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The phone rang at three o'clock in the morning. Scott rifled around on their bedside table trying to find his cell phone, and answered it blindly. "Derek, if this is you, I swear to God..."
"No, Scott, it's me," his mom answered through the receiver. Her voice was small, and overtop of that, he could hear his baby sister crying quietly in her arms.
"Mom? What's wrong?" He sat up quickly, and Stiles shot up in bed next to him.
"Nothing, nothing, Jesus. Can't a mother call to check on her only son? Especially when he's an hour away at college?"
Scott knew that he and Stiles moving had been hard on his mother, on both of their parents, but it had been the only option for them. They didn't know how their parents would react to their relationship, which was the next obstacle they were planning to conquer, and neither of them could bear to stay so close when the instinct and the urge to protect her, their child who wasn't their's, was so strong. Scott had suggested distance, and Stiles had jokingly suggested kidnapping, but they had packed up their bedroom and moved into a shitty dorm on the eighth floor of the furthest apartment building from campus.
"At three am?" he countered, laughing slightly into his hands. Stiles relaxed next to him, letting his hand drop from Scott's shoulder with a breathy Jesus and flopping back onto their bed. They had put out some feelers on campus and found a guy who needed some quick cash and had a full size bed for cheap. It took them a while, but they had broken down the blocky and space-eating bunk beds and changed their whole room around to look more like home. They didn't give a shit who knew about them here, and only kept the bunk bed pieces shoved in the back of Scott's closet on the off-chance their parents visited before they could tell them and they needed to look like best friends again, and not boyfriends.
"Touche," Melissa sighed, and Scott heard her shifting the weight of the baby around.
It had only been two weeks since they'd last seen her. She was a little over a year old now. She had finally perfected the art of walking, and was slowly working on learning her words. She was great at telling everyone, especially her mother, "no". Her favorite word was "mine", something she lisped whenever Scott would get too close to her favorite toy, or Stiles, her favorite person. The sheriff would still tear up a little when she called him Daddy, and Stiles almost choked on his soda the first time she yelled 'COTT from the table because he was late and holding up her dinner.
"Mom," Scott tried again.
"She won't sleep," Melissa whispered, and Scott thought hard for a second if he was meant to have heard that or not. Stiles was laying awake next to him, his hand running up and down Scott's back, and he wondered if it was quiet enough in their room that he heard it too.
"Have you sang her the song?"
"Yes." She sounded exasperated, exhausted, and Scott felt for her. He remembered how hard it had been when she had worked nights and he and Stiles had found themselves sitting cross-legged on the floor of his room feeding the baby a bottle at midnight just to have her wake them up again at four for another. She slept through the night now, or, at least, she had been, before Scott and Stiles had left. "Do you think you could give the phone to Stiles? Is he sleeping?"
"No, he's here, hold on." Scott laid down and handed the cell phone over. "She wants to talk to you."
Stiles frowned, but held the phone to his ear. "Hey," he sounded a little too cheerful, and that was going to be a dead giveaway that he had been awake for a while, but if it even registered with Melissa, Scott couldn't tell from the sound of her voice.
"Stiles, hey." She let out a sigh of relief. "Do you think... Could I put you on speaker? Will you sing to her? She's just... She's been cranky all day and now she just won't go to sleep. And even when I get her to sleep, she won't stay asleep. I think... I think it's finally hit her that you guys aren't coming back for a long time."
Stiles sucked in a deep breath, like her words had been a punch to his gut, and Scott curled himself around Stiles, laying his head on his chest and squeezing his arms tightly around his boyfriend's ribs. It was still a raw wound for Stiles, and hearing it said out loud wasn't easy for him. Scott knew better than anyone how much moving away had meant for the two of them. While everyone else had made jokes about girls, and parties, and late night cram sessions, they had been staring with glazed eyes at her over their shoulders.
Scott wished he was with his mom, then. He had come to rely on his werwolf senses to fill in the blanks for so long now that he missed being able to smell her, hear her heart, know what she was thinking just from all these little cues she didn't know anything about. He wondered if this phone call was hurting her as much as it was hurting them, to have to admit that her daughter was missing her sons because they had been the ones to raise her in her first year of life.
"Yeah, Melissa," Stiles breathed. "I'll sing to her."
Scott heard Stiles' heart beat a little out of rhythm, and he pushed his face into the soft skin of his belly as he listened to him sing. Her favorite lullaby was something Stiles had basically created himself - a mishmash of a half-remembered song from some childhood television program and something his mom had sang to him. Scott hummed along under his breath, gently kissing any little bit of skin that he could, just enough to let Stiles know that he was still there.
When Stiles was done, he waited a second, listening to the sound of Melissa rustling on the other end.
"She's down, thank God." They were awkwardly silent for a moment before she continued. "Thanks, Stiles. I- Thanks."
Stiles swallowed harshly and grit out, "Yeah, you're welcome. My pleasure," in his friendliest voice. Scott, by virtue of having heard every one of Stiles' voices in the course of their many-year friendship, and one year of courtship, knew that it was fake, but Stiles had always been a great actor when times were tough, and Melissa just bid them goodnight and hung up.
"I think we should tell them," Scott said, before Stiles could dig himself too deeply in his thoughts. "About us. Next time we go home, I want to tell them."
"This soon? I don't know, man. It just seems like too much to throw out at them in the same year. Werewolves, a new baby, a new house, us off at college, and now this? It's a lot to process, and... what is that?"
Scott flipped the gold circle into the air and caught it. He had leaned over during Stiles' diatribe and fished it out of the bedside table. He had carefully hidden it under one of his anatomy textbooks to keep it out of Stiles' sight. "So, you don't want it?"
Stiles' mouth must have gone dry, because he swallowed a couple of times, and Scott smirked in the darkness.
"I was thinking, you know, if we tell them, then you could wear this all the time, not have to worry about taking it off when they are around. I've got one too."
He had planned something a lot more elaborate than this - dinner, wine, the works - but now seemed like the time. That phone call had brung up the past, the pain of leaving her behind, and Scott wanted to remind Stiles of the future he had promised him once, laying in their bed under their parents' roof, wrapped in each other's arms.
"Already?" Stiles was a little breathless. He reached up and encircled Scott's wrist with one hand, while taking the ring with his other.
"It's not solid gold, just gold plated. I didn't have the money saved up for the really nice ones, but yeah. Already."
Stiles slipped the ring on, like he was testing it out for size, or maybe to see if it was all real and not some figment of his imagination. Scott just watched with what he knew was a goofy, love-drunk expression on his face, until Stiles grabbed him and yanked him into a hug.
"I want to tell them," he whispered in Scott's ear. "Next time we go home."
Scott took that as a yes.