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Whenever anyone asks, Stiles has a pre-made answer ready about what it’s like to be a military spouse.
My dad was a solider before I was born, and he was in law enforcement the whole time I was growing up, so the worry and the waiting, all of that was already second nature.
It goes well with a smile; it doesn’t sound bad as a sound bite. It’s not dishonest, either—he’s held worry for his dad deep in his chest ever since he got old enough to understand what his uniform meant. The thing is, though, that this particular reality can’t be adequately described by any nostalgia-tinged reminder about his past, and how it makes him a better husband. There’s probably infinite specific realities like that, unique pains that cannot be properly described or wholly understood by anyone but the souls living them.
He’d like to think his history does make him a better husband though, overall, but right now all a lifetime of worry is doing for him is giving him a panic attack in the downstairs bathroom. It’s noon; across the world it’s almost midnight. With his last known duty schedule, Chris is off watch. He’s had time to eat and shower, time to fall back on a shitty couch and have a breather. He’s surely had time by now to check his e-mail, and see the pictures Stiles sent of the ultrasound yesterday, to read the rambling paragraphs he’d written about how they know for sure now that they’re both boys, that they’re a little bigger than avocados. Blood test results aren’t back yet, so it’s still unknown if they’ll be wolves like Peter, or human like their surrogate mother. Whatever the answer, it’s not like anyone will love them any less—it’s not like Chris is going to feel something different looking at them, one way or the other.
He’ll just see his babies, and he’ll get that same look on his face like he did the first time they saw Allison, a specific adoring severity that had made Stiles’ chest ache down to his lungs. It reminded him so fucking much of his dad, and fuck anyone who might have said that was creepy—he wasn’t confused; he didn’t have daddy issues. His dad was fucking great, and maybe that was part of why he’d found Chris. Maybe everyone who was attracted to men married their father, good or bad; maybe he just got lucky twice.
Of course, none of that accounts for Peter. The laugh that thought rips out of his chest is at least a bit productive in breaking up the hyperventilating.
The knock on the door makes him jump, his knuckles banging into the edge of the counter. He’d been frozen in indecision on whether to yank one of his emergency inhalers out of the drawer for God only knew how many minutes; the sting of pain is at least distracting enough that that might not be necessary.
“Yeah, just a minute, baby,” Stiles says. It’s a little high, but Allison won’t notice. She’s too excited; too eager for nuance today. She probably wants help with her wings—
But the door pushes open, and instead of the face below the doorknob he expects, it’s Peter.
“She’s trying to decide about her shoes; I told her I’d be back in a few minutes to give her time to choose,” Peter says. Stepping in, he closes the door behind him just in case.
Stiles doesn’t even wait for Peter’s outstretched hand to reach before turning and burying himself into his chest, his face hidden against Peter’s collar. Even in fall, he smells like winter; he always does. Peter usually rolls his eyes at that if Stiles says it out loud—and maybe to another wolf he’d smell like something different, but all Stiles catches is something indescribably wild that reminds him of bitter cold and snow, layered against something warm and safe and sweet that hits his throat like maple syrup. Alongside the oddly metallic, Marlboro red tinge of Chris and the Old Spice and police station smell of his dad’s jackets, it’s one of the safest scents he knows. Breathing Peter in, he no longer feels like his lungs are trying to crawl out of his chest, and that’s something.
Peter’s hand cradles the back of his head, as soft and easy as the kiss he presses to Stiles’ temple. “I could hear your heart from upstairs. Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
For a full minute at least, Stiles just breathes. Peter’s hand curls over the back of his neck, close and tight. Stiles doesn’t need to see or even feel the rub of skin over scar tissue to know that where his palm rests is just over the bite he put there when Stiles was 19. Too young to be mated, Scott had said, but it wasn’t his choice to make. Scott had never liked Peter; he hadn’t understood then or now how it could feel for Stiles sometimes to feel the ground fall out from under him, but never all the way—in some form or other, those teeth on the back of his neck had never let go. To someone who wasn’t happily mated, it probably sounded like fucking romantic hogwash, Hallmark bullshit.
Stiles is a big believer in Hallmark bullshit, for the most part. Maybe that’s part of what scares him so much about Chris, and his dad’s refusal to retire—he’s had his share of tragedy in his life, sure, but he’s had far more magic. He’s overdue for more tragedy, like balance in the Force. After all, the prophecy about Anakin Skywalker hadn’t been wrong; he’d brought balance, in a far more literal way than anyone had wanted—
A Star Wars tangent might help clear his mind, too, but even fandom isn’t quite as steadying as Peter is.
Stiles readjusts himself, arms snaking up around Peter’s neck to cling a little tighter.
“Thank you. I thought I was going to need the inhaler for a minute, but hey that’s one less hit I need; that puts off that refill and saves some money.”
“I don’t know why you still think about these things. We can afford archery lessons for a six year old; we can afford for you to breathe.”
“Old habits die hard; you grew up with like four super Nintendos in the house—”
“There were six children—”
“And a shit ton of money for those six kids, which is great, but it’s just one of those things where you and I are never going to speak the same language. It’s okay; I can still be glad I saved a few cents. Besides, it’s a joke anyway; it’s just—” Without letting go, Stiles half heartedly gestures at his face. Given that it’s still hidden against Peter’s throat, there’s not really a point. “I just needed a minute. Probably could have managed without the inhaler or the magic werewolf—”
“And here I felt so needed.”
“—but my brain was just going off on its own, you know?” Stiles breath still comes too shallow, quick enough that Peter doesn’t have time to answer. “Have you checked your e-mail?”
Peter hums. Even in the sound, there’s understanding without condescension. There’s so much about him that Stiles appreciates, but that goes on the list—he doesn’t worry like Stiles, at least not on the outside where anyone would ever see, but he never judges him, either.
“Not since this morning. You know how it is for him; he tries to tell us about his duty shifts but they can change—”
“I know.”
“—and sometimes there’s nothing he can say. Sometimes they get moved or something happens and he’s out of reach for days without being able to warn us—”
“I know.”
“—and I know you know, but I’m just reminding you.” Peter squeezes over the scar, his grip firm as nuzzles against his mate. Sometimes, he reminds Stiles so goddamn much of the way he is when he’s shifted that the sweetness of it all brings tears to his eyes.
Right now, it’s maybe only 12% of why they’re welling up, but it’s in there.
“I’m sure he’s safe. He’s probably tired; there might have been too long of a wait for the computer. It could be anything. When he sees the pups, he’ll have something to say about it.”
Pups, like their status is already a given. Stiles laughter shakes a little of the ache free from the tension in his jaw. “You’re so biased.”
“I’ll love our boys no matter what—” Peter pauses to chase Stiles hum with a nip to his ear, so soft it’s barely a catch of his teeth. “But yes, I would love to be able to run on our land with at least one of my children. I won’t deny it.”
The silence that falls is more comfortable than the quiet of the bathroom without Peter ever could have been. Stiles squeezes his eyes shut until they hurt, until the twitch of muscle in his eyelids is sufficiently distracting, and still not as helpful as the hand on the nape of his neck.
“It’s just not like him. He knew about the doctor’s appointment, and he’s so excited about the babies—I just keep thinking for him not to have checked, something has to be wrong, and I know that isn’t true, but it’s fucking freaking me out and I can’t stop thinking about it. I feel like I should know if something had happened to him, but that’s not a real thing, is it? We don’t just…know; he could have been shot and lying in the dirt somewhere and I’m fucking playing Animal Crossing or some shit and—”
“Stiles.” Peter’s murmur stirs his hair. The pitch of his voice is so soft and low Stiles can feel the rumble of it in his chest; it’s that more than the interruption itself that helps him go quiet. “Maybe you wouldn’t know, but I would. He’s pack. He’s one of my mates. If something serious had happened, I would know, and I would tell you. That can’t rule out everything, I know, but it’s something—and I think it’s far more likely he hasn’t had a chance to answer his e-mail than that he’s in a field hospital. You know that, too. I’m sure he’s just fine, and you’ll see him soon.”
“Next video call’s not till Thursday,” Stiles mumbles. He knows, right off the top of his head. He can’t say with any certainty if they have milk in the fridge without looking, couldn’t give his work schedule without his planner even if someone had a gun to his head, but he’s got every scrap of contact information Chris ever gives them down cold.
Peter turns Stiles’ face gently, just enough that pressing a kiss to the bite on the back of his neck doesn’t take too much contortion. “Thursday’s soon, but we’ll hear from him before then. He’s alright. It’s just an e-mail he hasn’t had time to answer; it happens.”
From the sound of Allison’s feet on the stairs, she’s gone with her boots—thick and black, like her daddy’s big brown ones. The first time Chris put them on her, her smile could have lit the fucking room.
Stiles squeezes Peter so tight that for a half a second his shoulders hurt. He’d feel old if he didn’t know the problem was fucking anxiety.
The kiss he presses over Peter’s pulse lingers, a little more of the strain bleeding out of his back when he finally pulls away. The blue of Peter’s eyes is so different from Chris’—deep, like thick ice, deep water.
Stiles shoves gently at his chest. “Go on. Tell her I’ll be out in just a minute.”
Allison is every inch her father’s child; perceptive as all hell. If she sees that he’s been crying, she won’t stop until she knows why, and Stiles won’t fuck up today for her. Not for anything.
^^^^^^
When Allison was three, her grandpa Stilinski gave her a stuffed cat with a witch’s hat. It’s not entirely fair for that to be considered the inciting incident—Stiles had been reading her books about Halloween and magic and monsters since she was born; her fascination was maybe organic or maybe cultivated but either way, if she hadn’t already loved it his dad wouldn’t have gotten her Witchhazel.
After Witchhazel, though, everything kind of snowballed together—Allison carried her everywhere, watched Trick or Treat roughly 5,000 times to see her kitty’s namesake. She fell in love with Nightmare Before Christmas, forever giggling when Peter would sing the music with her under his breath, his eyes flaring bright red for Jack’s name. She loved Halloween with the same abandon that she had always loved mimicking Chris—so really, her costume for this year was completely inevitable in the most bizarrely specific way.
Somehow, she manages to be pretty damn graceful for a six year old in baby combat boots, swirling around in the kitchen trying to get a good look at the glittery black and purple wings on her own back. Peter’s taking the dogs out, so that’s at least two less whirlwinds in the kitchen. Knowing them, if they don’t sink their teeth into her wings between now and Halloween night, it’ll be a miracle.
“Can you take one from the back so he can see my wings?” Allison says, mid-spin. “He can’t see from the front.”
“Baby, I will take every angle you want me to, but daddy’s going to want to see your face more than the wings, and I can only send a couple at a time. Why don’t you come over here and pose by the door? I can see the pattern there in the light if you stand sideways.”
Getting her to stand any way at all is a challenge today. Sometimes, there’s a sharp, sweet ache in Stiles’ chest that flares with the realization that if anyone didn’t know, and didn’t see her next to Chris, they’d probably assume she was his. She is his; she’s all of theirs, but there’s still something he can’t quite call bittersweet in knowing that sometimes, she reminds him so much of himself it hurts.
He’s an artist, not a scientist. He doesn’t want to argue nature versus nurture; he’ll just pour the feeling into a painting he never sells that doesn’t make a goddamn bit of sense to anyone else, and hang it in his office.
In the sunlight through the back door, Allison’s wings shimmer, glittery purple and silver arrows that Stiles applied by hand over the last few weeks to the thin black mesh of fairy wings catching and winking. The tip of her bow rests against the toe of her boot, and stays unjostled for about .5 seconds, until she reaches up to add the name sign for Hawkeye with her right hand.
Two months ago, when she’d announced over dinner that she wanted to be Hawkeye, but if he was a fairy for Halloween, it had taken everything Stiles had not to laugh. Later that night, when she’d told him she thought it was perfect because she loved fairies and Hawkeye was almost as awesome as dad, he’d been grateful he managed to hold his tongue.
This’ll be the first year she’s old enough to really enjoy the Halloween fair at the school, and the first Chris isn’t here for her favorite time of year. He won’t be able to take her trick or treating, and trade off with Stiles or Peter carrying her back against his hip. By the time he goes with her again, she’ll able to walk the whole circuit, or an even bigger one, and they’ll all have lost something.
Stiles doesn’t hate Chris’ job; really he doesn’t. It’s important to him; it matters, but sometimes, he can’t help but be a little jealous. The Marines take, and take, and one day they might take more than everyone who loves Chris can bear to give. A little jealousy’s only human.
He doesn’t realize he’s been still too long looking down at the picture until Allison’s right there, tugging on his arm.
“How do I look? Let me see.”
He does, of course he does, but before he tilts the screen into her view Stiles leans down to kiss his daughter’s hair. “You look perfect. The best Hawkeye fairy anyone’s ever been.”
Her giggles can’t pull him all the way out of the hole his mind keeps trying to dig itself into, but they’re a hell of a ledge to rest on.
^^^^^^
Working with facepaint always reminds Stiles of working with chalk, or pastels. Even when his canvas moves, it’s soothing and charming in a way that takes him back to being 8. For a half hour while you draw Candyland in technicolor on your driveway, your mom can’t be dying. The world is too bright; the dust of the chalk and the rasp of the asphalt and the grit of the dirt and leaf bits are all too consuming to let anything else in.
A squirming seven year old isn’t exactly the same thing, but it’s a parallel memory—David Bowie reds and blues smoothed out into a lighting bolt that bursts into butterflies on her neck, past the sticky patch of dried syrup from her snow cone, past the jagged scar on her chin whose origin he doesn’t know, because this isn’t his child or even one of her friends. This little rock and roll princess is a stranger, but giving her wings is keeping him grounded.
He’s going to neglect to mention that to her parents, or the teachers running the event. There’s a dozen cracks they might make about the emotional natures of artists at the very best; at worst, they might have something to say about the stability of the person drawing on their kids, and that just wouldn’t be fair. He’s not stable right now, maybe, but he can play stable on TV. He’s been practicing a long time.
He finishes the butterfly rockstar, moves on to a tiger and then a preying mantis. After that there’s Frankenstein, but pink instead of green, stitches done with silver glitter paint that’s going to end up all over her parent’s car seats.
Next, there’s Allison, her hand tugging away from Peter’s so she can wrap her arms around Stiles’ neck for a hug before she gets started. There’s bits of leaves stuck to her wings already; Peter takes the chance to pick a couple off while she’s still and distracted, huddled against Stiles.
“Me and dad fed goats and they were scared of him,” Allison says. She knows why, of course she knows, but it’s so goddamn endearing that she can still say that like it should be an impossibility, like the concept of even a prey animal being afraid of Peter is laughably insane. For her, of course it is—what could be frightening about the man who takes her pain away when she falls, and banishes every bad dream by shifting and laying himself down across the door to her room? On some level, she knows, because how could he threaten a nightmare if he wasn’t something worse—but it doesn’t matter; it never will. He is rock solid safety, until she’s old enough that the monsters in her head aren’t things that would shy away from teeth.
Fortunately, they shouldn’t have to be ready for that for a long time.
“Dad’s pretty scary,” Stiles says, his smile widening when he can see Peter’s eyes flash, just to make Allison giggle.
“No, he isn’t! Mummies are scary.”
“Mummies, not giant werewolves who eat goats. Gotcha.”
“Papa!” She jabs him in the chest with her bow without any force, and it’s all so easy, so light. He understands sometimes, now, why his dad never got tired of him, even when he was a pain in the ass. It’s hard to get tired of someone who can ease your burdens without even trying.
“I think that’s a chupacabra,” Peter says, and gets her laughing again.
“No, no,” Stiles picks up his paint, and nods toward the stool. “They just drink the blood; dad could eat the whole goat.”
“Not without cooking it first.”
Stiles can feel Peter pulling the lightness out of him, too, just like their little girl. Even when it’s gossamer thin, they can spin it out of him, barely even trying.
It’s easy to banter while he works, easier still because Allison trusts him so much that she doesn’t even tell him what she wants, just assumes that he knows. She tilts her face toward him with eager expectation, ready for her finishing touches. He gathers purples and black and starts giving her an arrow on her cheek, fingers pausing every few seconds to let her talk, and shift, and look back and forth at Peter to give him a chance to weave in and out of her recounting of the afternoon so far.
Stiles is so lost in it, the voice that cuts in from the outside wouldn’t have reached him if it had been any less distinct.
"Fairy Hawkeye, how’s your bullseye from the air?”
Familiarity freezes him. Stiles would know that voice in his sleep; he has known it in his sleep, more times than he could ever count. The scar on the back of this man’s neck is the closest match in the world to his own, given by the same teeth, with the same power. Love itself comes in a million shades, but the strength of Peter's never wavers, and neither does theirs. The pull toward Chris rips a sound out of him that doesn't feel human—and still, Stiles has enough in him even with his eyes hot with tears to rein that draw in, enough willpower to wait, because in-between the two of them is the only person on this earth who could argue she might have missed Chris more than he and Peter have. They might have taken turns wearing his dog tags, but he and Peter have skipped their own days more than he can count, lying about a privilege they'd never forget so that their little girl can rub her fingers over the letters every time she misses her dad.
Her head jerks back, smearing purple across her cheek because Stiles didn't pull his hand back fast enough. It doesn't matter—the utter glee in the way Allison yells daddy will be living rent free in his head for the rest of his life.
He can hear the crowd gasping and cooing as she runs, and he's not oblivious enough to not be certain someone or ten is recording this— the way Allison flings herself off the stool so hard it tips over, how she drops her bow and sprints, how Chris catches her and lifts her like she weighs nothing at all. In even the glimpse of the brilliant blue of Chris' eyes that are visible before he buries them in her hair, they're visibly wet, overcome.
Stiles wouldn't blame anyone for pulling out their phone. Even if they weren't his, he doesn't think he could look away, either.
He watches as long as he can, past the sound of an elderly woman at the apple bobbing station sniffling, past Allison’s shoulders shaking and Chris murmuring something against her ear only the two of them can hear. He’s holding her so fucking tight, and still so carefully—he hasn’t messed up her wings, and somehow that detail is the last one Stiles can take.
He means to walk, and runs. It’s not like he had the time to build up much speed, and still it feels like hitting Chris knocks the wind out of him, because he’s really there, the familiar heavy weight of his fatigues. He smells like the fucking airport and cigarettes; he needs a shower or five and it doesn’t matter, it would never matter, because if Stiles could he’d slither his way inside his jacket to get closer to him than even the tight press of Chris’ arm around his waist could bring him.
“Holy—” Stiles says it, and swallows, and tries to not curse in front of other people’s children. He sobs instead, a broken gasp that Chris hushes with a murmur of his name.
His grip is so tight, Stiles would almost believe Chris could lift him, too.
“I missed you all so much.” The way he says it with the weight of a prayer is a reminder of temperance—no matter how fucking terrified he’s been, Stiles isn’t the one on the other side of the world, poised on the edge of bleeding into the sand at any minute. He has Allison, and Peter; he has his dad. When he leaves, Chris has pictures he tapes to the inside of his watch band; that’s what he gets to keep.
Peter’s hands on his back and Chris’ come to rest easy, and there’s so much that’s so suddenly clear—even for Peter, he’d been so calm that morning, is so calm and steady now. He isn’t grabbing at Chris like a drowning man, just nuzzling into his shoulder blade with the cool ease of a wolf marking what’s his.
There’s a moment, half a second at least where the you fucking bastard waiting in his throat moves all the way into his mouth. It’s almost out, feels inevitable—but when he untucks his face from Chris’ chest and looks up, Peter’s kissing the scar on the back of Chris’ neck with a reverence that aches. His eyes are squeezed shut; all the tension the rest of his body isn’t giving away laid out in the furrow of his brow and tightly drawn crow’s feet. The breath he lets out through his nose shakes, and Stiles can’t be mad, not even if he wants to be. Peter’s a goddamn liar, but Stiles knew what he married. He loves what he married, in every direction.
As far as prizes go, it’s a hell of a lot more than he expected to be taking home from the carnival.