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Derek came home to a house full of blankets.
Literally full.
Just blankets and pillows fucking everywhere.
He had no idea they even owned that many comforters, not to mention quilts and various types of pillows(fuck he didn't even think about the different types of pillows until he was seeing what he was pretty sure was all of them, at once).
That made sense though because they didn't okay none of them were crazy pillow-and-blanket hoarders. Or at least, they weren't. Evidently, in the three days he had been away, that had change.
Stiles literally popped out of the piles of linens, like a fucking Jack-in-the-Box. Stiles-in-the-Linens. She stared at him, whiskey-honey eyes all wide and turned with more of the burnt umber of her beta eyes than usual, though thankfully they were still distinctly human. He wasn't sure how to handle this already without Stiles randomly 'wolfing out'(as she so delicately put it) in her...
"Is this a nest?" he asked incredulously. Stiles' cheeks burned, red running all the way down her neck and up to the tips of her silly ears.
"Shuddup," she snapped. "Don't you fucking judge me." Despite how clearly improbable and ridiculous it was, she disappeared under the blankets/pillows/repurposed couch cushions? And she wasn't on the floor, she was definitely too high for mere blanket forts--oh for the love of...
"Did you drag our mattress downstairs, Stiles." When stressed, Derek was known to revert to his pre-punctuation days.
"No!" Stiles squawked, despite the clear evidence that there was a fucking mattress in their living room. The pile of bedding proceded to sulk and look mulish which was fucking terrifying until Stiles peeked out from the covers to glare unconvincingly, looking more like a sulky puppy than a grown goddamn woman. Probably because grown goddamn women did not generally buy bedding en masse and panic-nest when their husband left for three fucking days and okay so those had felt like sort of the longest days in Derek's entire life but he hadn't built a fucking nest because he wasn't a psychopath. Usually. Okay he was totally a psychopath but not of the nest-building variety.
"I made Erica bring it down," Stiles admittedly grumpily when all they did was stare at each other. "The floor was hurting my butt."
Despite himself, Derek found he was fighting back a grin. Then he went ahead and let himself grin because he honestly didn't know what the appropriate reaction was here so why not just go with what felt right. Grinning over Stiles' weirdness always felt right, especially when she smelled like mate and home and happiness and pups and wait.
"Stiles?" Derek croaked. She looked up at him, having drifted off to picking absently at a pillow, and blinked. After a moment, a slow grin spread across her face and she wriggled eagerly, burrowing a bit more into the bedding without hiding again.
"I found out two weeks ago," she admitted, then carried on before he could start growling. "I wanted to surprise you with--" she ducked under the blankets, irrationally, and reemerged after some rummaging with a little plush wolf. It had two ribbons around its neck, one pink and one blue, and it somehow managed to look like a puppy instead of a cartoonish wolf. It was stupidly cute. "This, but it took forever to get in and then there was that dumb pack stuff--" AKA an important meeting with a rival pack to hash out some peaceful negotiations; Stiles had been the one to press for it in the first place, actually, and even talked the other alpha over initially. Derek had actually expected her to come along, but she had claimed that she wasn't in much of a mood for travel. "And you needed to do that so I figured I'd wait until we were all cozy and stuff and just carry on with the stuffed wolf plan right? But then you were gone and the house was so empty cause everyone has y'know work and even with the pack here I was just all fidgety and then Erica mentioned Ikea's really close I think she thought I wanted to just get like a new mattress or something which is kind of what I thought too cause I wasn't sleeping like at all and then there were all these blankets and pillows and the whole pack had come so I just sort of--" she flailed her arms around to encompasse the piles--"got carried away?"
Derek snorted. He dropped his bag and strode briskly across the room, shedding clothing along the way. Down to his boxers, he grabbed the bedding and lifted it with Stiles' help to find just the right layer. With only a contented grumble and a happy little noise from Stiles, Derek climbed in to curl around his nesting mate.
"You're an idiot," he informed her, earning a squawk of protest and a punch in the shoulder. But Derek kissed her, soft and tender, and when he drew back he was smiling like--like the sun had come out, like there were rainbows curling around him. Like his family was growing in the best way. His hand curled over her belly, still perfectly flat, and he pressed a kiss to the tip of her nose. "You're a werewolf, not a bird, Stiles."
Stiles grimaced at him, but it was fond and happy underneath the genuinely disgruntledness. "Yeah but 'denning' just does not have the same ring to it," she grumbled, sounding as if she had given this some serious though. Hell, she probably had. His mate was a freak.
"I love you so much," Derek breathed like it just burst out of him. Stiles looked startled, then horrifically pleased, biting her lip and grinning dopily at him. For a few minutes they just laid there, grinning like fools while Derek touched her belly and pressed delicate kisses to her face. Then suddenly Stiles was wriggling around again, pushing the wolf at him.
"Look, it's got two ribbons so when we find out the gender we can cut the inappropriate one or--" Stiles suddenly blushed again, looking like she would have flailed it that weren't difficult in their current fairly ensconced position. "Uh, the website suggested keeping the other ribbon, for...later. Or it mentioned maybe both would be appropriate." Her words dissolved into incoherent mumbles there and she curled, burying her face in wolf and bedding as her ears turned all red again.
Derek wrapped his arms around her and the stupid wolf(no he didn't already love it shut up you don't know what you're talking about) and if they both purred like the werecats they most assuredly were not, well, neither the wolf nor the bedding was going to tell on them.
Erica might though. Especially since she opened with, "I can hear you morons purring!" before launching herself into the nest. She was dragged into their little pile, and within an hour the rest of the pack just so happened to show up and join their cuddlefest, not even Jackson managing so much as a token excuse. It turned out that what Derek estimated to be five hundred blankets and pillows combined with about a dozen werewolves was not so great for anything involving not overheating but it was sort of fantastic anyway, even if their humans warbled and whined about it. Stiles just hummed in sleepy contentment, and the pack, human and wolf alike, sort of couldn't argue with that.