Chapter Text
Stiles doesn’t know what to do.
The marriage contract is old. Old enough that his mom was a toddler when the thing was written and now it's Stiles that's stuck with commemorating the damned thing because his Grandfather decided that the best course of action was to marry off a descendant of his to an influential Werewolf Pack.
It's not like his Grandfather would even consider him his family with the way his mom ran away either.
But sadly, the contract is still valid and now Stiles has to deal with it. Blood signatures and all.
First thing Stiles does when he learns all this— he screams out in the woods outside his dads house while he's out at work.
Right on his summer break before his last year of college.
His day is nearly as bad as the time Scott got bitten by a werewolf all those years ago.
The second thing he does is get a headache from translating the contract from Polish.Its been years since he's tried reading anything in it and it doesn't help his incoming feeling of doom and shame every time he has to use Google to dictate the thing out loud for him.
The third thing he does is prepare.
There's a Magical convention happening in San Francisco and Stiles is going. He doesn’t care that the moment Scott got wind of it, the first thing he did was try and persuade him not to go.
He needs all the help and magic he can get.
….
Stiles hasn’t really realised how big the magic community is.
In Beacon Hills it was just him and Scott for the longest time before their friend group all took the bite. Stiles was never offered and he never asked, and, from the looks of it, that's a good thing. The amount of Pack Politics drama it would have caused if Stiles was officially in Scott's pack would be enough to upturn half of the United States and Eastern Europe by the looks of it.
The convention is a busy place. There’s people performing magic on stage and by their stands, there's even a vampire recruitment stand that makes Stiles want to laugh at the weirdly hippy looking vampire running it in tie-dye pants and green headband with peace signs on it.
A few of the stands hold trinkets and magical artefacts which make Stiles’ hands itch with curiosity whenever one of them catches his eye.
There’s also a stand somewhere between the middle and end of the venue that catches Stiles by surprise.
It has a man sitting with a book propped open in his lap and a sudoku puzzle book on his stand. He doesn’t seem to be enjoying his book with the way he grimaces at every line he reads. The man is handsome, even with his lips downturned and scrunched eyebrows. He’s dressed in a blue v-neck and some jeans, and if not for curiosity's sake Stiles would have come up purely to flirt with him.
But the plainness of the stand has piqued his curiosity; there's a clipboard with what seems to be signatures on the man's left and a pile of old books.
“What you got there?” He asks the man.
The man grunts, not looking up from his book before marking it with a dog tag and finally lifting his piercing hazel eyes into Stiles’ own.
“It’s a petition.” Stiles stares at him blankly.
“Cool, what's it for? Or against?” He cringes internally at the non descript answer.
The man sighs again, and stands up from his chair to tower over Stiles by a few good inches.
“Its a petition against the displacement of magical children in the foster system as currently there's no way to keep track of magical creatures that enter the human foster system.” He takes a grumpy breath. “I want the council to put some safety nets in place so those kids learn about their powers and what have you, before they they do something stupid like bite or seriously injure someone or themselves due to the lack of knowledge.”
…
It's the Alpha that finally hunts him down.
Not that Stiles is hiding per say, but he has sprinkled mountain ash everywhere he could think of. From his underwear drawer to his window.
After a week of panic since the contract magically appeared on Stiles’ bedside table the Hale Alpha rings his doorbell. File under her arm and looking more professional in a white shirt and trousers than even the missionaries that come knocking on his door every other week of summer break managed to look.
“Hi?”
“Afternoon, I’m looking for a Mr. Stanislaw Stalinski?”
“Oh, um, sorry. No clue who that is. Bye!”
The Alpha’s eyes flash gold and before he knows it there's a foot stuck between the door and its frame.
“I’m so sorry but I’m a fag!” He shouts, not sorry at all. “This really isn’t going to work.” He gives her an apologetic smile before slamming the door on her foot.
The Alpha doesn’t bulge, her nose flares. Stiles expects her to yelp in pain, instead she leans forward and grabs the door by the hinges.
“Open the door.” Her voice is on the verge of a growl.
“No.”
“Open. The. Door.” She flashes her teeth.
“Why?”
“So we can have a civilised conversation about this.”
“I can’t! You’ll force me to marry!” His grip on the door slips and he falls backwards as the Alpha pushes the door open.
“Fuck.”
****
The meeting place is more or less at a park, it's not a botanical garden no matter how much they try to advertise it as such on the way in with a small outdoor cafe run by a lady in her late forties a few hours drive down from Beacon Hills.
It was either that or meeting the wolf pack at their own home. And Stiles would rather die than do that.
So there he is, sitting on a picnic bench with a finished Walmart burrito wrapper in his lap waiting for the Hales (which he only recently learned is the Packs name) to show their asses up like the Alpha said they would.
He finds them walking out into the garden from the car park like a bunch of weirdos. Stiff and awkward in their wake, only the Alpha– Talia looks comfortable walking towards him.