Information to File Away for Later
He woke to the feel of his mate curling closer into his side, Stiles' arm flung across his stomach and his knee was resting over his thigh. There was no change in Stiles' heartbeat to indicate his mate was waking up so Derek just pulled the younger man a little closer and continued to doze.
His mate smelled of sunshine and coffee which wasn't surprising from the amount of it he had consumed the day before. Stiles had smiled apologetically after the fourth cup and mumbled something about self medicating. It had taken Derek a few minutes before he could get the full story.
"I'm ADD. Stimulants have a weird effect on me. A lot of times they will help calm me down where as normal people would get all revved up. It helps me think, helps my brain stay focused. When my parents were alive I was on medicine for it but the Pack Home just thought I needed discipline."
Stiles had cut off with that remark, looking down and away. "They punished you for a condition you couldn't control." Derek asked softly.
Shrugging his shoulders as both answer and evasion Stiles joked, "I learned to sit still in chemistry. I wrote this awesome essay that should have been an A+ except I wrote about history instead of chemistry." Any other questions Derek might have asked about chemistry or ADD were silenced when Stiles leaned in for a kiss, quickly followed by a mad shuffle for the bed and a way out of their clothes.
But now with him snuggled against his chest with the morning light starting to peek through the window, Derek had a chance to think of what he knew about his mate.
Nothing.
Aside from his name and the fact he was a very resourceful orphan that was quick on his feet and mouthy, Derek had no personal knowledge of the man he was going to spend the rest of his life with. It was a bit disconcerting to say the least.
"I can hear you thinking." Stiles' breath tickled his chest as he spoke.
"You can feel me thinking through the bond?"
"No, your eyebrows brush up against each other. It's very distracting." Stiles looked up and smiled at Derek's look of shock. "I'm joking. You know that, right? I can't really hear your eyebrows but they are very expressive." His fingers danced over them as he spoke before sliding downward and across Derek's lips.
Stiles rested his chin on the center of Derek's chest and looked up at his mate with honey colored eyes. "Why are you so serious this morning? We have another," he gave a bleary glance at the alarm clock, "two hours before we have to be doing anything important. Your father said they wouldn't be able to get all the files on the kids and staff until then."
"I wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking about you."
"Really? I was thinking about you too." Stiles smiled before sliding lower in the sheets letting his fingers trace Derek's abs until they found the beginning of his happy trail where they paused to play and tease. "What exactly were you thinking about?"
"Doesn't matter. I'm only thinking about one thing now." Derek mock growled as he rolled his mate beneath him.
Stiles let Derek control their love play for a few minutes before pushing at his shoulders to roll him over. Derek watched through lidded eyes as Stiles ran his hands over the smooth plains of his body before reaching over to the night stand and pulling out the tube of lube.
"Can I?" His mate asked, his eyes suddenly hooded and uncertain.
"Yes," Derek's hips thrust upward bouncing Stiles a little as they did bringing a happy chuckle from his mate's lips.
Stiles moved down until he was resting between Derek's legs, warm moist mouth touching him with tantalizing kisses and slow languid licks that made Derek arch and beg. The feeling of pressure and stretching as Stiles slowly worked in the first digit did nothing to slow the pleasure he felt.
Stiles was inexperienced but with the help of the bond found every part of Derek's body that made him come apart. By the time his mate was lining up to enter him, Derek had become a quivering mass on the bed.
Wrapping his legs around Stiles he urged him closer. "Please," Derek moaned as Stiles leaned in for another kiss. "Now. Stiles now!"
Derek could only gasp and pant for breath as Stiles slowly worked him open, each thrust going a little deeper until he was completely seated within Derek. "Is this good? Are you okay?" Derek bucked his hips in response, driving his mate just a touch deeper before forcing him to slide out. Stiles laughed and tightened his hold on Derek's hips.
It took Stiles two thrusts to find Derek's prostate and then his mate seemed determined to hit it straight on every time afterwards. "Derek," he groaned. "God, Derek." With a shudder he came bringing Derek over the edge as his orgasm flowed down the link.
Together they lay in bed as their sweat cooled on their bodies, neither wanting to be the first to pull away.
"I love you," Derek whispered breaking the silence. Stiles pulled back as if struck by an electric current.
"You don't even know me." His eyes had more white than honey brown showing with shock.
"I know enough to know I love you. The rest we will figure out with time."
"Derek, I don't know YOU." The wolf looked at his startled mate and smiled as he tried to reassure him.
"Like I said, we will figure it out with time. Take all the time you need, Stiles, I'm not going anywhere." Derek scratched at the cooling mess that covered both of them and smile sheepishly. "Except maybe the shower."
Stiles hummed and burrowed deeper into the covers as Derek left the bed. "Save me some hot water," he mumbled before falling back asleep.
Derek let Stiles sleep. After his shower he went downstairs and piled two plates full of breakfast adding a couple of cinnamon rolls to the top because he noticed that his mate had a sweet tooth.
By the time he made it back upstairs the shower was running. Derek could see his mate under the stream of water through the open door and stood, mouth ajar, for a few minutes and just stared in wonder. His mate, while much too thin, had strong shoulders and long legs. His ass was firm and shaped so perfectly that he had the urge to bite it.
"Could you had me a towel or do you plan on drying me by the shear heat of your stare alone?" Smiling over his shoulder, Stiles turned off the water and opened the shower door. "Next time you should just wait for me. We could conserve water and have some fun at the same time."
"I don't think it's considered conserving water if we stay in the shower three times as long." Derek sais as he handed over a dark blue towel. Stiles quickly dried his hair and chest before wrapping the towel securely around his waist.
"You brought me breakfast?"
"I was going to let you sleep in some more." Derek pulled a small table closer to the bed so they could both place their plates on it as they sat on the bed together.
"Once you left I couldn't get comfortable. I missed your body being next to mine." Derek couldn't stop the grin that broke across his face at that. He nudged Stiles with his shoulder and received a quick kiss in return before Stiles took most of the bacon off his plate as well as the rolls.
"Alpha?" Isaac's voice called from outside the room. "The files you and Stiles have been waiting for have just arrived. Laura is already in the office going over them if you would care to join her."
Derek followed Stiles down the stairs and into the small office. Laura was already poring over the files from the Pack Home looking for some information to explain why the children there had been treated so horribly.
Derek pulled a chair around for Stiles and made sure he was comfortable before getting himself situated. Stiles grabbed a stack of files from the middle of the desk and divided it between the two of them. Derek couldn't help but sigh at the faces that looked out at him from inside the files, each child with a fake smile and saddened eyes.
"They have a strange color coding system that I can't work out." Laura pointed out. She had arranged the files into different piles based on the color on the label.
"All the orange ones are boys and girls on the same side of the House as I was. All the boys were in my dorm and the girls shared meals and school time with us. All the other colors are from the other side. Those are the ones that were shown off and pampered."
Derek flipped through the files with rainbow colored tags; blue, red, purple, dark green with happier looking children on the inside. These children didn't have the haunted eyes that the orange group had, their eyes held a true expression that matched the smiles on their faces.
"Look, my file has a blue sticker on the inside next to my name. Do the rest of the orange files have different colors on the inside." It took just moments for the Derek and Laura to confirm that all the orange files had colored tags that matched the tags from the other side.
"So why did they separate us out like that. They seem to have picked a color for us and then just made us all orange."
"What do the other colors all have in common?" Derek asked.
"They were all in the nice side of the Home. Those are the kids that went on the trips and played on the playground outside. I never knew what I did wrong that I couldn't get to do some of the things they did. Maybe that's why I'm in the orange group, maybe that's the defective pile."
Derek growls and pulls Stiles close. "There is nothing defective about you. Nothing."
"You're just saying that because of the bond. I'm ADD, mouthy, annoying, I say whatever goes through my mind.."
"and you are perfect just the way you are."
Laura rolled her eyes. "You two are going to give me cavities. You're just too sweet."
"Right because you and Max were so demur when you were first started dating."
"Please! I didn't have my hands all over Max at every moment of the day and I definitely didn't screw him on dad's desk."
"Oh God!" Stiles moaned burying his head in his hands. "This is your dad's desk. I'm never going to be able to look at him over the breakfast table again."
"You may have not used THIS desk but you and Max have christened almost every other room in the house. Which reminds me – my room is off limits!" Derek continued over Stiles' bout of shame.
"What's all the shouting about?" Max soothed walking in. He handed Stiles a cup of coffee before passing one to Derek and Laura. He leaned over and kissed his wife on the cheek before turning back to Stiles. "What are they yelling about? You get used to it after awhile. Any day ending with Y is 'Hale sibling argument day'. I find it easiest to just leave the room until they remember they are adults."
"They're arguing about which one of us couples are the most sickening sweet."
Max hummed happily as he sat beside Laura. "I think we have a good head start. You will really have to start working on it if you ever want to catch up with us." Noticing the blush that stained Stiles face and ran down his neck, Max took raised his hands in mock surrender and reached for a stack of files. "What are we looking for?"
"We don't know," Laura grumbled. "We are just looking for patterns, something to help make since of all this."
"Well, all these colors correspond to influential packs in North America but that's probably just a coincidence."
Stiles flipped back to his chart. "It's a weird one because my color is blue."
As soon as Stiles put his chart back down, Derek picked it up and started to read through it. It had more information than seemed necessary for a Pack Home file, containing detailed information from even before Stiles' parents' death. Reading about the tragic car wreck that killed both Stiles' parents he stopped short.
Dragging a pile of files he had previously checked back over he reread their information eyes widening as he noticed a startling trend. "Max? What is the probability of all the children at the pack Home having both parents killed in car wrecks?"
Tilting his head in thought for a second, Max answered, "That's statistically impossible."
Derek opened chart after chart pointing out the common portions to his brother-in-law who turned paler with each new file.
"What does that mean?" Stiles asked in a small voice.
Deep inside Derek had the beginnings of an idea but was not ready to share it until he had more information. Pulling Stiles into a hug he tried to comfort his shaking mate.
Max continued to flip through the charts of the personnel that had worked at the Pack Home. "All the staff working for the Argents were vetted by Pilak. There files show recommendation letter for them to become turned betas that were approved which means these ex-staff members are working for many of the packs across the nation. I don't understand how such abuse could have gone undetected for so long."
Stiles shrugged. "I guess nobody cared."
Laura growled low which made Derek all tense and protective in turn. Max ran a calming hand down Laura's spine. "I thought that for a while too but the longer I've been inside the pack the more I realized that it's not that they don't care, it's that they don't know."
"What do we not know?" Laura asked with her brows furrowing. Stiles hid a smile in his cup of coffee at the sight. Laura's brows might be shaped by the best salons but they still managed to convey emotion in the same manner as her brother.
"The packs are so removed from humans that you don't have any idea how we think or feel about anything. The only humans you're around are either those haughty, stuck-up, collar wearing brown-nosers or 'the help'." Max air quoted with a sniff. "And they're too terrified of werewolves to do more than bleat out a 'yes or no ma'am'.
Laura looked at Max like she was seeing him for the first time. "You've never said anything before. Why are you just telling me this now?"
"Because I though you knew and God help me I was so glad that you loved me that I didn't care about anything else. I've struggled for so long to pull myself up, to find a job that could take care of my family and give us all the break we needed. And no one would look twice at me. I was top of my class and because I wasn't collared I wasn't good enough."
"I was your ticket to social promotion." Laura looked devastated.
"No! Laura, I love you. You damn well know I love you. But I never said ANYTHING because I wasn't about to rock the boat. I'm not brave like Stiles is and I don't have the luxury of the true mate bond to shield me."
Derek felt sick as he watched his sister and Max fall apart and front of him. He wanted to say something, to stop this wreck before it drove them apart but he could only sit and helplessly watch as the chasm between them seemed to grow wider.
"See!" Stiles grumbled to his coffee cup. "This is why to world is so screwed up. Humans don't trust the wolves and wolves don't know enough about us REAL humans, not the fake collared ones, to know a good thing when they have it. If you ask me True Love trumps a true mate bond any day. You have to choose love and only an idiot would throw something like that away."
"I know neither one of us is an idiot. And I would do anything to be by your side." Max sat on the desk in front of Laura and rolled the chair she was sitting in closer to him and tilted her chin up. "What about you?"
Putting his cup down Stiles turned to Derek and smiled. "One day I'd like to have both."
"Both?" Derek could only swallow sharply as Stiles crawled into his lap.
"Yeah. True love and a true mate bond. I think we are getting there don't you?"
Derek rumbled contentedly while Laura allowed herself to be pulled into Max's arms to sooth away the pain and hurt. Pressing another kiss to Laura's head, Max staged whispered, "I think they may be gaining on us," which earned a laugh from Laura and a groan from Stiles.
This is the essay that Stiles wrote in chemistry class...notice it is not written on the topic of chemistry.
There was a war of sorts – The wolves call it The Conflict of 1912. Humans refer to it when werewolves are nowhere near as The Shifter War. The war was started by an attack lead by the humans. They rationalized it by saying that the wolves were encroaching on their territory and turning humans into betas without consent. The werewolf retaliation was swift and brutal. By the end of the first year, the humans on all fronts were in retreat. Hundreds of thousands of humans were displaced and forced to live in refugee camps that had little food and water and hardly any medical supplies.
Camp Mule Shoe was over-run by the Larger Pack in the fall of 1915 when the wolves took control of Texas and most of Oklahoma. Most humans outside wolf territory thought they had all been killed and it wasn't until after the war that it was discovered that the wolves had taken them all in, giving much needed medical treatment, ample food and clean water supplies. Most of the humans from Mule Shoe swore that the wolves had cared for them better than when they were under human protection. When looking at the mortality rates from the camps, Mule Shoe had the lowest death rates and most of those were documented from before the wolves took over the camp.
In July of '16, the Cooper Pack defeated a battalion lead by Samuel Argent. His eldest daughter was one of the commanders. Brice Cooper had an immediate reaction to meeting Darla Argent and claimed her as his true mate. This lead the Cooper Pack to begin cease fire talk which ended the war by the end of the year.
Brice Cooper wed Darla Argent in a lavish wedding on Jan. 1st 1917 which the papers heralded as a new beginning for human/wolf relations. In order to better integrate the two societies, Brice Cooper appointed Samuel Argent as head of his Pack's holdings.
Within six months the Cooper Pack had begun to lead the way in many innovations. To this day there are few packs that can claim the same respect as the Cooper Pack.
Sadly, Darla Argent (wolves take the human's last name along with the pack name – so Brice became Brice Argent – Cooper) was killed in a freak automobile accident when her car swerved off the road and into a deep ravine. Brice was distraught, more so since he had given her the car as a gift. He never forgave himself and died of pining within a year of her death. There exists no solid evidence of how Brice Argent – Cooper died but most historians believe that he was most likely put down by his own pack when he started to lose control of his wolf.
The funeral was a worldwide event and millions of humans and wolves came to show their respects at the massive wake that was held for an entire month.