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“Mama! Mama!”
Claudia looked up at the sound of her Stiles’s voice, wiping her hands on a dish towel as she walked out of the kitchen to greet her husband and child. She smiled at his excitement, crouching down to catch him as he threw himself at her, keeping her head tilted to the side to avoid biting her tongue from his energetic bouncing.
“Hey baby, how was school? Get any valentine’s?” She asked, standing up to give John a kiss. She usually picked Stiles up from school, but he’d insisted today and her smile widened as he handed her a bouquet. It was a random assortment of daisies, daffodils, babys breath, and loose blades of grass that fluttered to the carpet as she took it. Stiles had quieted but was still bouncing away, hand on her leg as he looked up at her with an eager face.
“Did you pick these?”
He nodded emphatically. “Uhuh. Me an’ Daddy picked ‘em! An’, an’ I went to school and I got a buncha kisses! From Scott and Lydia and Allison an’ even Derek, mom Der gamme a kiss and I gave him one and his whole face turned pink and I wanted to give him another one and Scott and Allison gave him ones too and even his ears turned pink and he looked so--happy.”
He beamed up at her and she chuckled, carding her fingers through his wild hair. She didn’t give him any kisses to hand out, just little gummy hearts and an assortment of mini superhero cards. “They all had the same candy, huh? Must be popular this year.”
His face scrunched up at her. “Not those kisses Mama. That’s exactly what Daddy said.”
(“That’s a lot of kisses. You didn’t eat them all already, did you?”
“You can’t eat kisses, Daddy.”
“Last time I checked, chocolate kisses were a very edible candy.”)
Claudia looked up at John, but he just shrugged, scratching the back of his head awkwardly. She looked back down at Stiles.
“Stiles. Did you go around kissing people?”
He frowned at her. “Yeah, babcia said the best Va’entime present was to show them you love them. So I thought, Mama and Daddy kiss each other all the time, n’ you gimme kisses and Scott’s mom gives him kisses an’--”
She just laughed, taking his hand and leading him to the dining table and heading back into the kitchen. “So let me get this straight,” she starts, rummaging in the cabinet for a vase for the flowers, precariously held together by a couple rubber bands. “You, Allison, Derek, Scott, and Lydia all went around kissing each other?”
The sound of the table shaking carries over, and she assumes it’s another vigorous head nod.
“The teacher looked absolutely scandalized. ‘You need to have a talk with your son about smacking his lips all over his classmates, it’s incredibly inappropriate,’” John quoted in a horrible imitation of the older woman’s voice. “Says he even tried to give all the grown ups cards and kisses at recess time, too.”
When he looked over Claudia was practically hysterical, her upper body laying on the counter with the flowers abandoned next to her, shoulders shaking with silent laughter.
“I don’ like her no more, she didn’t like my presents,” Stiles grumbled. “I don’t care though,” he declared loudly. “We got more on the playground. Lydia gave Jackson one an’ Scott gave Isaac one an’ Kira and I got Malia an’ Cora and Laura. Laura was silly though, she made my whole cheek wet. Kisses aren’t supposed to be wet, she doesn’t know how to give kisses right.”
Claudia gave a loud gasp and straightened up from the counter, face flushed from the efforts to hold in her laughter. “That’s good, honey,” she said, with effort, filling a glass with water. She picked up the flowers and debated putting the flowers in it, changing her mind and taking huge gulps of it. “But try not to do anything to make your teachers mad, okay?”
Stiles pouted. “You meant I can’t kiss them ever again?”
John sighed. “Try to limit it to special occasions, okay?”
--
Stiles remembered this conversation for every occasion. The others would often come over for play dates, and more often than not when she left the room for a few moments they were all hurriedly scrambling away from each other, smiling and giggling like they shared some great secret. She was pretty sure she knew what it was, but refrained from saying anything.
There was no such secrecy for birthday parties. The children spent holidays with their own families, so these were really the only occasions when they were all gathered together. The first time it happened was for Derek’s seventh birthday. He wasn’t the most social child and felt overwhelmed and a little miserable surrounded by so much people and noise and hubbub. He had just blown out the candles on his DC comics cake, sitting there awkwardly like he didn’t know what to do next as the smoke filtered out around him. Scott, Stiles, Lydia, and Allison all looked at each other and nodded, and that was the only warning before they weaved through the adults expertly, emerging in a circle around Derek’s chair with serious faces. He looked around at them with wide eyes, jerking around when Stiles dragged his chair back and all the children shuffled closer. Laura and Malia picked up on what was happened and smiled gleefully, charging through the adults to join the circle.
Derek seemed to figure it out at the last second and he flushed all the way up to his hairline but nonetheless complied, sliding out of his chair to give them more room. The adults looked on curiously, save Claudia who was trying to muffle her laughter behind her hand, grabbing her husband’s arm to keep him from interfering. She saw the confusion on the other adult’s faces and had to hide her face in his shoulder for a second before scrambling for her phone camera. She opened it just in time to catch the circle closing, all the kids shoulder to shoulder as Derek scrunched up his face and braced himself. They leaned in simultaneously, and smacked kisses over every inch of his face, bumping cheeks and chins and foreheads to pepper kisses all over him, even catching each other a couple times in the processes.
It started as a chain reaction, Stiles surging into his back in a hug because (when he was telling her later “It’s not fun kissing hair and it doesn’t have the same affect, and there wasn’t enough room on his face.”) Scott followed, throwing one arm over his best friend and getting the other pinned between Derek and Laura, Lydia ducking in and getting squished between the birthday boy and his cousin Malia. There was a chorus of gasps, aw’s, and laughter from the adults around them. After a few seconds of wriggling, Derek’s hands appeared on the sides as he did his best to hug them back. “I don’t have enough hands for this,” he whined, and the children released him in fits of giggles. The rest of the day was a little brighter for him.
--
The werewolf thing was spread between them without ceremony. No one outside them was even alerted to this until Allison’s ninth birthday, which was spent in the Hale backyard because her family was away on some business trip. She was fiddling with a box that had been taped shut. “Hey Derek, can I borrow your.. Yeah thanks,” she said, reaching out to grab his hand where he obligingly flicked out his claws to slice the tape.
There was a collective gasp and a few people Derek’s name in various tones of disbelief. They all looked up in confusion, staring at each other. Peter and Laura snorted simultaneously. “Please, dear sister, did you honestly think any secrets would be kept between a group of children that spent so much time together?”
The parents were another issue that were handled on the same day by different pack members, dragging two children and an adult to each house. The guest room actually had two queen beds pushed together and layered with blankets and pillows, more often slept in than Stiles’ own bedroom. The Argents, however, were a different matter to be handled at a later date.
--
It continued as the years went by. Derek, Allison, Stiles, Scott, and Lydia were the main group, but Malia floated in and joined when she was present. Many sleepovers were spent in a tangle of arms and legs and hair, a mess of tiny bodies wriggling so much the blanket fort collapsed on top of them and they erupted in shrieks of equal parts terror and delight. Claudia and Talia often shared blackmail photos, mornings woken with birds nest hair, sometimes with all of them using one person as a pillow, Stiles drooling on Scott or Lydia cuddling Allison’s foot.
On one memorable occasion, when they were in sixth grade and wearing matching super hero pajamas that Stiles and Derek had spent the entire year saving for. Scott was Superman, Derek was Spiderman, Allison was Wonder Woman, Lydia was Harley Quinn, and Stiles was Batman. That year Erica had joined them per Stiles’ request and much supportive begging from the rest of them, and she slept clad in Catwoman pajamas, the children curled protectively around her where she used Stiles as a pillow, save for a narrow space on one side for the adults to get to her in case anything happened.
--
In a way, it made a lot of things easier for them growing up. They weren’t shy or awkward around different genders or nakedness, even clothes were a confusion. Most of their parents gave up trying to keep them separate, Stiles often caught wandering around in one of Lydia’s dresses or Allison in one of Derek’s graphic tees, Scott sometimes running to get the mail or to the park in her flowery flip flops. Claudia, Talia, and Laura made sure to get those on camera whenever possible. They all cooed when they all went shopping for dresses, even going as far as to go to a tailor to get some custom fitted dresses for the boys.
They didn’t have to worry about being weird or not making any friends. There was an increasing number of awkward moments up until a week after Stiles’s thirteenth birthday. The group had been upstairs in Derek’s room for several hours and hadn’t responded to any of the family’s calls for dinner. Laura popped her head in and quickly retreated, shuffling past her mother’s confused face.
“Don’t look at me, that’s not my problem,” she said, earning a disapproving frown from Talia. The alpha trailed up the stairs and blinked at the sight that greeted her. Lydia, Malia, and Kira were piled on top of each other on Derek’s bed, reading what looked like three separate windows on his laptop screen. Derek was laying on the floor paging through a book, a laptop resting on his butt that Stiles was parked in front of, Lydia pressed against his side and facing the opposite direction. They were surrounded by a chaos of papers, notebooks, books, highlighters, and pens. Scott was at the edge of it on his phone, also reading.
Talia blanked for a few seconds. “Children,” she said, and received a few perfunctory noises in return, only Derek and Malia looked up at her, a yellow highlighter falling from the latter’s mouth. “What is all this? What are you doing?”
“Researching,” Stiles replies immediately, craning his neck to look at her. “What’s up?”
“It’s dinner time.” There was an immediate chaotic scrambling, Stiles and Scott slipping on papers in their haste, the laptop falling off Derek and the bed creaking as Malia wriggled out from under Allison.
The dining room and living room were filled with people and the sound of clinking utensils as everyone settled down for food. After a bit Talia cleared her throat, speaking again. “So. Care to share your research findings?” She asked, looking from face to face as they did the same.
“Gender conformity and sexuality spectrums,” Lydia answered primly.
Peter’s eyebrows rose. “And what did you find, exactly?” He asked, curious. He’d been the first to begin researching when he realized their group showed no signs of dispersing, creating a facsimile of a pack within a pack, all of which had led him into topics like polyamory and further into sexuality and gender identification. Of course, he hadn’t had the conjoined efforts of six minds.
They all looked at each other and nodded.
“We’re polyamorous.”
“Stiles is genderfluid.”
“Derek is asexual.”
“Lydia’s aromantic.”
“Allison’s granddad is crazy.”
There was confused silence after the last one. Scott ducked his head, cheeks flushing. “He was going on about there being something wrong with us because he walked in on all of us in dresses and doing each other’s make up.” He mumbled a few other things that made most of the werewolves in the room snarl and flash their eyes. Since Derek and Malia had let them in on the family secret, Allison had easily figured out her family were hunters and accidentally spilled the beans to her parents that she knew werewolves existed. Talia used the opportunity to create a treaty with the Argents, showing up on their doorstep with Allison, Derek, Lydia, and Stiles trailing upstairs to keep her company while Peter stood protectively at his alpha’s back downstairs.
--
Years later in middle school and high school, their peers gave them increasingly weird looks. They filled up whole lunch tables, argued over who sat with who when class was divided into groups or pairs. They were extremely protective of each other whenever someone tried to single one of them out and exploit some insecurity. Sometimes they fought, like when Lydia started ditching them for Jackson or Malia and Stiles arguing over trying to talk to Talia about giving Erica the bite, or bringing someone else into their group like Boyd. Lydia was forcefully dragged back into their midst, and there were weeks of arguments and shouting matches about bringing Danny and Jackson into their group. Lydia wanted Jackson but he was a serious dick, Danny was awesome and nice but was also a package deal with Jackson. In the end they agreed to share Lydia with Jackson, but made her promise to split her time equally. Boyd was welcomed and added when they converged around him at lunch, but he didn’t really connect with anyone so much as drifted happily in the spaces between them. Stiles won the argument, and he and Malia approached her in her office one night after dinner and made their case about Erica.
Isaac was another case. Scott and Allison mentioned their likeness of him, but also his skittishness and constant wounds. Inquiry passed through them, Lydia weaseled out of Jackson that his dad beat the shit out of him. They snapped photo evidence for about a month from the locker room, Jackson’s house, corralled him to the doctor for backup cataloging of the injuries. Stiles brought it up with his parents and piled up all their research in front of them, and the case was handled. Mr. Lahey was arrested and Isaac went to stay with Scott and Melissa.
They’re group was far from problem free or perfect, but they made it work and refused to let each other go.