Stiles carried a sleeping Isaac back into the beach house, the backpack strung over his left shoulder. He ascended the stairs slowly, fearful of waking his son. The sheer exhaustion etched into Isaac's tiny face, coupled with the blotchy redness in his pale cheeks, was only remedied for Stiles by the knowledge that the treatment had been successful enough to stop the child's wheezing. He sent up a silent prayer as he lay his son down on the bed, thankful that they had medication to help them.
"How is he?" Derek asked quietly from the doorway.
"So much better," Stiles responded as he tucked Isaac beneath a dry blanket. "But I'm guessing you already knew that," he added, looking up at his husband with one eyebrow lifted.
"I knew for sure that he was okay once Max began to calm down," Derek said, coming into the room and sitting down on the edge of the bed. "I can't believe how relaxed his lungs are," he whispered as he placed his hand on Isaac's. "I was sure we'd be on our way to the hospital within the hour."
"I hate to admit it, but I thought the same thing."
Derek gently touched his hand to Isaac's forehead and then weaved his fingers through his hair. "We should let him sleep," he said.
"Do you think it'll always be like this?" Stiles asked as he and Derek walked into the hall, his hands fidgeting as he looked back at Isaac.
Derek paused to think, his eyes following the rise and fall of his son's chest beneath the blanket. "I've been thinking about that a lot," he admitted. "Sometimes, it feels like illness is stealing everything from us. Like it enjoys hiding in the shadows and waiting for opportune moments to strike. It takes away our time and energy, our happiness, plans, dreams, relationships, and paychecks. And it's hard not to let it, right? It's relentless. It's hard not to give in and slow down and let it consume us. We tell everyone that we won't let it define us, that we're fighting it with medication and positivity. Again and again we rearrange our priorities as a family and push through each flare as best we can. It's not ideal, and most of the time it really fucking sucks. But sometimes we're lucky enough to get a reprieve, a brief period of easy breathing and hive-free living. An afternoon like this after watching our little boy struggle to breathe for almost 24-hours," Derek said as he gestured toward Isaac sleeping peacefully. "What you two go through isn't fair or inspirational. It's heartbreaking and difficult on so many complicated levels. You know I'd take it away if I could. We've spoken about that. But in the meantime, I think we need to stop waiting for the next storm to come and just enjoy the calm. We need to start embracing the other parts of our lives.."
"I don't know if I can do that," Stiles whispered, his fatherly instincts gearing up. He suddenly itched to put a second blanket on Isaac, to tuck the sides neatly beneath his back and push his fingers through his soft curls just as Derek had done just moments before.
"I think we need to try. Because honestly? I'm starting to think that we're too busy letting it win to actually enjoy our lives."
"But it is our lives," Stiles added, feeling hopeless. It was easy for Derek to make such a comment; as much as they suffered through everything together, Stiles' experience with illness had been so much more isolating as a parent.
"Part of our lives. One slice of the pie. We need to start focusing on the other things, like this vacation, and our friends. The ones downstairs who have actually been a huge help during the last 24 hours."
"Just because Isaac isn't wheezing right now doesn't mean he's out of the woods." Stiles could feel his stubbornness turning on.
"Max will start screaming her head off the second something's wrong," Derek reminded his husband. "She is deeply connected with Isaac. Now that we know he's under the weather, we can watch for her reaction downstairs. And if he wakes, you know he'll yell for one of us. He always does."
Stiles hated to admit that Derek was right. They did need to take a deep breath and step away from the part of their lives that was medication and anxiety and stress. They needed to stop waiting for the next bad thing to happen and focus on the good in their lives. For a moment, he wondered if maybe he was jealous of how easy it was for Derek to do just that. How could he just shut off the anxiety of never knowing what was coming next? Of worrying? It had been a part of their lives for so long now. It seemed like a constant, and it hadn't been until just a few minutes ago that Stiles had realized how seriously unhealthy it all was.
But who could blame him? He knew he shouldn't feel guilty for what they had been through, for what they were going through on a day-to-day basis. It almost felt the same as after his mom had died. Each day, he and his father tried so hard to tread water, to keep their heads above. And some days they had failed and the grief had consumed them. Stiles started to think that maybe they'd been grieving as a family for all of the losses that Derek had listed. Illness could be so relentless, so ruthless. He remembered how hard it had been to pull his father and himself out of that horrible grief all of those years ago, and part of him knew that it would never really be gone 100%. Was that the role that illness was also playing in their lives?
"I can see the gears in your head are turning," Derek commented softly, his hand reaching out for his husband's.
"It's just...do you remember what it was like after the fire? Like the months and years following? Was it hard to stop thinking about it, replaying everything? Because that's what all of this feels like." Stiles took a slow, deep breath and steadied himself. "It feels just like after my mom died, and I know it's completely different, but in so many ways it's just not." He took another breath, surprised he'd let how he was feeling out. "I'm probably making no sense at all and confusing the hell out of you and-"
"I do remember, and I agree." Derek went silent and looked up at the ceiling, his eyes closing tightly as though to hold back tears. "It was really hard to let any of it go because even though it was painful and hard, it was mine. My memories, my experiences and feelings."
"That's what this feels like to me," Stiles said with a sniffle. He bit his lip to keep the tears away and took slow, calculated breaths. "Like no matter how hard we try, our lives will never be completely free of illness. It will always be waiting, lingering. There will always be doctors appointments and medications and hospital stays. Secretly, I mope about it. I stress about it and become super neurotic about Isaac's medication and breathing. And then I see other families in the doctor's office or hospital with something so much worse, and I feel guilty for not wanting be happy that it's just asthma because honestly? There's no such thing as 'just asthma' and-"
"Relax," Derek whispered, his voice floating in the cool air of the hallway as he pulled Stiles in close. He kissed his forehead and wiped away the tears running beneath his eyes. "I'm not trying to discount how you feel. I think and feel the same exact things."
"You're just saying that because I'm a blubbering mess right now." Stiles sniffled as he lay his head on Derek's chest.
"God, I wish that were true," Derek said with a sad chuckle, his demeanor shifting as he began to shed his own set of tears. "I worry about our babies so much that I'm surprised it doesn't throw me over the edge."
"Maybe," Stiles proposed, pulling his head away for just a moment, "we should make more of an effort, like you said earlier, to enjoy the moment. Even when Isaac's sick or Max is melting down. Maybe we can do better. For us. For our family."
"It sounds a lot easier when we say it, doesn't it?"
"Yeah," Stiles agreed. "But now that I think about it, I think the kids might need it even more than we do."
"This is why I married you," Derek said, his voice lifting as he pulled Stiles back into his arms. Together, they gently rocked side-to-side as though dancing, a calmness finally between them. There were no more words for a while, just the steady hum of their breathing and the soft creaking of the wooden boards beneath their feet.
x
Derek and Stiles joined Scott and Allison downstairs. Tessa sat brushing her doll's hair on the carpet, a set of out outfits and accessories spread around her, and Max alternated between shaking and biting a plastic ring of keys atop a perfectly spread blanket.
"Thanks, again, for watching over Max," Stiles said to Allison. He tried not to show that he knew about her struggles from the last year by avoiding her gaze.
"She's a pleasure," Allison replied, and Stiles could hear the smile in her comment. It gave him the courage to look up at her for just a second. Her eyes were transfixed on Max, her grin wide and eyes more full of joy than they'd been in a long, long time; it only made his knowledge of her illness heavier.
Stiles felt Derek's hand squeeze his, and he wondered if maybe Derek had know but hadn't told him. Could he sense cancer the same way he could sense anxiety and asthma? They'd promised no secrets, but that had proven to be harder than either of them had imagined. The $15 million dollars worth of art he'd found out about last night had been both shocking and exciting news. This, though, wasn't Derek's secret to share, or even Stiles', and he wasn't sure if Scott wanted Derek to know.
Because although Derek and Scott had a father-son-like relationship, it had always been pretty strained. As Stiles thought back over the last few days, he realized that Derek and Scott had barely spoken, and each time that they had, the entire room had been able to feel the tension.
He forced the feed running through his brain to stop. He needed to relax, to take a deep breath and enjoy the rest of their quiet, rainy day.
"Why did Isaac get to go watch a movie in the car with Daddy?" Tessa whined, throwing her doll down and crossing her arms across her chest; Stiles knew that his and Derek's entrance to the scene had caused her reaction.
"Mommy and I explained this to you before, Tess. We didn't watch a movie in the car. Isaac was very sick and needed medicine," Scott reminded her.
"But he already took his medicine in the house!"
Even Max could sense that the kid was on the verge of a tantrum; she'd let her keys drop to the blanket and had her eyes glued to the dark-haired preschooler across from her.
"Tessa, why don't we go for a walk?" Allison tried coaxing.
"It's pouring outside!" she whined, pointing toward the window. "Are you stupid or something?!"
Stiles had the sudden urge to take the dolls and dresses from her and throw them in the garbage, his mind already writing the litany he'd be reading to her about what happens to little girls who are fresh. But Scott was already standing up and had Tessa by the arm.
"You need to apologize to Mommy for calling her stupid!" Scott demanded.
"No!" she yelled, trying to yank her arm away. Scott was too strong, though, and because of her frustration she began to cry.
"Scott, you don't-"
"Allison, we need to start handling this before it gets any worse! Her behavior is unacceptable!"
"Of course it is! But that doesn't mean we need to do it like that!" Allison argued, pointing at Scott's grip on their daughter. The second he let go, Tessa began to scream and grab accessories from around her, which she threw across the room in angry bursts. Her continual screaming made Max cover her ears and begin to cry, senses overloaded by the sound. She crawled over to Derek for comfort, who lifted her into his arms and walked to the other side of the house to calm her down.
"Tessa!" Scott yelled, but she was having an all-out tantrum, pulling books from shelves and pillows from the couch and chucking them wherever she saw fit. Stiles tried to keep his anger at bay, because this didn't really involve him, wasn't even about him and his family, but he couldn't help it, because Tessa was ruining the peace he'd tried so hard to conjure within himself, and he was not going to allow her to continue this without a fight.
Although he'd been through this more than enough times with Isaac, Stiles was reminded of an incident with a student named Jake just a few weeks before. School was winding down, and although administration had warned about pulling artwork from the hallways and classrooms down early for fear of jolting students from their comfortable routines, many tired teachers had started the process of packing up for summer.
Stiles had been one of them.
He was moving classrooms and had an entire room of files, bookshelves, and manipulatives to go through, so of course he'd started his summer cleaning early. Stiles had cleared a bulletin board and had the students help him reorganize the classroom library, making a box of lower level books for the other first grade teachers to weed through. He'd emptied an entire shelf of math center manipulatives for first grade and returned the bins to the storage closet down the hall one day while his class was at gym. He'd felt great about it, actually, until he'd brought his class back. The students immediately continued with their Wednesday routine of completing independent reading. Everyone, that is, except for Jake.
Jake, a tiny boy with floppy blonde hair and dark brown eyes, had stood just in the front of the room while the rest of the students pushed around him and made their way over to the bins of books in the library. Stiles hadn't noticed him at first, because Angela had needed a band-aid and Mya had won a Way to Go card for good behavior in the hallway, but it wasn't long before the Jake's heavy breathing caught his attention. The boy was standing at the front of the room with his shoulders up high, arms straight, and fists clenched. His grunting had captured the attention of the entire class, their books open in their laps but eyes focused on Jake. This wasn't the first time it had happened, and it didn't help that the boy had had a difficult time making friends.
Out of context, Stiles knew Jake's behavior would be easily misjudged. He'd been known to throw things and yell out expletive comments when frustrated. It had taken hundreds of emails, stacks of documentation, and more meetings than Stiles could keep track of to push for Jake to receive an evaluation. And even after all of that, it had taken four months for the Department of Education to get their act together. A miracle, if Stiles knew one, because there had been cases where students had waited upwards of six months or more. By March, the boy had started receiving services for what had been labeled as a language-based learning disability. That meant a flurry of work with a speech therapist, counselor, occupational therapist, and resource room teacher. Stiles knew deep within his heart that the boy was somewhere on the autism spectrum, and though he would never be allowed tell a parent that those were his beliefs, he knew from their emails, phone calls, and meetings that they felt it might be that, too.
The stomping and tears began the moment Stiles looked over from his desk. Within seconds, the boy was grabbing books lining the whiteboard and chucking them across the room. Their pages splayed out as the flew, hitting desks, walls, and floors. The children in the library ducked, hiding beneath their own books. Some of them laughed, others yelled; Stiles made a mental note to deal with the bullying after.
Stiles hadn't yet realized that the changes he'd made to the shelf in the right corner of the room was the reason for Jake's outburst, but that didn't stop him from going into action. He immediately called across the hall for Ashley's assistant, Laurie, and had her watch the class while he somehow managed to pull Jake into the hallway and into his lap, arms holding him tight to calm him down.
"We're okay," Stiles whispered, a slight wheeze trailing his breaths from the physical struggle. "Breathe." It took him a few minutes to get Jake to relax in his arms, his breaths evening out and fists loosening. "Do you want to talk about it?" Stiles finally asked, Jake shaking his head to say no.
It was always no. Stiles had assumed this, but he always asked, because he was secretly hoping that the speech therapy or the resource room time was maybe developing some of the skills Jake tried so desperately to master. Jake had the words, could form sentences and decipherable speech, but he couldn't put his feelings into those words because his brain was not wired like everyone else's.
"Do you know what Isaac's favorite thing to do is?" Stiles asked, feeling Jake relax as he shook his head again. The boy loved hearing stories about Isaac and Max, and Stiles enjoyed telling them. "He loves loves loves to read books."
Jake loved reading, too, so this statement had piqued his attention. When Stiles had completed reading assessments, Jake had already mastered a third grade level in first grade. He'd had to scour the book room to find higher-level books for Jake and found it difficult to keep up with the numbers of books in which he consumed.
"He has many favorites, but," Stiles started, reaching over to grab a book that Jake had thrown into the hallway, "his absolute favorite author is Shel Silverstein."
"Where the Sidewalk Ends," Jake read softly.
"Let's take a look," Stiles said as he opened the book, stopping at his favorite Silverstein poem. "Ah, this is a good one. Spaghetti, spaghetti all over the place," he started, adjusting the book so that Jake could see the picture. "Up to my elbows-up to my face, over the carpet and under the chairs, into the hammock and wound round the stairs, filling the bathtub and covering the desk, making the sofa a mad mushy mess.
The party is ruined, I'm terribly worried, the guests have all left (unless they're all buried). I told them, "Bring presents." I said, "Throw confetti." I guess they heard wrong 'cause they all threw spaghetti!"
The happy laughter that followed allowed Stiles to slowly lead Jake back into the classroom, but not after a few more poems and a little bit of conversation about sidewalks, Sarah Sylvia Cynthia Stout, the shelf of math center bins that had disappeared over the course of one class period, and coping strategies. As he watched Jake work on a sheet of math problems at his desk an hour later, he wondered if maybe he was handling him all wrong. He hadn't denounced his behavior with yelling in front of the class, and it probably hadn't been good that he kept leaving his 28 other students with an assistant.
"His parent's are divorcing," Laurie had mentioned quietly to Stiles as they watched, but pretended not to watch, as Jake followed Stiles' directions and picked up all of the books he'd thrown, replacing them to their places on the whiteboard ledge.
"Where'd you hear that?" Stiles asked, knowing how false information often floated around the school.
"Ash has his older sister. She's been crying about it on the playground for a week now."
"Thanks for the info, and thanks for helping me out," he said, sighing. "You're a lifesaver."
"No problem," Laurie said, waving him off. Stiles had thought she'd left, but a moment later, he felt her hand on his shoulder and could hear her whispering in his ear. "For what it's worth, I think you're doing a really great job with Jake. I was an assistant for his class last year, and this," she said, gesturing gently toward the front of the room where the books were appearing, one-by-one, on their ledge, "was a stage we never reached with Jake. I swear, you are a true miracle worker, Stilinski! I don't know how you do it."
It had been one of those far-and-few teaching moments that really made a person smile. Most of the time, teaching was standards, testing, politics, administration, and parents. Someone had tacked up a cartoon in the faculty room picturing a tired teacher stating, "Most days, teaching feels like giving back, but today it feels like giving blood...and a little bone marrow." He hated how much he could relate to that stupid cartoon, and he hated how his vacation was really feeling like that as well.
"We're okay," Stiles whispered to himself. "Breathe." He wished he could scoop Tessa up and press down on her arms to calm her. Stiles wasn't sure how he knew it would work. Was it the tone in her voice? The way she was thrashing her arms and legs?
"No!" Tessa was screaming, straining her vocal chords. "Noooo!" She kicked at Scott as he tried to approach her, but she was no match for Allison who came from behind and squeezed her close, slowly pulling her into her lap on the floor. Tessa continued to yell, but Allison was stronger and was able to keep her grip on the child.
It had been the emotion, Stiles decided from his place on the couch. He'd been able to sense her sadness, how deeply affected she was about something deeper than Isaac getting to watch a movie in the car with Scott. Tessa's deep sobbing confirmed this for Stiles. She had her arms and legs wrapped around Allison and was holding on for dear life. She was calling for Allison over and over, Allison responding with, "I'm right here, baby. I'm right here."
As a parent, Stiles knew when a kid was being a kid, and when there was truly something wrong. Scott got down on his knees next to Allison and Tessa, the three of them now weeping softly as they held on to each other so tightly it seemed like they were one.
Stiles took that as his cue to go and check on Isaac, a tear slipping down his own cheek as he climbed the stairs.
