offer are—” he hesitates, searching for the right word, “—more mundane. Ironically.” His lips flicker, but it’s not exactly a pleasant smile. “Pack politics are complicated, as are the relationships between them, and the various hunter clans. Sometimes certain supernaturals just need—the opportunity to get away from their old lives. Start over someplace new.”
Now it’s Alec studying Nolan. “And you’re the, the—”
He seems to be struggling for the right word, so Nolan fills in, “Waystation,” with a small smile. He shrugs when Alec tips his head slightly. “That’s what Argent sometimes calls it, anyway. I can never tell if he’s actually joking or not.”
Alec smiles reflexively back at the joke, but he’s clearly distracted. He’s also wider awake now than he was even just a few minutes earlier, his fingertips drumming a little against the countertop edge. “So you’re a, a supernatural waystation. As penance for—for the way you’d acted when you first met the McCall pack.”
Nolan frowns, but only lightly. “That’s a pretty neat summary of it, yeah,” he agrees, and then he leans forward so that he can still Alec’s drumming fingers. He waits until after Alec has jolted and then darted his eyes up to Nolan’s own to probe, “You want to tell me what all this is about?”
Alec touches his tongue to his bottom lip, and then swipes it sideways. His eyes flicker quickly down to Nolan’s mouth, and then back up to his eyes. He hesitates a few seconds longer, and then he wonders, “What if—what if someone didn’t want to just pass through the waystation? Would they always just be—part of your penance?”
Nolan feels his mouth drop open slightly, and his expression slacken. He realizes he’s staring at Alec with naked surprise all over his face, but he can’t get himself to stop. Alec winces—he’d been wincing throughout his whole speech, really—and pulls his lips between his teeth, biting down on them and forcing all the color out, turning them pale.
And that’s the reason that Nolan would give, if anyone asked him for one, as for why he leans forward and presses his mouth to Alec’s own: that pale flash of color.
Alec gives a startled noise, and in doing so his lips slip free of his teeth. The movement causes his lower lip to drag in between Nolan’s own and Nolan can feel his eyes squeezing even tighter shut at the sensation, his fingers spasming around Alec’s from where he’s still holding Alec’s previously-fidgeting hands still. They’re not fidgeting now, though; now they’re entirely frozen. Nolan goes to pull back, wincing a little himself.
But then he can’t, because there’s a hand on the back of his neck—Alec freeing one of his own out from underneath Nolan’s fast enough that he’d definitely used his supernatural speed to do it, though he probably hadn’t realized it—and Alec’s pressing his mouth harder to Nolan’s own. He’s kissing him back. Nolan shudders a little and bends further forward over the counter separating them, the edge of it digging into his stomach.
Alec keeps kissing him, or Nolan keeps kissing Alec, or they both keep kissing each other, for a few more minutes. But as the initial adrenaline starts to fade they slow, and then eventually stop, until finally they’re just leaning there with their foreheads together, Alec’s hand still on the back of Nolan’s neck. Nolan rolls his forehead a little against Alec’s own, smiling helplessly, and when he opens up his eyes Alec is already looking back. Nolan darts in for one more quick kiss, can’t stop himself, and then pulls just a few inches back.
Just far enough to say, “I, um. I’ve never thought about it. Your questions,” he clarifies, when Alec just looks confused, Alec’s eyes constantly dropping down to his mouth and then back up. “But I’d be,” Nolan continues, catching Alec’s eyes and holding them, “I’d be interested in finding out.”
It takes Alec a second to fully absorb what Nolan’s saying.
But then he grins.