In hindsight he thought he was probably a little sick, but the first thing that made him smile wasn't any of Derek's subtle coaxings to and it wasn't anything anyone purposefully did to try and cheer him up, but really he didn't think he should have been so surprised that it was Maggie who made him smile.
His Pack were still wandering around like they had lost a limb or some other significant part of them, their heads hung and their movements slow; but then Stiles actually thought that was a pretty good way of describing how they all felt. Accurate. It was like the universe had suddenly shifted, the axis tilting until it felt like everything under their feet was starting to crumble and fall away. It had only been a week now and most of them were still clinging to the rubble and trying to haul themselves back up to solid ground again.
It hadn't hit anyone harder than anyone else, but it seemed like it had. The difference was that Stiles knew different people had different ways of coping. Maggie reverted to sarcasm just like Sax and Brady blew off steam playfighting, Mona cried a lot and spent all of her time comforting Callum, whilst Lee became a permanent attachment at Isaac's side seeking the comfort only a mate could bring. Predictably Jason reverted to getting under everyone's feet and becoming generally as aggravating as possible, but people let it slide. Martin was like Stiles in that he'd just withdrawn inside of himself, watching the world from a distance and wondering when it was going to feel like it was turning again.
He knew that was understandable simply for the reason that they'd all lost and Alpha and their friends, but Martin had lost his sister in Lucy. It would take him longer to heal and they all understood that, which was why for the most part they left him to his own devices. The only person he really seemed to let near was Maggie, but then everyone let Maggie in.
"Does it get any easier?" Martin asked him after a week when they were alone in the kitchen, his blue eyes rimmed with red even though none of them had seen him cry since those first couple of days. They were sitting side by side at the kitchen island, the room empty save for them.
Stiles mimicked Martin's posture, staring down into his coffee cup like it was going to give him all the answers he could ever hope for. And he really wished it would. He wished he knew how to handle this, wished he knew what the right thing was to say. The only experience he had with loss was how it felt to lose his mum as a kid, but he knew that even if he'd had zero experience, Martin still would have been asking him that question. He was Alpha, it was his job to comfort and advise and honestly, it wasn't really anything different to what he'd been doing before.
He pressed close against Martin's side, Brady's scent wafting towards him from the slightly overlarge t-shirt that the other wolf was wearing. "In a way," he admitted, scratching his cheek, "But it's less about moving on and more about learning how to find a new way to live."
He couldn't help but think of Derek, of how Derek had lost everything and of how Derek even blamed himself for that fact a little bit. More than a little bit if he was being honest. Thinking back to how Derek had been back then he knew that the broodiness and the snappish attitude was just Derek's coping mechanism. He was someone who had lost everything and nothing was going to fill that hole, not completely, but it was possible to learn how to cover it up well enough to not feel the draft so badly.
Stiles had done the very same thing when he'd lost his mum. He'd learnt how to do things for himself. Had grown up and become a different person. He'd coped and lived a life completely different to what it would have been if he'd had a mother.
He didn't know if he'd said something right or not, whether he'd helped, but Martin leant into his side all the same, fingers curling around his forearm in an almost possessive gesture. They rested that way for a second and Stiles knew that it was more about scenting than anything else. With the losses they'd suffered they'd all been scenting more than usual, sometimes not even realising they'd done it.
Martin stood up as soon as his coffee cup was empty and Maggie didn't hesitate to take his place, breezing into the room like her feet weren't even touching the ground. She'd been waiting, he knew, to make her entrance. She'd been letting them have those moments. As no doubt had the rest of the Pack and Derek's. She was wearing on of Stiles' shirts and not much else if he was being honest although there may have been a pair of short shorts under their somewhere.
She sat down sideways on the stool next to him, looping one of her legs over his thigh and leaning in close so that her forehead rested against his collarbone. Her hair was a tangled mess and he snorted to keep it from going up his nose, but he couldn't help but feel some sort of satisfaction over the fact she hadn't brushed her hair yet. Maggie was all about appearances and if she didn't feel comfortable around people she had to look perfect. Even the last week while they've all been grieving, aside from being puffy eyed and having tear tracks down her cheeks, she was immaculate looking.
Out of the corner of his eye he noticed Derek slink into the room, heard him starting up the coffee machine. He turned his head to flash him a smile and didn't miss the way that Derek's eyes zeroed in on Maggie's shirt. Or his shirt if you wanted to be accurate.
There was a strange expression on Derek's face then and not for the first time Stiles wondered why the hell he had ever considered the Pack close when he was a teenager. Because if you compared them to his Pack now, they really weren't. It was sort of sad.
"You owe me a drink by the way," Maggie said casually, draining the rest of the luke warm coffee from his cup and pulling a face.
He frowned, wondering what he'd missed, "What?"
She rolled her eyes like he was the stupidest person on the planet and this interaction was so normal that something in Stiles' chest ached.
"You. Owe. Me. A. Drink." she said, emphasising the words and staring at him meaningfully. He could practically feel her thoughts bouncing off his brain as she tried to telepathically clue him in.
She knew exactly when the light bulb clicked on in his head by the slow smile that stretched its way across his lips. He grinned with maybe a little bit too much teeth, but he didn't care in the slightest. "You serious?" he asked her, lifting her leg off of his and turning so that his thighs bracketed her legs in. He laced his fingers through hers, squeezing slightly.
"Would I lie to you?" she asked with a casual flip of her hair, her expression devious and beautiful and making something inside of him spark back to life. And if they spent the next half an hour dancing around the kitchen island singing, "Ding dong, the witch is dead!" well they were more than entitled to their moments of madness. Even if Derek and the majority of both Packs looked at them like they were seriously considering having them institutionalised.
They'd explain later.
The next day Stiles woke up feeling lighter than he had done in a long time, which seemed stupid. His day only got better when Maggie wandered in to breakfast in one of Derek's shirts rather than anyone else's, Stiles didn't miss the smile that twitched the corner of Derek's mouth upwards for a second.