[TW] every day of your life, child
Derek has learnt to believe in omens, with a fervent, almost fanatical regard, thanks to his father's great aunt. She'd somehow brought the bayou with her to California, and her bedroom had always been damp and smokey, littered with strange tree roots and hundreds of candles, natural light dampened with layers of newspapers glued to every window. Derek had never quite figured out how she kept anything growing in her strange mystical cave, but logic had never seemed to inhibit Aunt Yvette.
She'd passed away when he was 10 or so, but before that, Derek had been dragged into her hideout more often than he would've liked, and shoved into an uncomfortable chair while she told his fortune with cards or bones or the lines of his palm.
"Hardship," she'd always say. "You will walk a devastating road, but the reward....your prize will be better than everything you've ever wanted. Better than anything you've ever dreamed, even. But somehow, you'll stumble across exactly what you need."
She'd mentioned maps of the stars, shining and abstract, but Derek had never been interested in the night sky unless it was dominated by the bright full moon, his perpetual mistress.
Her laugh whenever he told her this was raspy and dark, full of incontestable promise. She'd spoken of a dark queen, a deceitful illusion that would lead him astray, but also a child of the sun who would lead his pack into the light.
With his mother and his sister before him in the line of succession, and the almost certainty that he would never hold real leadership within the pack, Derek had shrugged off her predictions as mere fancy, and then she was dead.
Like every child, forced into a stifling, uncomfortable suit and paraded before a coffin, Derek had quickly forgotten that the object of the day had once been a person, confusingly alive and schilling advice that he wasn't prepared to hear.
Her bedroom had been cleared out and turned into a day room, the wide sunlit windows overlooking his mother's garden, and the scent of roses and fresh sweet herbs had quickly overtaken anything spectacular Derek might have learned there.
Instead, he'd gotten older, believing himself to be superior and invincible, and he'd met a girl called Kate while standing in line at the grocery store, picking up a bag of spinach for his mother's famous chicken soup.
She'd smelled like summer air and wild rasperries, and he'd fallen head over heels before he even knew her name.
She'd never wanted to meet where anyone who knew them could see, but Derek had thought she was shy, and he'd respected her caution. He'd grown to tolerate the motels that stunk of sex and death, the rough sheets filled with secrets and mornings where he was kicked to the curb, clothes carelessly thrown to the ground around him.
On the last day he'd met Kate, a murder of crows had flown over the park, raucous and hoarse, almost entirely blotting out the sun as it had glinted over her face, bright and warm. Derek had dismissed the unsettling shadows as the flickering shade of tree branches, and he'd fallen once again as only a high school boy could when tempted with love and sex and belonging.
Seven hours later, when he'd ventured as close as the police and fire department would let him to the smouldering ruins of his family, his home, he'd still been able to scent the traces of her perfume, her hatred, viciously intwined with the wreck of everything he'd ever known.
After that day, Derek had been certain that he could never trust another living soul outside of the family. And with the family reduced to him and Laura, he'd never have far to look.
Uh. I blame Fourze? Their constellation bullshit is straight up addictive, yo.