chasing little tails

[malia]

His response is so very him it almost catches her off guard for a moment. She wants to laugh, because it’s funny. He’s right, this is part of who he is, and she loves this part just as much as all of the other parts. But the moment doesn’t seem right for laughter, so she just rolls her eyes, her thumbs still tenderly stroking his cheek. She subconsciously moves her other hand to one of the buttons on his open shirt, rolling it between her fingers as she just enjoys the closeness. The nearness of him after a morning that had left all three of them rattled to say the least.

A comfortable silence settles between them there as she feels his hands move to her bare back, his fingers soft against her sensitive skin. And it’s like he speaks his next words right into her heart. She tenses, thinking back to her first few full moons after she’d shifted back. They were out of control. She had to be chained up, kept away from anyone that she might be able to hurt, including him. She hadn’t been able to control her body or her shift or what she did because of it. And there’s a very real fear over the fact that she doesn’t know what it’ll be like for Ava.

She looks into his eyes, her hand pressing against his chest as she feels his heart beat, his anxiety rising again as he thinks about all of the things they don’t know. And again, she has no answers to offer him. But she knows what she wants for that night. “We’ll do whatever we have to do,” She tells him softly. “I’ll hold her all night if I have to, or maybe we can swaddle her.” They’re not great options and definitely not enough to take away the weight of her anxiety. “We’ll keep her between us all night long, and when she needs us, we’ll do whatever we need to do.”

Maybe Scott could sleep over that night in case Ava needed her alpha. And if there was any pain involved, Malia knows she can take care of some of that. And they can hold her and make sure that she knows she’s safe, and not alone, and that they’re right there with her. But she doesn’t have any more words to offer him, no comfort. No reassurance that it’s not a big deal, or that they’ll just cross that bridge when they come to it. No confidence that it’s not going to be awful or that Ava is going to understand what’s happening, or that there’s any way they can stop it.

“We have a little time to figure it out,” She tells him. She wishes there was some way she could make him understand how confident she is in his ability to be Ava’s daddy, even this part of her. “Maybe full moons won’t affect her yet?”

[stiles]

The full moon feels like some kind of deadline looming before them right now. It had been the first thing he searched after he parked the car, desperate to know the next time Ava would shift. And since that was impossible to actually know, knowing the next full moon was second best. But the problem is that he has memories - vivid memories - of both Scott and Malia’s first full moons. He remembers chaining them up and watching them struggle and feeling vulnerable and helpless.

And they can’t. They absolutely cannot lock their daughter up.

Malia’s voice is still so calm, but he sees the worry on her face, and he wonders if her mind is filled with the same memories. He doesn’t know how it couldn’t. And then, he wonders if her mind shifts to Ava the same way his does, imagining her fear this morning multiplied for an entire night. But she sounds like he has for years when she does speak. She becomes the voice of reason, the problem solver, the one who’s prepared to face any challenge.

They’ll hold her. They’ll swaddle her. They’ll keep her nestled between them in their bed all night. They’ll be right there with her through every minute of it.

Stiles bites his tongue to keep from pointing out that he will be useless. He can’t anchor her. He shouldn’t risk it, but he knows already that he’ll be willing to be bitten or scratched if it means that the baby feels comforted. Anything to keep her safe and free of pain and free from restraints. He’s not sure he’s ever regretted anything more than he regrets resorting to those measures for Scott and Malia when it’s now his own child.

“No one knows,” he tells her, still rubbing those same circles on her lower back. “She apparently felt like she needed to show up her cousin. Olive hasn’t shown any signs of shifting.”

He feels that same wave of nausea at the thought of the unknown that lays before them, but he forces it down. With a sigh, he lets himself fall back against the back of the couch, and Malia follows suit, resting her head on his chest. He pulls her closer, rubbing wider circles on her back. “What does it feel like?” he asks softly, realizing he wants to know and understand in a way he never has before now. “When you shift?”

[malia]

Olive hadn’t shown any signs of shifting. And that seems more normal for their kind, at least Malia thinks so. It wasn’t like she’d grown up around a large group of others like her who could teach her how things work. At least Derek had had his family, when they were still around. But then, she wasn’t like them either. She could fully shift from the first moment she changed, and it seems Ava could too. And when she had killed her mother, all that power that was lingering inside of her seemed to transfer into Malia herself. She wonders what the implications of that will be for Ava’s future. Maybe she would be more powerful than any of them. Maybe she would be the next Alpha.

She shakes the thoughts off. Ava was just a tiny baby. She didn’t want to think about her growing up, shouldering the weight of all of that responsibility. But perhaps it would explain why she’d made a full shift when she was so tiny.

She lies her head down against Stiles’s chest, closing her eyes as she listens to his heart beat. HIs hand still strokes her back slowly, soft circles against her skin. She’s not really prepared for his question. They’ve never talked about it. He’s been with her so many times through a shift and she can remember some that were very harrowing for him. Times when she’d come very close to really hurting him….or worse. Times when she had absolutely not been in control of anything happening with her body or anything she was doing. At least the human part of her hadn’t been in control.

She doesn’t think very often about how it actually feels though. How would she even explain it to him?

“It tingles at first,” She tells him. “Like all of your hairs stand up on end. Everything gets louder and brighter and more intense. It used to hurt,” She says honestly, stopping to think. “At least I think it did. But it doesn’t any more, not really. Everything just kind of, shifts.” She rests her hand against his belly, pressing soft kisses to his shirted chest between thoughts. “It doesn’t feel good, but it doesn’t feel terrible. And then once it’s over, it feels amazing.”

[stiles]

He’s never asked her before. He’s witnessed it countless times, the latest being just a week and a half ago on Christmas morning. But he’s never stopped to wonder how it feels, or what truly happens to her body. He knows what it feels like to watch. What it feels like to feel claws graze his skin while that fear curdles in the pit of his stomach as his brain screams to put distance between them and his heart insists that she would never hurt him. What it feels like to restrain her while trying to convince himself that it’s the right thing. What it feels like to sit with her while she wars with herself until she’s drained and exhausted, curled on her side on a cold floor. But he’s never stopped to think about what it feels like to be her in that moment.

Not until he watched his daughter in that same moment.

Now, he listens to her, but his mind is on Ava. It happened in a flash - one second, Ava was fine, and he looked away, and the next, she was a tiny helpless pup sprawled on her back. One second, it was a normal morning, and the next, according to Malia, her world would’ve burst into technicolor. Stiles had yelled for Malia, not realizing that Ava’s hearing would be heightened, but she had whimpered loudly then. Maybe it had hurt her tiny ears. That same feeling of nausea settles in the pit of his stomach when Malia says that it hurts, or at least it hurt at first. Maybe that pain and that fear had kept it from feeling amazing for Ava. But maybe the next time would be better.

Stiles listens to her quietly until she’s done, and then he brings his hand to her face. Gently, he guides her away from his chest so he can hold her gaze again. His other hand comes to cup her face, his thumbs rubbing her soft skin. “You’re incredible, you know that?” He’s not sure if he’s saying it because of the way she handled this morning or because this has been her entire life, but he needs to say it. “You were so good with her. You knew exactly what to do while I just fucking stood there. You were… You were incredible.” It’s a sad smile he gives her, still weighed down from the emotions of the morning, but a smile all the same. “You must be her anchor.”

[malia]

She doesn’t do well with compliments. She never really has. She’s not sure what to do with them. They usually lead her to some kind of awkward small talk that she doesn’t like, or a compliment that she feels like she needs to return that she doesn’t mean. But it’s not that way with him. When he told her something like this, he meant it. And he means it now, and her heart swells a little as looks into his eyes. It’s was more than just the fact that ever since they’d connected as mates, all she ever wanted to do was please him, to make him proud of her, this was bigger than that because this was about their baby.

He thought she was amazing with their baby, and that meant more to her than she could ever say. She leans in to kiss him, letting her nose nuzzle against his before he can speak again. But his smile is sad when he starts talking about himself. He thinks he failed her, Ava, but he didn’t. She feels a very real need to make him understand that he didn’t.

She moves her thumb back to his cheek, still smooth from the mornings shave. “This is my life,” she tells him. “It’s all I know. I barely remember anything before it.” It was the truth. Those memories she had of human life, when it was what she thought she was and she had a normal family and what seemed like a normal life. They were so long gone, so far in a distant past that doesn’t seem real, this supernatural life….this hovering between two worlds (sometimes caught in one) was all she knew. For a lot of it she had been alone. The same kind of fears that they had about Ava, were fears that she dealt with on her own.

It has literally colored her life for as long as she can remember. And sure, Stiles had been a part of this supernatural word for a while, but not like she had. Not in the throws of it. At the end of the day, even though he was pack, he was still human. And there had to be some kind of comfort in that.

“It’s still new to you, being this deep,” She continues finally. “It’ll get easier. And besides, we need you just the way you are. You keep us human.”

She leans down to kiss him again. “I guess that makes us a pretty good team.”

[stiles]

Sometimes, it’s hard for him to believe they’re the same people they were a year ago. It feels fitting now that he stumbled across her in her coyote form in a random backyard after years of not seeing her. And then he had brought her home with him. She had fallen into his bed before he even knew what they were doing, and then gotten pregnant almost immediately. And a year later, it’s hard to even remember what that felt like when they were mostly strangers, trying to make sense of the hand they’d been dealt.

Now, it’s hard to picture her as the Malia she had been then. It had felt like love, the way he felt about her then. But it had been that 17 year-old version of love that he had felt that first time, during the blizzard, when they couldn’t seem to get close enough fast enough. And he knew that he meant it when he told her that he loved her that weekend they went away together, when the idea of his child growing inside her still felt foreign and impossible. But that feeling paled in comparison to the way he felt about her the day she gave birth. Or the way he felt about her the day he asked her to marry him. Or the way he felt about her today, watching her care for their daughter like this role was truly the one she was always meant to stumble into.

It is new to him. Stiles finds himself nodding as she talks, pulling his hand away from her face to run it through his hair. It feels different to him now that it’s his own child. Malia and Scott were his equals. They were his age. But now, it’s a baby - his baby - and that changes everything. Still, her smile mirrors his own as she tells him that he keeps them human, and it tugs at his heart in a way that leaves a lump in his throat.

He meets her lips in that kiss as she leans in. Her hand is warm against the nape of his neck, fingers twirling the ends of his hair as she tells him they make a great team. “The best team,” he tells her sincerely as he brings his hand back down to her backside, pulling her just a little closer. “And we’ll figure this out.”

Of that, he felt certain. It may have been the only thing he felt certain of this morning, but he had watched the deft way she navigated what had seemed like a crisis to him, and he had fallen more in love with her in the process. And if he had her by his side, they could figure out the rest. Together.