You've got the love I need to see me through - Baby in the Pack

2

Everybody sleeps in the next morning. Everyone but Derek. He's always up early, even after they had a late night watching movies and playing games. He sits in the kitchen with the local newspaper on his tablet and a cup of coffee. The paper boy doesn't come this far into the Preserve, so he digests his news in digital form. It's too early to start breakfast yet, it'll be an hour or even two before the others will wake up.

His coffee cup is half empty when the quiet sound of bare feet reaches his ears. A moment later he hears the familiar heartbeat and he gets up to fill another cup from the pot for Stiles.

"Morning," Stiles says over a yawn, receiving the warm cup of coffee with a grateful smile. He takes a seat at the kitchen table across from Derek, planting his elbows on the table to hold his warm coffee cup up with two hands wrapped around it.

It's quiet and peaceful, so much so that Derek doesn't register that they have a visitor before they're already knocking on the back door. He kicks his chair back, suddenly alert because there's an unknown werewolf on his back porch.

"Who... How?" Stiles utters, frowning at the door in confusion. Through the screen door the blurry features of a female werewolf with dark, short hair are visible.
Derek knows that whoever it is can't have bad intentions, because the wards Stiles has put up around the house would have alerted them to that. Still, he can't help but warn Stiles to be cautious when the young man gets up to open the door.
"Cristina? What are you doing here? I haven't seen you in..." He gulps and Derek follows his gaze to the young woman's feet, where there's a maxi cosi with a small child in it.

"Eighteen months?" The woman answers blithely. "Sounds about right."

Derek quickly thinks back to all he knows about this Cristina. She's a werewolf that went to Stiles' university. They dated for about a year, their relationship nowhere near serious enough to warrant meeting the packs or anything like that. After all, Stiles was bound to the Hale pack as emissary in training and he'd assured Derek over and over again that this was his place, that he would never leave. And Cristina was next in line for Alpha of her pack, so she wasn't about to uproot all that. They'd both agreed it was just a fun college thing, no strings attached. Only now it seemed that that wasn't completely true anymore.

"I thought you went abroad for your minor," Stiles stammers and Derek remembers how Cristina leaving called a natural end to the mostly casual relationship.

"Among other things," the petite werewolf answers with a shrug. She has her height in common with Lydia, along with a love for high heels.

"Among other things," Stiles repeats with an understandable tone of hysterics in his voice. He has paled consideringly, staring at the woman and the child.

"She's yours," Cristina offers, sounding a bit clipped but sincere. "You can have your Alpha check, if you want." She picks up the maxi cosi and holds it out to them. The little girl inside it is sleeping soundly, unaware of what's happening around her.

Derek squeezes Stiles' arm in reassurance as the younger man stares at him bewilderedly. The Alpha has no idea what to do in this situation, although he's getting a pretty rough idea about why Cristina's here. He's already preparing himself for having their lives thoroughly uprooted.

Derek takes the maxi cosi and gingerly puts it on the kitchen table. He stares at the small child. It's still a baby, although she's chubby enough for him to estimate her to be about eight or nine months old. He remembers laughing at Laura's baby pictures, how she looked like the marshmallow man with all the little rolls of fat. His mom told him it was around this age babies generally learned how to sit up on their own, she called the rolls their little bumper cushions. The child has dark hair like Cristina, a shade or two darker than that of Stiles - more like Derek and Cora, he thinks unbidden. He's inclined to say she has his emissary's nose though, the tip turning up a little.
He glances back at Stiles, who's watching him nervously, biting his cuticles to a pitiful state that will surely get him a firm reprimand from Lydia. Cristina on the other hand seems calm and collected. If she's feeling any emotions at all, she's doing an impressive job of pushing them down. She even seems fine with an unfamiliar Alpha hovering over her child. Everything points in the direction of her speaking the truth, of her coming here with a clear purpose.

Derek forces himself to get this over with, if only for the sake of Stiles' fingernails. He leans over and carefully noses around the baby's body. She's a collection of unfamiliar smells, the strongest being that of a car and the faint bleach smell of cheap motel bed sheets. They've been on the road. She smells like her mother and of laundry soap. He smells the urine in her diaper; it's not that pungent, she must not have been wearing it for that long yet. He tries to get to her base scent, the scent that makes her her. It should be composed of the scents of her parents, no matter how non-attending they were.
He straightens out again, relieved that the child is still sleeping. He catches Stiles eyes, those honey gold eyes that are wide with worry. "I can't say with a hundred percent certainty, it's not like a DNA test."

"Those aren't infallible either," Stiles mumbles around the thumb he's maiming.

"She's yours," Derek whispers on an exhale. "Cristina is telling the truth."

"She's mine?" Stiles slowly lowers his thumb, a thin thread of spit following it from his open mouth. He stares at the sleeping child as if he's only really seeing her now.

Derek turns to Cristina, positioning himself between her and his packmate. "Why are you here? Why now?"

"The child is human," she answers. "And I've got responsibilities."

"Responsibilities as a mother," Derek argues, folding his arms in front of his chest.

"I've carried her for nine months, I've breastfed her for six," Cristina states, voice nearly void of emotion. "I never wanted kids."

"Does your pack know?" Derek is suddenly filled with the vision of her pack finding out she had a child and coming after it. Coming after Derek's pack.

She nods. "I gave birth at home." Her face betrays some emotion then, though it hardens into resolve quickly again. "Look, I know this is sudden and maybe I should've told you from the start. But I didn't. We were never serious, never supposed to be." She's speaking to Stiles, but the young man is still staring at his newly acquired daughter and it's Derek who's facing Cristina. "I never wanted kids and I don't have the kind of stable home situation a kid needs." She gestures at the room, still standing in the doorway. She hasn't set foot inside, doesn't pretend or assume that she can just walk into another pack's home. "You do, Stiles. I know. You were always talking about home when we were together. Your friends, your Alpha." She throws Derek a look he thinks is supposed to be significant.
Cristina shifts her gaze from Derek to Stiles, who he feels standing next to him. The young man is leaning against the back of his arm, one hand fisted in the material of his shirt on his back. Stiles is literally holding himself up by the back of Derek's shirt.
"Her name is Billie, but we've been calling her Baby." Cristina gestures to a large military style duffle bag behind her on the porch. "All of her stuff is in there, her papers too. Your name is on the birth certificate, it shouldn't be that difficult to give her your last name. There's legal papers in there too, giving you full custody. I've already signed everything. All you have to do is sign your name and send them back to the lawyer's office."

"Oh my god." The words sound punched out of Stiles. His hand on Derek's back grips the shirt even tighter.

"Are you sure?" Derek presses.

Her jaw clenches and she nods. "Yes. I have - We have no place for a child. I really feel she will be better off with your pack."

"Because she's human," Derek says and Cristina doesn't deny it. He remembers Stiles telling him she is from a pretty unconventional pack, not a tight family unit like most werewolf packs tend to be, but made up out of an assortment of people, not all of them savoury. He remembers Stiles saying there was a lot of strife within the pack. In his gut he feels like every child needs a family, a warm home. Cristina's pack never sounded like a welcoming place, no matter how nice the girl herself was. He hopes the girl can maybe change things for the better when she becomes the Alpha.

In the end, Cristina leaves before the baby wakes up. "I've already said goodbye," she says, a slight tremor in her voice but steel resolve in her eyes. She plucks a lilac bunny with a flat plushy square for a body from her inside pocket, a pacifier clipped to one of the corners. "This is her favourite."

And then she's gone, leaving Derek and Stiles to stare at the little girl who is peacefully sleeping through the biggest event of her - and her father's - life.