Teenwolf xbb fic: Tangled Lonely Path Forward Part one
Title: Tangled, Lonely Path Forward
Author: indusnm
Artist: dollarformyname
Fandoms: Teen Wolf/Supernatural
Genre: Crossover and Fusion
Pairings: Derek/Stiles, Peter Hale/Dean Winchester, Lydia/Jackson, Allison/Scott
Main Characters: Derek, Stiles, Dean and Peter Hale
Rating: PG-15
Warnings: Um, there's a lot of discussion of canonical character deaths, and it's a story about moving through pain. Nothing too terrible or graphic, and it does, I think, end happily.
Summary: Still reeling from John's warning, the Winchester brothers follow the Croatoan virus to Beacon Hills, California, where they learn that there are all kinds of hunters, and all kinds of werewolves too. And in saving a town, they just may change their destiny. For teenwolf-xbb
Notes: This wouldn't be possible without my beta oomnydevvotchka and my alpha witchyemerald, who took what I wrote and made it much better.
This is my first big bang, and as I've worked on it, I've gone through some major events, some great and some horrible, while writing it. I've hated it and loved it by turns, and I hope you enjoy it!
Link to the Fic! Link to the awesome art by the super-talented dollarformyname
PROLOGUE
“Dude, you’re such a cliché,” Stiles mocked.
Dean didn’t look up from the rhythmic ritual of cleaning his gun. He was going to say something smart-ass with a slice of mean, but for some reason he couldn’t. Maybe he was more impressed with the kid who was on the verge of losing everything Dean couldn’t remember ever having than he’d admitted, even to himself. “My dad taught me.”
Stiles was quiet for a minute, remembering that Dean hadn’t lost his father all that long ago. He tried not to think of his own father, out there with Derek and Peter and Sam, on patrol.
Then, sitting down with a calmness he rarely felt, he smiled. “Mine did too. He had guns in the house so I had to learn to use them. My mom hated them- she’d rather they weren’t there and she was kinda rabidly anti-gun, but she got that my dad didn’t have a choice. Still, she also knew hiding them wouldn’t work so she was okay with my learning. But I don’t know, since she died, I haven’t been able to use them without thinking of how much she would have hated that.”
Dean’s hands had stopped moving as he looked at Stiles intently. They shared a knowing, painful glance until Dean ruined it. “Wait, are we having a moment?”
“Shut up.” But Stiles was grinning because he’d been a second away from saying something very similar.
And then they heard three cell phones ring almost simultaneously around the house.
They looked at each other, eyes wide, until Scott burst through the door. Scott’s eyes were gleaming gold and he was partly wolfed out, nose flaring as he growled, “It’s here.”
*
The little girl twirled around. “Look, Derek,” she said in that childish cry that demanded he look now, “Isn’t it pretty?”
Derek looked up from the book he was skimming through. He had an assignment due the next morning and his mother was still making him watch Jamie because he “shouldn’t have waited until the last day, Derek.” He was annoyed and resentful and more than a little disappointed to not be spending the evening with Kate, but whatever. “I’m looking, Jay.”
“No Derek, isn’t it pretty?” she twirled again, black curly hair bouncing around the dimples in her cheeks.
Despite Derek’s insistence on being in a bad mood, he couldn’t help smiling as he heard her lisp. He wasn’t perfect and was more than capable of being a little bitch to her and her older brother sometimes, but it was hard to feel anything but joy at the sight of his three year-old cousin dancing in the light evening mist. “Very pretty, Miss Jay. You’re the belle of the ball.”
“Is that Belle from Beauty and the Beast?” She asked, eyes impossibly wider.
“Naw, you’re way prettier than her. And when you get older, you’ll get a much better BEAST!” As he shouted the last word, Derek let himself shift his eyes and teeth. Jamie screeched and took off running so Derek threw aside his book and ran after her on all fours. He let her get about twenty feet before he tackled her, twisting so that he landed between her and the ground. “And now, little Belle, I’m going to eat you!”
“No, no Derek!” She wriggled and screamed, caught in that in-between place where children can’t tell the difference between real threats and games. “Let me go, evil beast!”
“Never!”
Jamie managed to twist herself out of Derek’s grasp and tumbled to a heap on the grass a few feet away from him. They breathed hard, her from the tickling and him from the laughter he couldn’t seem to stop. But then she looked down at her new dress, now covered in grass stains, and gave a little cry. “Derek, it’s spoiled. You ruined my dress!” She looked back at him, her face suddenly burned away in some places and puffy as if she’d been asphyxiated. When she spoke, her voice was hoarse as if she had been screaming and had not been able to stop. “You ruined it, Derek. You ruined my dress. You ruined everything.”
Derek’s eyes shot open and he sat up in bed almost before he knew he was awake.
*
“I’m bored.” Stiles flung himself onto his own bed dramatically. He shot a quick glance at his best friend when Scott made no response, only to see his best friend texting furiously. Sitting up with a jerk, he threw his arms up in the air. “Did you hear me?”
Scott looked up, surprised. “Yeah, dude, I heard. You’re bored.”
“So?”
“So what?”
Stiles sighed and stood up. “Scott, this is the last summer we’re both going to be in Beacon Hills. As of the fall, we’re transferring to schools out of town. This is our last summer at home.”
“Stiles, we’re going to be back. We’ve already spent two more years here than we’d planned. Junior college is over; time to party university-style. And it’s not like we’re going to the ends of the Earth- we’re like two hours away. Why are you stressing?” Scott had a point; Lydia and Jackson had gone straight to a four-year university after high school and they came back almost every full moon and some long weekends in the middle too. Even Danny, who’d gone all the way to the East Coast, had done a great job of staying in touch.
“Dude, we’re going to be interning during the summers and then working and well- we’re going to have lives. This is the last summer we’re free.”
“Some would say we haven’t been free for the last four years,” Scott pointed out. “But you’re right, we should enjoy it. Bowling?”
“Seriously?”
“Okay, no bowling. Derek’s?”
“Derek’s it is.”
*
Derek and the pack had rebuilt the Hale house, but only to a point. They had reinforced the walls and ceiling and re-furnished the home, but they hadn’t painted or bothered to match the furniture. Stiles tried not to think about it too much, but it was as if Derek wanted to sabotage his own attempts to move on by surrounding himself with a constant reminder of his family’s tragic end.
When Stiles and Scott approached the house, they could feel the odd excitement in the air. The reason for the charged atmosphere was immediately evident.
“Allison’s here?” Scott was wary at the sight of Chris Argent’s car, but even the thought of his girlfriend’s father and Derek in the same vicinity couldn’t keep the smile her name brought forth from emerging. “What do you think she’s doing here?”
“Nothing good,” Stiles predicted direly. “I have a feeling I’m going to be nostalgic about this morning’s boredom very, very soon.” In the four years since Scott was bitten, Peter Hale’s resurrection, and the Alpha pack’s desultory retreat, the Hale pack had established itself so that threats were now uncommon. The onset of peace had allowed Derek to learn about being an alpha, and his developing leadership skills had encouraged Scott to join Derek’s pack. But even with Scott and Allison reconciling, Scott and Derek becoming something approaching friends, and the Argents and Hales sometimes working together to stave off supernatural threats, it was an unspoken rule that neither would set foot on each other’s property.
This wasn’t good.
“This isn’t good,” Scott fretted.
“Oh you can say that again.”
When they walked into the Hale house, Scott did just that. “This isn’t good,” he muttered when he caught sight of the visitors.
Allison turned to him with a worried smile, but her father didn’t move. “Hey Scott,” she said.
“What is it?” Stiles asked. “Another lizard, some kind of cat, or oh my God, a vampire?”
“There’s no such thing as vampires,” Derek said in a monotone, but there was a warm amusement in the glare that he shot Stiles that was rarely present when he spoke to anyone else in that tone of voice. His claws were out, digging into the arms of a chair Stiles was pretty sure Isaac had stolen off someone’s porch, and he did not look happy.
“For the thousandth time, Stiles, stop watching Twilight,” Boyd agreed.
“It’s worse.” Derek added ominously.
“Well,” Chris argued, “I don’t know about that.”
Derek scoffed. “The Winchesters are much worse than vampires, which don’t even fucking exist. They hunt and kill indiscriminately. And if they do that here-“
“If they do that here… what? The truce is over?” Allison shot back. “Are you going to hold all hunters, us, responsible for the actions of a pair of renegade hunters? It’s not like we hold you responsible for the actions of every supernatural creature out there.”
“The fuck you don’t.” Derek stood up in a quick, aggressive movement. “You always look at us first. Especially if it’s werewolves.”
Allison stepped forward, obviously about to argue, but Stiles wormed his way between them. “Okay, who and what are the Winchesters? What’s so special about them?”
“They’re hunters, some of the best in the business. Two brothers out of the Midwest, I think. They were trained by their father, who got into the business when their mother was killed. Claims that she was killed by a demon or something. And no, Stiles, I don’t know if demons are real. Some claim they are, but they’re the weird hunters who live in their cars and don’t really have jobs or families or lives outside of hunting, so who the hell knows? But well, they contacted me this morning to tell me they’re on their way. Hunter courtesy,” Chris explained.
“And you’re here because…“
“Because the Winchesters kill supernatural beings like… oh, us, and they don’t have a code,” Derek stated blandly.
“I’ll talk to them, Derek, and tell them to leave you alone. They’re hunting something, and they’ve tracked it from Oregon so I think they’re going to leave local werewolves alone.”
“They’d better.” Derek moved towards the window and looked out. Something about the set of his shoulders, the dark purpose in his voice, put Stiles on alert. He knew Derek, he’d spent too many minutes watching the older man to not know him, and he knew Derek was worried. And anything that worried Derek, worried him. So he stuck around after everyone had left to talk to Derek some more.
“Why are you still here, Stiles?” Derek’s voice was a mix of affection and exasperation, but he kept his distance from Stiles, almost as if he was afraid of him. Which was stupid because who was the ferocious, killer Alpha in the room?
Stiles, for once, went straight to the point. “Are they dangerous? I mean, any more than any of the other for-hire losers who’ve come through town over the last few years?”
“Stiles, they’re all dangerous,” Derek explained, looking at the walls around him as if he could still see the imprint of smoke and burning bodies on them. He probably could, Stiles realized. “Hunters have no other aim but to kill werewolves, and yes, sometimes Codes hold them back like a restraining order. But like all restraining orders, they’re there because there’s a threat, because we need them to protect us from those who would do us harm without reason.”
“Ah, the lesser known Violence Against Werewolves Act,” Stiles quipped, but he understood. “I get it, you know. I don’t underestimate hunters, Derek. Sometimes I still wake up in cold sweat and wonder if I signed Scott’s death certificate when I made him come out into the woods with me-“
Derek reached out to him, but stopped with his hand halfway to Stiles’s shoulder. “It- it’s not your fault, Stiles. And being a werewolf, hunters aside, has given Scott more than it’s taken away. He gets that too, now.”
“Yeah, I guess.” They stared at each other for a few minutes, an odd sort of tension in the air, until Stiles broke it with an uneasy cough. “Um, I’d better go.” When had he gotten so close to Derek, he wondered, as he wheeled around and almost ran off.
*
“So remind me why we’re headed to Beacon Hills?” Dean threw a peanut in the air and caught it between his teeth, keeping his other hand steady on the wheel as he crunched obnoxiously.
Sam skimmed the notes he’d made on the laptop and answered absently. “I’ve been tracking something, or someone, who has been moving south on Highway 5. Whatever it is, it’s leaving a deadly trail. There’s a particularly violent crime in every town it stops in. And no, it’s not the shooter, but for some reason in every town he stops in, someone goes crazy and goes on a rampage.”
Dean thought about it for a minute, then flicked his eyes towards Sam. “I don’t get it.”
“It’s a straight line between River Grove in Oregon and French Camp, California, on the 5.”
“River Grove?” Dean yelped. He remembered that town well. It wasn’t every day he saw an entire town getting hit by something that turned nice, normal people into zombies that were smarter and cleaner than the ones in the movies. He still sometimes wondered what happened to all those people who’d just disappeared when their zombie apocalypse had fizzled out. Hell, he still sometimes wondered how their fellow non-zombie survivors had explained what happened to the infected residents. Hopefully Sargent Varko, Duane and the hot Doc kept their promise and didn’t mention the Winchester brothers when they talked to the Feds. “Dude, you’re thinking it’s the Croatoan virus?”
“Well, yeah.”
Dean shook his head. “I think even I’d have noticed if entire towns were disappearing in Oregon and California.”
Sam nodded. “Exactly. Look, we didn’t figure out what they were doing but it just ended. Everyone disappeared, and yeah, if they all went out there and started killing and infecting everyone they saw, it would make the headlines. One town, the government can hide. But you take down an entire state, the biggest state in the country, and you’re probably going to have something out of a disaster movie, and no one’s going to ignore what’s going on.”
“So you think they’re doing isolated incidents? That’s kind of reaching, isn’t it?”
“Come on, we know they were intelligent. The infected in River Grove tried to trap us and fool us into thinking they weren’t infected. And Duane… Duane fooled us all.”
“What are you talking about?” When Sam didn’t answer immediately, Dean slammed on the breaks, bringing the car to an abrupt stop on the shoulder of the road. “What are you talking about, Sammy?”
Sam sighed and shut his laptop. “Dean, I didn’t want to tell you, but Dr. Lee contacted me a few days after we left River Grove. They found Sargent Varko in his car- he’d been killed right after leaving River Grove. I hacked into the database of the town handling the crime and um, I learned a few things.”
“Oh, did you?” Dean asked with a bite in his voice. “Jesus, Sammy, what else did you find out and not tell me?”
“His throat was slit and from the splatter it’s obvious that he was killed by the person sitting next to him. Last we saw, that was Duane. And that’s not all; there wasn’t enough blood found at the scene. Someone must have collected it. Who’s the last person I saw collecting blood, Dean?”
His older brother leaned his head on the steering wheel as he recalled Sam telling him about how a demon named Meg had used a goblet full of blood to communicate with someone his brother couldn’t see. Probably the crazy bitch’s yellow-eyed demon daddy. When he spoke, his words were muffled by leather. “I let a demon live, didn’t I?”
Sam didn’t answer his question for a few minutes, but then softly pointed out, “You did what we both thought was right. Hell, you did what was right. He wasn’t vulnerable to the virus; we just didn’t figure out why. I think he was a demon and I think he has the power to turn an entire town into functioning zombies the way he did in River Grove or, if he wants to keep a lower profile, he can just infect enough people to create a mass murder that devastates a town but doesn’t, unfortunately, seem so out of the ordinary in this day and age. Take French Camp, for instance. Some normal family guy went insane and took a gardening rake to his neighbors and the same night his cop brother decided that speeding was a capital crime and took out eight drivers and five passengers before someone finally took him down.”
“So we let Duane go and now he’s killed a whole bunch more people.”
“Now he’s killed a lot of people, yes.” Sam winced, but forged on. “And looking at the frequency and pattern of the attacks, the next one is probably going to be Beacon Hills in about a week.”
Dean straightened and started the car. His face was set into a resolved expression and if he was a little pale, Sam knew better than to comment on it. “No, it’s not. Because we’re going to stop it.”
*
Derek looked up from his cell phone when he heard a knock on the door. “Yes?”
Derek’s father poked his head around the door and smiled gently. “Derek, do we need to talk?”
“Um, I don’t think so?” Derek surreptitiously put his phone under his pillow, but he had a feeling his father, his alpha, hadn’t missed the movement. “I’m sorry?”
“Is that a question or an apology?” Lawrence Hale, known as Larry to no one but his irrepressible younger brother, asked his older son gently.
“An apology, sir.” Derek cast his eyes down in shame as he remembered how he’d behaved at dinner, how he’d made his normally tough, no-nonsense sister cry. “I’ll apologize to Laura later.” He heard his father move closer but didn’t look up. When his father’s strong hand came down gently on his shoulder, Derek straightened. It was comforting and warm, and he was too much of a teenager to admit how much he liked it, even to himself.
“Derek, what’s going on with you these days?”
Derek shrugged. He wanted to tell his father about Kate, but at the same time he wanted to keep her to himself. And even though he was sure he loved her in that forever way his father talked about his mother, he couldn’t help suspecting his father wouldn’t approve of his affair with his teacher.
“Derek, what’s going on?” His father repeated, and Derek shrugged. His father sighed and, after squeezing Derek’s shoulder one more time, walked away.
Derek opened his eyes slowly, clinging to the sense memory of his father’s hand on his shoulder. All too soon it faded away, leaving only the lingering smell of smoke in the air. And the overwhelming wish he’d opened his mouth and answered his father when he’d still been able to do so.
*
The Impala rolled into Beacon Hills the next morning. “So you said you contacted this… Chris Argent?” Dean wanted to confirm.
“Dad had his name in the journal. Apparently they hunted a witch together. Yes, I know, you hate witches. Dad had a weird note in the journal though, something about Argent having friends in weird places. But he also noted that the Argents are apparently a very old family of hunters. Kind of a legacy thing. I don’t think he and Argent got along that well.”
“Color me shocked,” Dean said wryly as he knocked on the front door. Dean loved his dad, but even he knew a lot of people wanted to kill John Winchester, and those were just his friends.
A young girl, no more than 19 or 20, opened the door but didn’t immediately invite them in. Sam felt that she was sizing them up, but Dean didn’t share the same impression of her scrutiny. “Hey, babe, you a friend of Argent’s? He’s expecting us.”
“I’m his daughter,” she answered sweetly, but there was enough danger in that smile to set Dean’s radar off, and his hand strayed towards his weapon. “And before you come in, you should probably know something. The Argents were hunting the supernatural long before your family knew there was something under the bed, and we’re a matriarchal line. So when I warn you that you call me babe again and I’ll pull your tongue out so far it’ll touch your ass, you’d better believe me. Got it?”
“Got it,” Dean smirked, throwing a sloppy salute. As she turned and led them down the hall, his eyes followed her appreciatively.
“Don’t even,” Sam warned.
“You should listen to him,” a boy’s voice warned and he materialized out of the shadows a couple of feet in front of them.
Both Winchesters jumped. Until he’d spoken, they’d had no idea he was there. “Who the hell are you?” Dean demanded.
Scott let his eyes gleam gold. “I’m Scott, Allison’s boyfriend.”
*
“Wait, your daughter is dating a werewolf? And you’re okay with this?”
Chris Argent winced, and it was obvious to Dean that the hunter was not as sanguine with his daughter’s choice of dates as he pretended to be, but the older man persevered. “I respect Allison’s right to date whomever she wants to date. She is a grown woman who has earned the right to make her own decisions,” Chris said in a practiced monotone, ignoring the scoffing sound coming from the pale, tall young man by Scott’s side.
Dean couldn’t quite comprehend what he was seeing, so he turned a wild eye towards Sam. His little brother swallowed and tried to summarize what they’d learned. “So there’s a code about hunters not killing supernatural beings that haven’t killed, and as part of this code, you hunt with werewolves? There are werewolf hunters?”
There was a sudden snarling noise that made them all jump, but Scott’s friend was the first to recover. Rolling his eyes, he called for someone named Derek to show himself. “Come on Sourwolf, stop hiding and make your entrance.”
The French doors opened with a bang and a tall, dark-haired man dressed in leather and jeans strolled in, followed by two men and a woman, all about Scott and Allison’s age and all wearing a similar amount of leather and denim. The blonde girl was showing a fair amount of cleavage and giving Dean the same slow, lip-licking glance of appreciation that he was giving her, and Sam was about to elbow his brother when she switched over to him. He gulped and almost missed the entry of a fourth man, probably a good decade or so older than Dean.
The first intruder, probably the afore-mentioned Sourwolf, prowled closer to Dean and Sam, but his scrutiny held more disdain than appreciation. “Don’t call us hunters. We keep a control over supernatural beings that enter our territory but we’re not hunters.”
“Got it,” Sam said, leaning a little back in recognition of a real threat. “You’re not hunters.”
“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with hunters,” Dean tried to argue. His gun was in his hand and not very subtly pointed at the werewolf within striking range of his brother. “You need to get away from my brother, before I put a bullet in someone’s head.”
“Um, let’s not get into this again. I’m Stiles, by the way, and you’ve already met Mr. Argent, Allison and Scott. This is Derek, and his betas Boyd, Erica and Isaac.” Scott’s friend waved a hand in the direction of the betas, who each raised their eyebrows when their name was called, except for Erica, who blew them kisses. But Stiles’s body language made it clear that he considered himself allied with the wolves and not the hunters in the room. “And yes, they’re werewolves, and Allison and her father are hunters, and I’m human. Oh, and the creepy, quiet guy behind them is Peter Hale. We all work together to keep our town safe. So um, can you tell us why you’re here?”
“Let’s get something clear. I don’t know what kind of weirdass set-up you have going on here, Argent, but I don’t want any part of it. We don’t work with werewolves,” Dean growled.
Derek growled back; it was a lot more impressive. “If you’re going to be in my town hunting something, you don’t get a choice about being a part of ‘it.’ Unless you want me to rip your throat out with my teeth.”
“Is that a threat?”
Stiles wormed his way between the two men and threw his arms in the air. “Okay, you guys have both done your spraying around the room-“
“Stiles!” Scott groaned. Stiles - and what the hell kind of name was that? - huffed at the interruption but didn’t seem offended by it any more than he was by the way Derek stood close to him, ready to guard him from any attack Dean might offer.
“Ew,” Allison agreed.
“Colorful imagery aside,” Peter broke in, “Stiles is right. Look, we don’t like hunters, our hosts not excepted, any more than you like us, but if there is something that has come here and that threatens our people, we need to know about it. And I don’t know if you’ve worked with werewolves before, but we’re good at hunting things. And while I’m sure you’re also very good, we’re even better.” As he finished his speech in a sexy drawl, Peter shot a very appreciative glance at Dean’s militant stance.
“Worked with werewolves, no,” Dean said softly. “We’ve hunted them though.”
Derek lost his temper. Lunging forward, he swatted Dean’s gun away with fingers sharpening into claws and held his body against a wall, fangs inches from Dean’s eyes, before the hunter could let off a shot. “Are you proud of that? Did it give you a rush of power and satisfaction to kill someone who was a father, or a daughter? Someone who did nothing worse than eat a few wild rabbits or steal a sheep, and who didn’t deserve to have her head chopped off, her brains blown out, or to be barricaded in a house and left to burn to death-“
This time it was Sam who stepped in. He wanted to pull his own weapon, but they hadn’t really come prepared for werewolves and he had a feeling that violence wasn’t really the answer here. “Hey, look, we only go on hunts if something bad is happening. And the werewolves we’ve gone after had all done a lot more than steal a couple of sheep.”
Derek relaxed a little, and from the corner of his eyes Sam saw the glowing color fade out of the other werewolves’ eyes as their teeth receded and they all started looking a little less… wolfy. “Okay,” Derek said softly. “Okay,” patting down Dean’s coat and stepping away. “We can live with that. For now.”
“I guess,” Dean said, equally softly, much to Sam’s surprise. “We can too. And if you guys are going to help, you need to know what we’re up against.”
It was, without a doubt, the strangest conversation Sam had ever had, as they educated the supernatural team of Beacon Hills, six of them barely out of their teens, about demons and other beings the Winchesters had come across.
“I told you there were vampires,” Stiles said gleefully.
“Wait, so there’s a gun that kills… anything?” Chris asked, equal parts horrified and gleeful. And then, “the bad guys have it?”
“You guys use magic to fight stuff?” That was Dean, who was looking at Stiles with a whole new level of wariness.
“Only sometimes, and right now it’s more by accident than anything else,” Stiles admitted sheepishly. “But as soon as I’m done with college, Deaton’s going to teach me.”
But by the time the sun was going down, they had agreed on some things. They had to bring Sheriff Stilinski, who knew about werewolves but was kept out of things unless he needed to be in them, into the plan. Also, they had to congregate somewhere, and Derek had reluctantly thrown open the doors of the Hale house. “It’s out of the way, and it’s huge, so it lets us hole up in case they do go the pandemic route again,” Stiles pointed out.
Derek didn’t look happy but he agreed. Sam understood his reluctance when he got to the house and saw traces of fire still blackening the surrounding ground and some of the outside walls. He swallowed and glanced at his brother, who looked sad but not surprised.
Dean had an unexpected understanding of broken people.
And thus started the most surreal week of Sam Winchester’s life.
*
“Um, so we’re getting Erica’s room?” Sam asked, looking around at the Pack with no little guilt. “We don’t want to put you out- we can get a motel room. We’re used to it.”
“You’re supposed to stay here,” Derek said reluctantly. “And it’s not a problem, Erica stays in Boyd’s room more often than not if they’re here. Which they won’t be much this week; I want them patrolling the town so they’ll stay in our apartment there. But there’s room for everyone, even Stiles and the Sheriff, and Scott and Mrs. McCall.”
Erica nodded. “It’s not a problem. Hell, you guys would get your own rooms if Mr. Argent wasn’t here.” She said the hunter’s name with a sneer; it was obvious that the truce was difficult for most people to swallow. Which, Sam knew, didn’t really make it stronger or weaker, just the product of desperation.
“Well, if one of you wants to stay with me, you could stay in separate rooms,” Peter suggested, his tone innocent. His eyes were anything but innocent, and his hands reached out to gently brush against Dean’s arm.
Dean blushed, much to Sam’s surprise. “Uh, that- that’s okay. Thanks,” he added, and Peter smiled widely. Dean turned to Erica and almost desperately asked, “Do you want to take anything-“
“Oh, right,” she answered, biting back laughter. She sashayed her way past them and made a production of filling a duffle bag she’d pulled out of the closet. Sam was pretty sure she didn’t need to take a lace and ribbon negligee on patrol duty but he was fascinated by how even the sight of sexy lingerie didn’t distract Dean from his quiet fixation on Peter.
Sam wasn’t sure what the hell was going on, but he knew he didn’t want to miss a second of it.
*
“Oh my God, little brother, you can’t wear that,” Laura groaned.
“What’s wrong with this?” Derek looked down at his customary leather jacket, white tank, and jeans. “We’re going to a club, not the fucking Ritz.”
She stretched out an arm and gently brushed a lock of hair out of his eyes and then, with a quick twist he should have anticipated, she grasped that lock of hair and pulled. “Ow! Let go, you evil”- he shrieked, trying to twist his body away without pulling his head away from the hair she held. “Leggo.” He wasn’t proud of his own whining.
“Listen to me, Derek. I’ve been working all week and I want to go out and get a drink, some wings, and then find a nice, brainless body-builder who will use his roid-enfused body to give me the fucking my body deserves. And you are not going to ruin my night by sulking at home or scaring away all potential fucks. You’re going to play my gay wingman and you are going to play that role with style. Is that understood?”
Derek knew she knew she’d won, but he kept up pretenses for a little longer. “You know, normal people don’t take their little brothers with them when they go out to hook up.”
Laura’s mouth twisted in uncustomary bitterness. “We’re not normal, are we?”
“No, we’re not.” Derek looked down, and then gave a yelp as she twisted her hand again. “Hey, let go of the hair.”
Laura let go, but then leaned forward and let her fangs out enough that he felt a light nip on his nose. Not enough to break the skin, or really even hurt, but it made him swallow because it was something their mother had done. “Hey, we’re not normal, but remember what Grandpa used to say?”
“We’re better than normal,” they chorused, and Derek let a rare smile break his face.
Laura smiled back, but then the smile twisted into something ugly and mean. “Remember Grandpa Hale, Derek? You should. You killed him. You killed him, Derek!”
*
“You know that nothing’s happened in a long time when you actually want The Plague of Mindless Violence to visit your town,” Stiles observed sleepily as he collapsed into a chair. Then he caught sight of the food and perked up. “Ooh, breakfast!”
His father, following more sedately, groaned. “Didn’t you just eat dinner at home? And even if it’s eggs and pop-tarts, I don’t think you can call it breakfast at 11 at night.” Despite his words, Sheriff Stilinski took the laden plate from Sam with a smile of thanks. “But he’s right, it’s been three days and we haven’t seen any sign of him. Are you sure he’s coming here?”
“That’s what Sasquatch says,” Dean said shortly. “I’m just hoping he’s not wasting our time while all the action’s going on somewhere else.”
“I’m not wasting anyone’s time,” Sam said patiently. “Hey, even if I was wrong about this place being next, which I’m not because Lydia Martin confirmed it and she’s apparently a genius at this stuff, it wouldn’t be a waste of time. I’ve learned more about werewolves and other supernatural beings in the last couple of days than I’d learned in the last 20 years! Thanks again for sharing your database, Peter.”
Peter smiled and waved a hand dismissively. “Always a pleasure, Samuel.”
“Just Sam, thanks.” Sam corrected, and Dean rolled his eyes. He almost seemed jealous, which was ridiculous because Peter was nothing like the hot blonde waitress who’d ignored Dean and flirted with Sam during their previous case. But Sam had noticed that for all his usual bluster, Dean had not handled Peter’s overt flirting the way Sam had feared he would. In fact, the brother he’d always thought was homophobic actually seemed flattered by Peter’s behavior. Except when it was directed at anyone else.
“Why are you all here?” Derek stalked into the room. “Aren’t some of you supposed to be patrolling?”
“Aye, aye Sir!” Sam saluted. “I’m just heading out. Sheriff?”
Sheriff Stilinski looked down sadly at his plate as if he was saying goodbye to a loved one. Derek snorted and rolled his eyes. “You can take it with you. Just remember to bring it back,” he growled.
“Yeah, the wolves are a little touchy when it comes to littering in their territory,” Stiles added. “Careful, dad.” His father paused by his chair to give Stiles’s head a somewhat sticky kiss and, twenty years old or not, Stiles rose into the kiss a bit and then watched his father leave with an old, familiar worry in his eyes.
Seeing it, Derek leaned over and flicked Stiles’s head, not even smiling at his packmate’s outrage. For a second, Dean had a flickering thought that Derek had wanted to brush his hand over where Stiles’s father had kissed him, but then it passed. “I have a question and I need you to find an answer for me.”
“Um, what’s the magic word? Please?”
“Sure, you’re welcome,” Derek said casually and then swept out of the room, effectively replacing Stiles’s worry with justified indignation.
Dean watched them leave with an indulgent smile that he dropped as soon as the door opened. Chris Argent walked in and after a quick hello and update of zilch to Dean, filled up his plate and went to his room. Peter, on the other hand, stayed to pick at his food and stare at Dean.
“Dude, what is it?” Dean had tried to just avoid the stare, but Peter’s was unrelenting and just plain creepy.
For a minute, it seemed as if Peter would just smirk and walk out mysteriously like he generally did, but instead, “I’ve been talking to people about you.”
Dean slowly put his fork down. Oh well, it was his third helping anyway. He made his body stay relaxed and kept his voice calm. “Oh?”
“You’re in my house. You and the Argents are in my fucking house. Did you really think I wouldn’t try to find out who you were? I’ve heard the stories but I wanted to know more, to talk to wolves who have lived where you’ve hunted.”
“And?”
“Paris. The one in Texas, not France. 1999.”
Dean cast his memory back. That was… a long time ago. Hell, it’d been before Sammy went to college. Texas meant they’d probably stayed with Paulie, which… oh. “Werewolf.”
“Yes.”
“Did you know him?” Dean kept his eyes on Peter but his hand slowly crept towards his gun. He liked Peter, maybe even more than liked him, but he’d kill him if he had to, even if it broke off another part of Dean’s crumbling soul.
Peter nodded. “I fucked him on this table about a year before you or a member of your hunting family killed him.” That wasn’t quite true, as that table had been turned into ashes long ago, and even then he’d never have fucked anyone on the family dining table when there were kids in the house, as there had always been back then. But that was all the work of hunters too, so to hell with accuracy.
Dean swallowed, so caught up in a sudden, rare guilt that he forgot to react with the homophobic mask he’d perfected after growing up with his father, who’d been too military and too broken to deal with a son who’d had feelings for men as well as women. And maybe, just maybe, for reasons he wasn’t prepared to explore, he couldn’t find that mask when talking to Peter Hale. But regardless of his own feelings, the things they hunted weren’t supposed to have sexual partners or histories. They were monsters, not lovers. “I… I-“ He searched for something to say, but then settled on the truth. “He killed people.”
“He went rogue.” When Dean looked confused, Peter explained. “We don’t kill or turn people against their will. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to get that attention, but every now and then sense goes out the window and you get the Alpha packs, who want superiority and enslavement, or you get rogues. Werewolves who are usually crazy and who bring attention to us. We try to put them down before hunters get involved, but sometimes we fail, and then we go to ground until the hunters leave.”
“Put them down?”
“Yes, we take care of our own. Sometimes we rip their throats out, or we set them on fire. Right, Scott?”
Dean hadn’t even seen Scott enter, but Derek had already explained that werewolves had heightened senses. He looked up to see Scott standing in the doorway, Allison by his side. The young werewolf was stiff, his face vulnerable and somewhat guilt-stricken in the light. Obviously working to change the subject, Scott ignored Peter and told them what Allison and he had observed in the diner they’d been to that evening. “Nothing, everything seemed normal. Families were out and everyone was talking about Lindsay Lohan’s latest escapade, not murder or mayhem.”
But Peter wasn’t so easily dissuaded from his point. “That’s interesting. And I’m sure you and Allison observed a lot while you were on your romantic, star-crossed lovers outing.”
Allison bared her teeth. “Stay out of our relationship, Peter.”
“Your relationship? Please. A hunter dating a werewolf is a slaughter waiting to happen.”
“Oh, and who is going to do the slaughtering, Peter?” Allison shot back. “Is it you? Because out of all of us in this room, you’re the only one of us who has gone insane and killed a bunch of innocent people, including your own niece!”
Peter rose to his feet, but his voice remained silky soft. “Oh my dear, I wouldn’t go throwing murderous rage stones into people’s glass houses if I were you…”
“I’d just lost my mother!”
“So had I!” This time Peter shouted and sprouted some extra hair. Dean shot out of his chair and pulled out his gun but didn’t do anything yet. In the past three days he’d already learned that a little hair or teeth didn’t mean a lot, but this seemed much worse than the skirmishes he’d seen so far. “I’d lost my mother and my father, my two brothers and their wives, and my pregnant sister and her husband. And because my little brother was impotent, I lost the two children who were being raised calling someone else Daddy but who were biologically mine!”
In the silence that followed, Dean lowered his gun. Scott had a hand on Allison’s shoulder, caught somewhere between wanting to protect and restraining her. But Allison didn’t need to be restrained; her face was wet and she raised a hand to cover her shaking mouth.
Peter’s features returned to human and his voice lowered, but the passion was still there. “Does that surprise you? Have you never looked at the toll that hunters exact when they go rogue? For what I did, I know I’m not getting forgiveness from Derek in this life or the next, God knows I’m not forgiving myself, but I’m damned if I’ll hear judgment from a little girl who went around torturing her innocent peers and plotting to kill my nephew who has, for all his faults, refrained from taking a life other than in defense of another or for the general common good.”
“Hey,” Scott finally said. “That’s enough.”
“No,” Allison stopped him with a gentle smile. “I love you for always defending me, but he’s right. I messed up, and yes, so did he, but the truth is that he’d have his family and I’d-“ her face twisted but then she took a deep breath and continued, “and I’d have mine if we all would stop this stupid cycle of killing instead of talking things out. Peter was insane then, and Kate was insane, and no amount of talking would probably have helped them. But a lot wouldn’t have happened, or might have happened differently, if one of us had done this. So I’m going to start. Mr. Hale, on behalf of every hunter I can claim to represent, I am so sorry for what was done to your family. If I could have stopped it, I promise you I would have. And I know that’s not much comfort, but I do mean it.”
For a minute, it was so quiet Dean could hear the wrought-iron Ikea clock in the hall ticking away the seconds while three men stared at the woman in their midst.
Scott was the first to recover. Beaming, he grasped his girlfriend’s hand and kissed it, and Dean was torn between amusement and the need to hurl. Peter, however, examined her eyes to discern her sincerity. Whatever he saw must have been convincing because a tension that had been there as long as anyone present had known him seemed to evaporate. He shuddered with the release of it. “I’m not sorry for your aunt, but on behalf of the Hales, I regret what happened to your mother.”
“I can accept that.” Allison, too, looked as if she’d shed a heavy weight. She tossed a smile Dean’s way and then pulled Scott out of the room. Dean doubted either of them was going to sleep any time soon, under the same roof as her father or not.
Dean slumped back down into his chair, but didn’t resume eating. He watched Peter carefully as the man obviously fought giving in to his emotions. He wasn’t sure whether to pull out his gun or a box of Kleenex, and a part of him wanted to run away. But a different part, a broken one that was too familiar with loss to walk away from someone drowning in it, made him get up and go towards Peter to pat him on the shoulder or offer him the last slice of the unexpectedly delicious cake Boyd had baked.
He wasn’t expecting Peter to grab him or push him against the wall. He definitely wasn’t expecting Peter to kiss him like he was trying to suck his tongue out of his mouth. But hey, unexpected events weren’t always bad, and it had been so long since Dean had been with a man. Since Dean had felt strong arms hold him up, and the press of a thick, hard dick against him, in him. It’d been a long, dry 20 months with Sam in his car, beside him all the fucking time.
He pushed Peter away a bit, ignoring the older man’s growl to work on his buttons. He smirked a little at how nonverbal Peter was, because yes, he was that good, and then had to stop breathing and throw back his head when Peter pushed his knee up against his crotch. “Fuck!” He groaned, feeling Peter’s teeth, just a little too sharp to be human, in the crook of his neck. “Fuck,” he said again, rubbing himself against Peter’s denim-clad knee. He could feel his cock getting a little wet at the tip. He was close, too close. “Dude, not in the kitchen!”
Peter pulled away to glare at Dean for a second, then rolled his eyes and pulled the man out of the room. Over Dean’s shoulder, he caught a glimpse of a tall, open-mouthed young man. Had he not been so far gone, he would have been shocked at how he’d missed Sam coming into the house. But he was too far gone to care, and Dean had no idea Sam had seen them dry-humping in the kitchen so he wouldn’t stop.
“Oh my God,” Sam gasped. “Oh. My. God.” He knew he was starting to sound like that Chandler Bing guy from that show Jess had made him watch, but he couldn’t stop himself. “Oh my God.”
Upstairs, Derek flinched away from the book he was reading and his face screwed up in disgust. Curious, Stiles leaned over and read the page Derek had been skimming through a second ago.
“Um, what’s so disgusting about flies? I mean yeah, that they carry diseases is bad, but not magical curse diseases, which is good news. And hey, it’s kinda gross to see them on your food or in your drink, or eew, finding a dead fly in your soup is disgusting -“
“I can hear my uncle fucking Dean Winchester.”
Stiles stopped mid-sentence and stared at Derek for a second before taking on an expression of horror.
“Yeah, that was how I felt.” Derek slammed his book shut and closed his eyes. “Okay, if I can tune Scott and Allison out, I can tune this out. I can tune this out.”
“It’s like the train-wreck that you can’t look away from,” Stiles said, grudgingly impressed. “I mean, I can’t stop picturing it and I know it’s a little creepy but they’re both hot and wow I really can’t stop picturing it. And I can’t even smell or hear anything!”
Derek shot him a glare. “And you’re not related to either of them.”
“There’s that, too,” Stiles admitted cheerfully. “Oh, cheer up, Sourwolf. Peter’s probably going to be a lot easier to deal with now that he’s getting some. And man, Dean’s going to be the same. You know, you might… Oh hey, look at how late it is! Time for all traumatized wolfies and their research buddies to go to sleep.”
“I might what?” Derek asked ominously.
Stiles looked anywhere and everywhere but at his Alpha. “Um, you might lots of things. Like sleep!”
“Or be easier to deal with if I get laid? Is that what you were going to say?”
Stiles gulped. “I… I-“
Derek stalked towards him. “Well, Stiles? Do you think I’d be easier to deal with if I had sex?”
Stiles had an inch or two on Derek, but he felt penned in and trapped in a way that should have been scary instead of hot. He squeaked out an answer that the other man ignored.
“Would I?” Derek asked, softly now. He moved into Stiles’s space, breath whispering on Stiles’s lips, but didn’t close the distance between them completely.
Stiles suddenly knew that Derek would never make the first move. Not this troubled young man who had real issues with consent, power imbalances and differences in strength. So he screwed up his courage and forced himself those few extra centimeters and finally, after three years of wanting, kissed Derek.
Stiles learned a lot of things that night. He learned that he liked being fucked but that he loved fucking Derek, which worked well because Derek became a whole other person when he had someone’s cock up his ass. Younger, carefree and all melty and needy in a way Stiles had kind of been looking for all his life. Derek, who had hardened himself into rock for everyone around him, became soft as putty after he’d been fucked and bitten and scratched. And when he was soft as putty, he held Stiles close in a way that reminded Stiles of naps with his mom, or popcorn and movie nights with his dad- being safe and warm and knowing there was someone between you and the monster under the bed.
He also learned that Derek was ticklish on the balls of his feet, that he had a thing for biting at Stiles’s mouth, and that the bed in his room had really squeaky springs. And that for all that Scott had put him through in the Scott-and-Allison Harlequin love story, Scott was so offended by the noise the bed made when Stiles was fucking Derek that he banged on the wall twice. Whatever.
*
“Do you see that, Derek?”
Derek turned his face towards where his mother was pointing and squinted. He couldn’t see anything until… oh. “Is that a baby, Mom? In that lady’s stomach?”
“Yes, baby.”
Derek’s eyes widened. He was still getting used to the knowledge that babies grew in mother’s stomachs, and getting over the destruction of the illusion that storks brought them, in the middle of the night to wherever the mothers were at that time. Disney had so much to answer for. “Wow.”
“Yes, wow.” Darcy smiled and clutched her five-year-old boy closer. “Isn’t that amazing?”
“And my new cousin is growing just like that?”
“Just like that.”
Derek pursed his lips and pushed himself on his toes, then let his feet drop back down. He repeated the motion a few times. He was still a little jealous of his sister, who got to go visit Aunt Alex and see the new member of the Hale pack being born, but it was cool to get a glimpse of what she was seeing. “Is that baby a werewolf?”
“Derek!” His mother reprimanded. Little Derek then remembered that they weren’t supposed to talk about werewolves in public, and he supposed the grocery store parking lot counted as public.
“Sorry,” he murmured.
Darcy let her hand brush his hair, swallowing the ache in her that rose up and choked her. She worried about this child. She wasn’t sure why, but she worried about him in a way she didn’t worry about her daughter. “It’s okay, but you know the rules. And no, this baby is the son of the sheriff. He’s going to be a beautiful, normal human boy.”
“Will we be friends?”
“Oh baby, you are going to be the best of friends. And when you are both a little older, that beautiful, normal human boy will play with my extraordinary son. You two are going to do great things together.” Then she turned, and her eyes were dark with an expression of hate her son had never seen before, certainly not directed at him. “And then you’re going to get him killed.”
Derek didn’t open his eyes. He just pulled Stiles closer and breathed him in, as if that would fight the dark future his dreams foretold.
Part Two
Author: indusnm
Artist: dollarformyname
Fandoms: Teen Wolf/Supernatural
Genre: Crossover and Fusion
Pairings: Derek/Stiles, Peter Hale/Dean Winchester, Lydia/Jackson, Allison/Scott
Main Characters: Derek, Stiles, Dean and Peter Hale
Rating: PG-15
Warnings: Um, there's a lot of discussion of canonical character deaths, and it's a story about moving through pain. Nothing too terrible or graphic, and it does, I think, end happily.
Summary: Still reeling from John's warning, the Winchester brothers follow the Croatoan virus to Beacon Hills, California, where they learn that there are all kinds of hunters, and all kinds of werewolves too. And in saving a town, they just may change their destiny. For teenwolf-xbb
Notes: This wouldn't be possible without my beta oomnydevvotchka and my alpha witchyemerald, who took what I wrote and made it much better.
This is my first big bang, and as I've worked on it, I've gone through some major events, some great and some horrible, while writing it. I've hated it and loved it by turns, and I hope you enjoy it!
Link to the Fic! Link to the awesome art by the super-talented dollarformyname
PROLOGUE
“Dude, you’re such a cliché,” Stiles mocked.
Dean didn’t look up from the rhythmic ritual of cleaning his gun. He was going to say something smart-ass with a slice of mean, but for some reason he couldn’t. Maybe he was more impressed with the kid who was on the verge of losing everything Dean couldn’t remember ever having than he’d admitted, even to himself. “My dad taught me.”
Stiles was quiet for a minute, remembering that Dean hadn’t lost his father all that long ago. He tried not to think of his own father, out there with Derek and Peter and Sam, on patrol.
Then, sitting down with a calmness he rarely felt, he smiled. “Mine did too. He had guns in the house so I had to learn to use them. My mom hated them- she’d rather they weren’t there and she was kinda rabidly anti-gun, but she got that my dad didn’t have a choice. Still, she also knew hiding them wouldn’t work so she was okay with my learning. But I don’t know, since she died, I haven’t been able to use them without thinking of how much she would have hated that.”
Dean’s hands had stopped moving as he looked at Stiles intently. They shared a knowing, painful glance until Dean ruined it. “Wait, are we having a moment?”
“Shut up.” But Stiles was grinning because he’d been a second away from saying something very similar.
And then they heard three cell phones ring almost simultaneously around the house.
They looked at each other, eyes wide, until Scott burst through the door. Scott’s eyes were gleaming gold and he was partly wolfed out, nose flaring as he growled, “It’s here.”
*
The little girl twirled around. “Look, Derek,” she said in that childish cry that demanded he look now, “Isn’t it pretty?”
Derek looked up from the book he was skimming through. He had an assignment due the next morning and his mother was still making him watch Jamie because he “shouldn’t have waited until the last day, Derek.” He was annoyed and resentful and more than a little disappointed to not be spending the evening with Kate, but whatever. “I’m looking, Jay.”
“No Derek, isn’t it pretty?” she twirled again, black curly hair bouncing around the dimples in her cheeks.
Despite Derek’s insistence on being in a bad mood, he couldn’t help smiling as he heard her lisp. He wasn’t perfect and was more than capable of being a little bitch to her and her older brother sometimes, but it was hard to feel anything but joy at the sight of his three year-old cousin dancing in the light evening mist. “Very pretty, Miss Jay. You’re the belle of the ball.”
“Is that Belle from Beauty and the Beast?” She asked, eyes impossibly wider.
“Naw, you’re way prettier than her. And when you get older, you’ll get a much better BEAST!” As he shouted the last word, Derek let himself shift his eyes and teeth. Jamie screeched and took off running so Derek threw aside his book and ran after her on all fours. He let her get about twenty feet before he tackled her, twisting so that he landed between her and the ground. “And now, little Belle, I’m going to eat you!”
“No, no Derek!” She wriggled and screamed, caught in that in-between place where children can’t tell the difference between real threats and games. “Let me go, evil beast!”
“Never!”
Jamie managed to twist herself out of Derek’s grasp and tumbled to a heap on the grass a few feet away from him. They breathed hard, her from the tickling and him from the laughter he couldn’t seem to stop. But then she looked down at her new dress, now covered in grass stains, and gave a little cry. “Derek, it’s spoiled. You ruined my dress!” She looked back at him, her face suddenly burned away in some places and puffy as if she’d been asphyxiated. When she spoke, her voice was hoarse as if she had been screaming and had not been able to stop. “You ruined it, Derek. You ruined my dress. You ruined everything.”
Derek’s eyes shot open and he sat up in bed almost before he knew he was awake.
*
“I’m bored.” Stiles flung himself onto his own bed dramatically. He shot a quick glance at his best friend when Scott made no response, only to see his best friend texting furiously. Sitting up with a jerk, he threw his arms up in the air. “Did you hear me?”
Scott looked up, surprised. “Yeah, dude, I heard. You’re bored.”
“So?”
“So what?”
Stiles sighed and stood up. “Scott, this is the last summer we’re both going to be in Beacon Hills. As of the fall, we’re transferring to schools out of town. This is our last summer at home.”
“Stiles, we’re going to be back. We’ve already spent two more years here than we’d planned. Junior college is over; time to party university-style. And it’s not like we’re going to the ends of the Earth- we’re like two hours away. Why are you stressing?” Scott had a point; Lydia and Jackson had gone straight to a four-year university after high school and they came back almost every full moon and some long weekends in the middle too. Even Danny, who’d gone all the way to the East Coast, had done a great job of staying in touch.
“Dude, we’re going to be interning during the summers and then working and well- we’re going to have lives. This is the last summer we’re free.”
“Some would say we haven’t been free for the last four years,” Scott pointed out. “But you’re right, we should enjoy it. Bowling?”
“Seriously?”
“Okay, no bowling. Derek’s?”
“Derek’s it is.”
*
Derek and the pack had rebuilt the Hale house, but only to a point. They had reinforced the walls and ceiling and re-furnished the home, but they hadn’t painted or bothered to match the furniture. Stiles tried not to think about it too much, but it was as if Derek wanted to sabotage his own attempts to move on by surrounding himself with a constant reminder of his family’s tragic end.
When Stiles and Scott approached the house, they could feel the odd excitement in the air. The reason for the charged atmosphere was immediately evident.
“Allison’s here?” Scott was wary at the sight of Chris Argent’s car, but even the thought of his girlfriend’s father and Derek in the same vicinity couldn’t keep the smile her name brought forth from emerging. “What do you think she’s doing here?”
“Nothing good,” Stiles predicted direly. “I have a feeling I’m going to be nostalgic about this morning’s boredom very, very soon.” In the four years since Scott was bitten, Peter Hale’s resurrection, and the Alpha pack’s desultory retreat, the Hale pack had established itself so that threats were now uncommon. The onset of peace had allowed Derek to learn about being an alpha, and his developing leadership skills had encouraged Scott to join Derek’s pack. But even with Scott and Allison reconciling, Scott and Derek becoming something approaching friends, and the Argents and Hales sometimes working together to stave off supernatural threats, it was an unspoken rule that neither would set foot on each other’s property.
This wasn’t good.
“This isn’t good,” Scott fretted.
“Oh you can say that again.”
When they walked into the Hale house, Scott did just that. “This isn’t good,” he muttered when he caught sight of the visitors.
Allison turned to him with a worried smile, but her father didn’t move. “Hey Scott,” she said.
“What is it?” Stiles asked. “Another lizard, some kind of cat, or oh my God, a vampire?”
“There’s no such thing as vampires,” Derek said in a monotone, but there was a warm amusement in the glare that he shot Stiles that was rarely present when he spoke to anyone else in that tone of voice. His claws were out, digging into the arms of a chair Stiles was pretty sure Isaac had stolen off someone’s porch, and he did not look happy.
“For the thousandth time, Stiles, stop watching Twilight,” Boyd agreed.
“It’s worse.” Derek added ominously.
“Well,” Chris argued, “I don’t know about that.”
Derek scoffed. “The Winchesters are much worse than vampires, which don’t even fucking exist. They hunt and kill indiscriminately. And if they do that here-“
“If they do that here… what? The truce is over?” Allison shot back. “Are you going to hold all hunters, us, responsible for the actions of a pair of renegade hunters? It’s not like we hold you responsible for the actions of every supernatural creature out there.”
“The fuck you don’t.” Derek stood up in a quick, aggressive movement. “You always look at us first. Especially if it’s werewolves.”
Allison stepped forward, obviously about to argue, but Stiles wormed his way between them. “Okay, who and what are the Winchesters? What’s so special about them?”
“They’re hunters, some of the best in the business. Two brothers out of the Midwest, I think. They were trained by their father, who got into the business when their mother was killed. Claims that she was killed by a demon or something. And no, Stiles, I don’t know if demons are real. Some claim they are, but they’re the weird hunters who live in their cars and don’t really have jobs or families or lives outside of hunting, so who the hell knows? But well, they contacted me this morning to tell me they’re on their way. Hunter courtesy,” Chris explained.
“And you’re here because…“
“Because the Winchesters kill supernatural beings like… oh, us, and they don’t have a code,” Derek stated blandly.
“I’ll talk to them, Derek, and tell them to leave you alone. They’re hunting something, and they’ve tracked it from Oregon so I think they’re going to leave local werewolves alone.”
“They’d better.” Derek moved towards the window and looked out. Something about the set of his shoulders, the dark purpose in his voice, put Stiles on alert. He knew Derek, he’d spent too many minutes watching the older man to not know him, and he knew Derek was worried. And anything that worried Derek, worried him. So he stuck around after everyone had left to talk to Derek some more.
“Why are you still here, Stiles?” Derek’s voice was a mix of affection and exasperation, but he kept his distance from Stiles, almost as if he was afraid of him. Which was stupid because who was the ferocious, killer Alpha in the room?
Stiles, for once, went straight to the point. “Are they dangerous? I mean, any more than any of the other for-hire losers who’ve come through town over the last few years?”
“Stiles, they’re all dangerous,” Derek explained, looking at the walls around him as if he could still see the imprint of smoke and burning bodies on them. He probably could, Stiles realized. “Hunters have no other aim but to kill werewolves, and yes, sometimes Codes hold them back like a restraining order. But like all restraining orders, they’re there because there’s a threat, because we need them to protect us from those who would do us harm without reason.”
“Ah, the lesser known Violence Against Werewolves Act,” Stiles quipped, but he understood. “I get it, you know. I don’t underestimate hunters, Derek. Sometimes I still wake up in cold sweat and wonder if I signed Scott’s death certificate when I made him come out into the woods with me-“
Derek reached out to him, but stopped with his hand halfway to Stiles’s shoulder. “It- it’s not your fault, Stiles. And being a werewolf, hunters aside, has given Scott more than it’s taken away. He gets that too, now.”
“Yeah, I guess.” They stared at each other for a few minutes, an odd sort of tension in the air, until Stiles broke it with an uneasy cough. “Um, I’d better go.” When had he gotten so close to Derek, he wondered, as he wheeled around and almost ran off.
*
“So remind me why we’re headed to Beacon Hills?” Dean threw a peanut in the air and caught it between his teeth, keeping his other hand steady on the wheel as he crunched obnoxiously.
Sam skimmed the notes he’d made on the laptop and answered absently. “I’ve been tracking something, or someone, who has been moving south on Highway 5. Whatever it is, it’s leaving a deadly trail. There’s a particularly violent crime in every town it stops in. And no, it’s not the shooter, but for some reason in every town he stops in, someone goes crazy and goes on a rampage.”
Dean thought about it for a minute, then flicked his eyes towards Sam. “I don’t get it.”
“It’s a straight line between River Grove in Oregon and French Camp, California, on the 5.”
“River Grove?” Dean yelped. He remembered that town well. It wasn’t every day he saw an entire town getting hit by something that turned nice, normal people into zombies that were smarter and cleaner than the ones in the movies. He still sometimes wondered what happened to all those people who’d just disappeared when their zombie apocalypse had fizzled out. Hell, he still sometimes wondered how their fellow non-zombie survivors had explained what happened to the infected residents. Hopefully Sargent Varko, Duane and the hot Doc kept their promise and didn’t mention the Winchester brothers when they talked to the Feds. “Dude, you’re thinking it’s the Croatoan virus?”
“Well, yeah.”
Dean shook his head. “I think even I’d have noticed if entire towns were disappearing in Oregon and California.”
Sam nodded. “Exactly. Look, we didn’t figure out what they were doing but it just ended. Everyone disappeared, and yeah, if they all went out there and started killing and infecting everyone they saw, it would make the headlines. One town, the government can hide. But you take down an entire state, the biggest state in the country, and you’re probably going to have something out of a disaster movie, and no one’s going to ignore what’s going on.”
“So you think they’re doing isolated incidents? That’s kind of reaching, isn’t it?”
“Come on, we know they were intelligent. The infected in River Grove tried to trap us and fool us into thinking they weren’t infected. And Duane… Duane fooled us all.”
“What are you talking about?” When Sam didn’t answer immediately, Dean slammed on the breaks, bringing the car to an abrupt stop on the shoulder of the road. “What are you talking about, Sammy?”
Sam sighed and shut his laptop. “Dean, I didn’t want to tell you, but Dr. Lee contacted me a few days after we left River Grove. They found Sargent Varko in his car- he’d been killed right after leaving River Grove. I hacked into the database of the town handling the crime and um, I learned a few things.”
“Oh, did you?” Dean asked with a bite in his voice. “Jesus, Sammy, what else did you find out and not tell me?”
“His throat was slit and from the splatter it’s obvious that he was killed by the person sitting next to him. Last we saw, that was Duane. And that’s not all; there wasn’t enough blood found at the scene. Someone must have collected it. Who’s the last person I saw collecting blood, Dean?”
His older brother leaned his head on the steering wheel as he recalled Sam telling him about how a demon named Meg had used a goblet full of blood to communicate with someone his brother couldn’t see. Probably the crazy bitch’s yellow-eyed demon daddy. When he spoke, his words were muffled by leather. “I let a demon live, didn’t I?”
Sam didn’t answer his question for a few minutes, but then softly pointed out, “You did what we both thought was right. Hell, you did what was right. He wasn’t vulnerable to the virus; we just didn’t figure out why. I think he was a demon and I think he has the power to turn an entire town into functioning zombies the way he did in River Grove or, if he wants to keep a lower profile, he can just infect enough people to create a mass murder that devastates a town but doesn’t, unfortunately, seem so out of the ordinary in this day and age. Take French Camp, for instance. Some normal family guy went insane and took a gardening rake to his neighbors and the same night his cop brother decided that speeding was a capital crime and took out eight drivers and five passengers before someone finally took him down.”
“So we let Duane go and now he’s killed a whole bunch more people.”
“Now he’s killed a lot of people, yes.” Sam winced, but forged on. “And looking at the frequency and pattern of the attacks, the next one is probably going to be Beacon Hills in about a week.”
Dean straightened and started the car. His face was set into a resolved expression and if he was a little pale, Sam knew better than to comment on it. “No, it’s not. Because we’re going to stop it.”
*
Derek looked up from his cell phone when he heard a knock on the door. “Yes?”
Derek’s father poked his head around the door and smiled gently. “Derek, do we need to talk?”
“Um, I don’t think so?” Derek surreptitiously put his phone under his pillow, but he had a feeling his father, his alpha, hadn’t missed the movement. “I’m sorry?”
“Is that a question or an apology?” Lawrence Hale, known as Larry to no one but his irrepressible younger brother, asked his older son gently.
“An apology, sir.” Derek cast his eyes down in shame as he remembered how he’d behaved at dinner, how he’d made his normally tough, no-nonsense sister cry. “I’ll apologize to Laura later.” He heard his father move closer but didn’t look up. When his father’s strong hand came down gently on his shoulder, Derek straightened. It was comforting and warm, and he was too much of a teenager to admit how much he liked it, even to himself.
“Derek, what’s going on with you these days?”
Derek shrugged. He wanted to tell his father about Kate, but at the same time he wanted to keep her to himself. And even though he was sure he loved her in that forever way his father talked about his mother, he couldn’t help suspecting his father wouldn’t approve of his affair with his teacher.
“Derek, what’s going on?” His father repeated, and Derek shrugged. His father sighed and, after squeezing Derek’s shoulder one more time, walked away.
Derek opened his eyes slowly, clinging to the sense memory of his father’s hand on his shoulder. All too soon it faded away, leaving only the lingering smell of smoke in the air. And the overwhelming wish he’d opened his mouth and answered his father when he’d still been able to do so.
*
The Impala rolled into Beacon Hills the next morning. “So you said you contacted this… Chris Argent?” Dean wanted to confirm.
“Dad had his name in the journal. Apparently they hunted a witch together. Yes, I know, you hate witches. Dad had a weird note in the journal though, something about Argent having friends in weird places. But he also noted that the Argents are apparently a very old family of hunters. Kind of a legacy thing. I don’t think he and Argent got along that well.”
“Color me shocked,” Dean said wryly as he knocked on the front door. Dean loved his dad, but even he knew a lot of people wanted to kill John Winchester, and those were just his friends.
A young girl, no more than 19 or 20, opened the door but didn’t immediately invite them in. Sam felt that she was sizing them up, but Dean didn’t share the same impression of her scrutiny. “Hey, babe, you a friend of Argent’s? He’s expecting us.”
“I’m his daughter,” she answered sweetly, but there was enough danger in that smile to set Dean’s radar off, and his hand strayed towards his weapon. “And before you come in, you should probably know something. The Argents were hunting the supernatural long before your family knew there was something under the bed, and we’re a matriarchal line. So when I warn you that you call me babe again and I’ll pull your tongue out so far it’ll touch your ass, you’d better believe me. Got it?”
“Got it,” Dean smirked, throwing a sloppy salute. As she turned and led them down the hall, his eyes followed her appreciatively.
“Don’t even,” Sam warned.
“You should listen to him,” a boy’s voice warned and he materialized out of the shadows a couple of feet in front of them.
Both Winchesters jumped. Until he’d spoken, they’d had no idea he was there. “Who the hell are you?” Dean demanded.
Scott let his eyes gleam gold. “I’m Scott, Allison’s boyfriend.”
*
“Wait, your daughter is dating a werewolf? And you’re okay with this?”
Chris Argent winced, and it was obvious to Dean that the hunter was not as sanguine with his daughter’s choice of dates as he pretended to be, but the older man persevered. “I respect Allison’s right to date whomever she wants to date. She is a grown woman who has earned the right to make her own decisions,” Chris said in a practiced monotone, ignoring the scoffing sound coming from the pale, tall young man by Scott’s side.
Dean couldn’t quite comprehend what he was seeing, so he turned a wild eye towards Sam. His little brother swallowed and tried to summarize what they’d learned. “So there’s a code about hunters not killing supernatural beings that haven’t killed, and as part of this code, you hunt with werewolves? There are werewolf hunters?”
There was a sudden snarling noise that made them all jump, but Scott’s friend was the first to recover. Rolling his eyes, he called for someone named Derek to show himself. “Come on Sourwolf, stop hiding and make your entrance.”
The French doors opened with a bang and a tall, dark-haired man dressed in leather and jeans strolled in, followed by two men and a woman, all about Scott and Allison’s age and all wearing a similar amount of leather and denim. The blonde girl was showing a fair amount of cleavage and giving Dean the same slow, lip-licking glance of appreciation that he was giving her, and Sam was about to elbow his brother when she switched over to him. He gulped and almost missed the entry of a fourth man, probably a good decade or so older than Dean.
The first intruder, probably the afore-mentioned Sourwolf, prowled closer to Dean and Sam, but his scrutiny held more disdain than appreciation. “Don’t call us hunters. We keep a control over supernatural beings that enter our territory but we’re not hunters.”
“Got it,” Sam said, leaning a little back in recognition of a real threat. “You’re not hunters.”
“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with hunters,” Dean tried to argue. His gun was in his hand and not very subtly pointed at the werewolf within striking range of his brother. “You need to get away from my brother, before I put a bullet in someone’s head.”
“Um, let’s not get into this again. I’m Stiles, by the way, and you’ve already met Mr. Argent, Allison and Scott. This is Derek, and his betas Boyd, Erica and Isaac.” Scott’s friend waved a hand in the direction of the betas, who each raised their eyebrows when their name was called, except for Erica, who blew them kisses. But Stiles’s body language made it clear that he considered himself allied with the wolves and not the hunters in the room. “And yes, they’re werewolves, and Allison and her father are hunters, and I’m human. Oh, and the creepy, quiet guy behind them is Peter Hale. We all work together to keep our town safe. So um, can you tell us why you’re here?”
“Let’s get something clear. I don’t know what kind of weirdass set-up you have going on here, Argent, but I don’t want any part of it. We don’t work with werewolves,” Dean growled.
Derek growled back; it was a lot more impressive. “If you’re going to be in my town hunting something, you don’t get a choice about being a part of ‘it.’ Unless you want me to rip your throat out with my teeth.”
“Is that a threat?”
Stiles wormed his way between the two men and threw his arms in the air. “Okay, you guys have both done your spraying around the room-“
“Stiles!” Scott groaned. Stiles - and what the hell kind of name was that? - huffed at the interruption but didn’t seem offended by it any more than he was by the way Derek stood close to him, ready to guard him from any attack Dean might offer.
“Ew,” Allison agreed.
“Colorful imagery aside,” Peter broke in, “Stiles is right. Look, we don’t like hunters, our hosts not excepted, any more than you like us, but if there is something that has come here and that threatens our people, we need to know about it. And I don’t know if you’ve worked with werewolves before, but we’re good at hunting things. And while I’m sure you’re also very good, we’re even better.” As he finished his speech in a sexy drawl, Peter shot a very appreciative glance at Dean’s militant stance.
“Worked with werewolves, no,” Dean said softly. “We’ve hunted them though.”
Derek lost his temper. Lunging forward, he swatted Dean’s gun away with fingers sharpening into claws and held his body against a wall, fangs inches from Dean’s eyes, before the hunter could let off a shot. “Are you proud of that? Did it give you a rush of power and satisfaction to kill someone who was a father, or a daughter? Someone who did nothing worse than eat a few wild rabbits or steal a sheep, and who didn’t deserve to have her head chopped off, her brains blown out, or to be barricaded in a house and left to burn to death-“
This time it was Sam who stepped in. He wanted to pull his own weapon, but they hadn’t really come prepared for werewolves and he had a feeling that violence wasn’t really the answer here. “Hey, look, we only go on hunts if something bad is happening. And the werewolves we’ve gone after had all done a lot more than steal a couple of sheep.”
Derek relaxed a little, and from the corner of his eyes Sam saw the glowing color fade out of the other werewolves’ eyes as their teeth receded and they all started looking a little less… wolfy. “Okay,” Derek said softly. “Okay,” patting down Dean’s coat and stepping away. “We can live with that. For now.”
“I guess,” Dean said, equally softly, much to Sam’s surprise. “We can too. And if you guys are going to help, you need to know what we’re up against.”
It was, without a doubt, the strangest conversation Sam had ever had, as they educated the supernatural team of Beacon Hills, six of them barely out of their teens, about demons and other beings the Winchesters had come across.
“I told you there were vampires,” Stiles said gleefully.
“Wait, so there’s a gun that kills… anything?” Chris asked, equal parts horrified and gleeful. And then, “the bad guys have it?”
“You guys use magic to fight stuff?” That was Dean, who was looking at Stiles with a whole new level of wariness.
“Only sometimes, and right now it’s more by accident than anything else,” Stiles admitted sheepishly. “But as soon as I’m done with college, Deaton’s going to teach me.”
But by the time the sun was going down, they had agreed on some things. They had to bring Sheriff Stilinski, who knew about werewolves but was kept out of things unless he needed to be in them, into the plan. Also, they had to congregate somewhere, and Derek had reluctantly thrown open the doors of the Hale house. “It’s out of the way, and it’s huge, so it lets us hole up in case they do go the pandemic route again,” Stiles pointed out.
Derek didn’t look happy but he agreed. Sam understood his reluctance when he got to the house and saw traces of fire still blackening the surrounding ground and some of the outside walls. He swallowed and glanced at his brother, who looked sad but not surprised.
Dean had an unexpected understanding of broken people.
And thus started the most surreal week of Sam Winchester’s life.
*
“Um, so we’re getting Erica’s room?” Sam asked, looking around at the Pack with no little guilt. “We don’t want to put you out- we can get a motel room. We’re used to it.”
“You’re supposed to stay here,” Derek said reluctantly. “And it’s not a problem, Erica stays in Boyd’s room more often than not if they’re here. Which they won’t be much this week; I want them patrolling the town so they’ll stay in our apartment there. But there’s room for everyone, even Stiles and the Sheriff, and Scott and Mrs. McCall.”
Erica nodded. “It’s not a problem. Hell, you guys would get your own rooms if Mr. Argent wasn’t here.” She said the hunter’s name with a sneer; it was obvious that the truce was difficult for most people to swallow. Which, Sam knew, didn’t really make it stronger or weaker, just the product of desperation.
“Well, if one of you wants to stay with me, you could stay in separate rooms,” Peter suggested, his tone innocent. His eyes were anything but innocent, and his hands reached out to gently brush against Dean’s arm.
Dean blushed, much to Sam’s surprise. “Uh, that- that’s okay. Thanks,” he added, and Peter smiled widely. Dean turned to Erica and almost desperately asked, “Do you want to take anything-“
“Oh, right,” she answered, biting back laughter. She sashayed her way past them and made a production of filling a duffle bag she’d pulled out of the closet. Sam was pretty sure she didn’t need to take a lace and ribbon negligee on patrol duty but he was fascinated by how even the sight of sexy lingerie didn’t distract Dean from his quiet fixation on Peter.
Sam wasn’t sure what the hell was going on, but he knew he didn’t want to miss a second of it.
*
“Oh my God, little brother, you can’t wear that,” Laura groaned.
“What’s wrong with this?” Derek looked down at his customary leather jacket, white tank, and jeans. “We’re going to a club, not the fucking Ritz.”
She stretched out an arm and gently brushed a lock of hair out of his eyes and then, with a quick twist he should have anticipated, she grasped that lock of hair and pulled. “Ow! Let go, you evil”- he shrieked, trying to twist his body away without pulling his head away from the hair she held. “Leggo.” He wasn’t proud of his own whining.
“Listen to me, Derek. I’ve been working all week and I want to go out and get a drink, some wings, and then find a nice, brainless body-builder who will use his roid-enfused body to give me the fucking my body deserves. And you are not going to ruin my night by sulking at home or scaring away all potential fucks. You’re going to play my gay wingman and you are going to play that role with style. Is that understood?”
Derek knew she knew she’d won, but he kept up pretenses for a little longer. “You know, normal people don’t take their little brothers with them when they go out to hook up.”
Laura’s mouth twisted in uncustomary bitterness. “We’re not normal, are we?”
“No, we’re not.” Derek looked down, and then gave a yelp as she twisted her hand again. “Hey, let go of the hair.”
Laura let go, but then leaned forward and let her fangs out enough that he felt a light nip on his nose. Not enough to break the skin, or really even hurt, but it made him swallow because it was something their mother had done. “Hey, we’re not normal, but remember what Grandpa used to say?”
“We’re better than normal,” they chorused, and Derek let a rare smile break his face.
Laura smiled back, but then the smile twisted into something ugly and mean. “Remember Grandpa Hale, Derek? You should. You killed him. You killed him, Derek!”
*
“You know that nothing’s happened in a long time when you actually want The Plague of Mindless Violence to visit your town,” Stiles observed sleepily as he collapsed into a chair. Then he caught sight of the food and perked up. “Ooh, breakfast!”
His father, following more sedately, groaned. “Didn’t you just eat dinner at home? And even if it’s eggs and pop-tarts, I don’t think you can call it breakfast at 11 at night.” Despite his words, Sheriff Stilinski took the laden plate from Sam with a smile of thanks. “But he’s right, it’s been three days and we haven’t seen any sign of him. Are you sure he’s coming here?”
“That’s what Sasquatch says,” Dean said shortly. “I’m just hoping he’s not wasting our time while all the action’s going on somewhere else.”
“I’m not wasting anyone’s time,” Sam said patiently. “Hey, even if I was wrong about this place being next, which I’m not because Lydia Martin confirmed it and she’s apparently a genius at this stuff, it wouldn’t be a waste of time. I’ve learned more about werewolves and other supernatural beings in the last couple of days than I’d learned in the last 20 years! Thanks again for sharing your database, Peter.”
Peter smiled and waved a hand dismissively. “Always a pleasure, Samuel.”
“Just Sam, thanks.” Sam corrected, and Dean rolled his eyes. He almost seemed jealous, which was ridiculous because Peter was nothing like the hot blonde waitress who’d ignored Dean and flirted with Sam during their previous case. But Sam had noticed that for all his usual bluster, Dean had not handled Peter’s overt flirting the way Sam had feared he would. In fact, the brother he’d always thought was homophobic actually seemed flattered by Peter’s behavior. Except when it was directed at anyone else.
“Why are you all here?” Derek stalked into the room. “Aren’t some of you supposed to be patrolling?”
“Aye, aye Sir!” Sam saluted. “I’m just heading out. Sheriff?”
Sheriff Stilinski looked down sadly at his plate as if he was saying goodbye to a loved one. Derek snorted and rolled his eyes. “You can take it with you. Just remember to bring it back,” he growled.
“Yeah, the wolves are a little touchy when it comes to littering in their territory,” Stiles added. “Careful, dad.” His father paused by his chair to give Stiles’s head a somewhat sticky kiss and, twenty years old or not, Stiles rose into the kiss a bit and then watched his father leave with an old, familiar worry in his eyes.
Seeing it, Derek leaned over and flicked Stiles’s head, not even smiling at his packmate’s outrage. For a second, Dean had a flickering thought that Derek had wanted to brush his hand over where Stiles’s father had kissed him, but then it passed. “I have a question and I need you to find an answer for me.”
“Um, what’s the magic word? Please?”
“Sure, you’re welcome,” Derek said casually and then swept out of the room, effectively replacing Stiles’s worry with justified indignation.
Dean watched them leave with an indulgent smile that he dropped as soon as the door opened. Chris Argent walked in and after a quick hello and update of zilch to Dean, filled up his plate and went to his room. Peter, on the other hand, stayed to pick at his food and stare at Dean.
“Dude, what is it?” Dean had tried to just avoid the stare, but Peter’s was unrelenting and just plain creepy.
For a minute, it seemed as if Peter would just smirk and walk out mysteriously like he generally did, but instead, “I’ve been talking to people about you.”
Dean slowly put his fork down. Oh well, it was his third helping anyway. He made his body stay relaxed and kept his voice calm. “Oh?”
“You’re in my house. You and the Argents are in my fucking house. Did you really think I wouldn’t try to find out who you were? I’ve heard the stories but I wanted to know more, to talk to wolves who have lived where you’ve hunted.”
“And?”
“Paris. The one in Texas, not France. 1999.”
Dean cast his memory back. That was… a long time ago. Hell, it’d been before Sammy went to college. Texas meant they’d probably stayed with Paulie, which… oh. “Werewolf.”
“Yes.”
“Did you know him?” Dean kept his eyes on Peter but his hand slowly crept towards his gun. He liked Peter, maybe even more than liked him, but he’d kill him if he had to, even if it broke off another part of Dean’s crumbling soul.
Peter nodded. “I fucked him on this table about a year before you or a member of your hunting family killed him.” That wasn’t quite true, as that table had been turned into ashes long ago, and even then he’d never have fucked anyone on the family dining table when there were kids in the house, as there had always been back then. But that was all the work of hunters too, so to hell with accuracy.
Dean swallowed, so caught up in a sudden, rare guilt that he forgot to react with the homophobic mask he’d perfected after growing up with his father, who’d been too military and too broken to deal with a son who’d had feelings for men as well as women. And maybe, just maybe, for reasons he wasn’t prepared to explore, he couldn’t find that mask when talking to Peter Hale. But regardless of his own feelings, the things they hunted weren’t supposed to have sexual partners or histories. They were monsters, not lovers. “I… I-“ He searched for something to say, but then settled on the truth. “He killed people.”
“He went rogue.” When Dean looked confused, Peter explained. “We don’t kill or turn people against their will. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to get that attention, but every now and then sense goes out the window and you get the Alpha packs, who want superiority and enslavement, or you get rogues. Werewolves who are usually crazy and who bring attention to us. We try to put them down before hunters get involved, but sometimes we fail, and then we go to ground until the hunters leave.”
“Put them down?”
“Yes, we take care of our own. Sometimes we rip their throats out, or we set them on fire. Right, Scott?”
Dean hadn’t even seen Scott enter, but Derek had already explained that werewolves had heightened senses. He looked up to see Scott standing in the doorway, Allison by his side. The young werewolf was stiff, his face vulnerable and somewhat guilt-stricken in the light. Obviously working to change the subject, Scott ignored Peter and told them what Allison and he had observed in the diner they’d been to that evening. “Nothing, everything seemed normal. Families were out and everyone was talking about Lindsay Lohan’s latest escapade, not murder or mayhem.”
But Peter wasn’t so easily dissuaded from his point. “That’s interesting. And I’m sure you and Allison observed a lot while you were on your romantic, star-crossed lovers outing.”
Allison bared her teeth. “Stay out of our relationship, Peter.”
“Your relationship? Please. A hunter dating a werewolf is a slaughter waiting to happen.”
“Oh, and who is going to do the slaughtering, Peter?” Allison shot back. “Is it you? Because out of all of us in this room, you’re the only one of us who has gone insane and killed a bunch of innocent people, including your own niece!”
Peter rose to his feet, but his voice remained silky soft. “Oh my dear, I wouldn’t go throwing murderous rage stones into people’s glass houses if I were you…”
“I’d just lost my mother!”
“So had I!” This time Peter shouted and sprouted some extra hair. Dean shot out of his chair and pulled out his gun but didn’t do anything yet. In the past three days he’d already learned that a little hair or teeth didn’t mean a lot, but this seemed much worse than the skirmishes he’d seen so far. “I’d lost my mother and my father, my two brothers and their wives, and my pregnant sister and her husband. And because my little brother was impotent, I lost the two children who were being raised calling someone else Daddy but who were biologically mine!”
In the silence that followed, Dean lowered his gun. Scott had a hand on Allison’s shoulder, caught somewhere between wanting to protect and restraining her. But Allison didn’t need to be restrained; her face was wet and she raised a hand to cover her shaking mouth.
Peter’s features returned to human and his voice lowered, but the passion was still there. “Does that surprise you? Have you never looked at the toll that hunters exact when they go rogue? For what I did, I know I’m not getting forgiveness from Derek in this life or the next, God knows I’m not forgiving myself, but I’m damned if I’ll hear judgment from a little girl who went around torturing her innocent peers and plotting to kill my nephew who has, for all his faults, refrained from taking a life other than in defense of another or for the general common good.”
“Hey,” Scott finally said. “That’s enough.”
“No,” Allison stopped him with a gentle smile. “I love you for always defending me, but he’s right. I messed up, and yes, so did he, but the truth is that he’d have his family and I’d-“ her face twisted but then she took a deep breath and continued, “and I’d have mine if we all would stop this stupid cycle of killing instead of talking things out. Peter was insane then, and Kate was insane, and no amount of talking would probably have helped them. But a lot wouldn’t have happened, or might have happened differently, if one of us had done this. So I’m going to start. Mr. Hale, on behalf of every hunter I can claim to represent, I am so sorry for what was done to your family. If I could have stopped it, I promise you I would have. And I know that’s not much comfort, but I do mean it.”
For a minute, it was so quiet Dean could hear the wrought-iron Ikea clock in the hall ticking away the seconds while three men stared at the woman in their midst.
Scott was the first to recover. Beaming, he grasped his girlfriend’s hand and kissed it, and Dean was torn between amusement and the need to hurl. Peter, however, examined her eyes to discern her sincerity. Whatever he saw must have been convincing because a tension that had been there as long as anyone present had known him seemed to evaporate. He shuddered with the release of it. “I’m not sorry for your aunt, but on behalf of the Hales, I regret what happened to your mother.”
“I can accept that.” Allison, too, looked as if she’d shed a heavy weight. She tossed a smile Dean’s way and then pulled Scott out of the room. Dean doubted either of them was going to sleep any time soon, under the same roof as her father or not.
Dean slumped back down into his chair, but didn’t resume eating. He watched Peter carefully as the man obviously fought giving in to his emotions. He wasn’t sure whether to pull out his gun or a box of Kleenex, and a part of him wanted to run away. But a different part, a broken one that was too familiar with loss to walk away from someone drowning in it, made him get up and go towards Peter to pat him on the shoulder or offer him the last slice of the unexpectedly delicious cake Boyd had baked.
He wasn’t expecting Peter to grab him or push him against the wall. He definitely wasn’t expecting Peter to kiss him like he was trying to suck his tongue out of his mouth. But hey, unexpected events weren’t always bad, and it had been so long since Dean had been with a man. Since Dean had felt strong arms hold him up, and the press of a thick, hard dick against him, in him. It’d been a long, dry 20 months with Sam in his car, beside him all the fucking time.
He pushed Peter away a bit, ignoring the older man’s growl to work on his buttons. He smirked a little at how nonverbal Peter was, because yes, he was that good, and then had to stop breathing and throw back his head when Peter pushed his knee up against his crotch. “Fuck!” He groaned, feeling Peter’s teeth, just a little too sharp to be human, in the crook of his neck. “Fuck,” he said again, rubbing himself against Peter’s denim-clad knee. He could feel his cock getting a little wet at the tip. He was close, too close. “Dude, not in the kitchen!”
Peter pulled away to glare at Dean for a second, then rolled his eyes and pulled the man out of the room. Over Dean’s shoulder, he caught a glimpse of a tall, open-mouthed young man. Had he not been so far gone, he would have been shocked at how he’d missed Sam coming into the house. But he was too far gone to care, and Dean had no idea Sam had seen them dry-humping in the kitchen so he wouldn’t stop.
“Oh my God,” Sam gasped. “Oh. My. God.” He knew he was starting to sound like that Chandler Bing guy from that show Jess had made him watch, but he couldn’t stop himself. “Oh my God.”
Upstairs, Derek flinched away from the book he was reading and his face screwed up in disgust. Curious, Stiles leaned over and read the page Derek had been skimming through a second ago.
“Um, what’s so disgusting about flies? I mean yeah, that they carry diseases is bad, but not magical curse diseases, which is good news. And hey, it’s kinda gross to see them on your food or in your drink, or eew, finding a dead fly in your soup is disgusting -“
“I can hear my uncle fucking Dean Winchester.”
Stiles stopped mid-sentence and stared at Derek for a second before taking on an expression of horror.
“Yeah, that was how I felt.” Derek slammed his book shut and closed his eyes. “Okay, if I can tune Scott and Allison out, I can tune this out. I can tune this out.”
“It’s like the train-wreck that you can’t look away from,” Stiles said, grudgingly impressed. “I mean, I can’t stop picturing it and I know it’s a little creepy but they’re both hot and wow I really can’t stop picturing it. And I can’t even smell or hear anything!”
Derek shot him a glare. “And you’re not related to either of them.”
“There’s that, too,” Stiles admitted cheerfully. “Oh, cheer up, Sourwolf. Peter’s probably going to be a lot easier to deal with now that he’s getting some. And man, Dean’s going to be the same. You know, you might… Oh hey, look at how late it is! Time for all traumatized wolfies and their research buddies to go to sleep.”
“I might what?” Derek asked ominously.
Stiles looked anywhere and everywhere but at his Alpha. “Um, you might lots of things. Like sleep!”
“Or be easier to deal with if I get laid? Is that what you were going to say?”
Stiles gulped. “I… I-“
Derek stalked towards him. “Well, Stiles? Do you think I’d be easier to deal with if I had sex?”
Stiles had an inch or two on Derek, but he felt penned in and trapped in a way that should have been scary instead of hot. He squeaked out an answer that the other man ignored.
“Would I?” Derek asked, softly now. He moved into Stiles’s space, breath whispering on Stiles’s lips, but didn’t close the distance between them completely.
Stiles suddenly knew that Derek would never make the first move. Not this troubled young man who had real issues with consent, power imbalances and differences in strength. So he screwed up his courage and forced himself those few extra centimeters and finally, after three years of wanting, kissed Derek.
Stiles learned a lot of things that night. He learned that he liked being fucked but that he loved fucking Derek, which worked well because Derek became a whole other person when he had someone’s cock up his ass. Younger, carefree and all melty and needy in a way Stiles had kind of been looking for all his life. Derek, who had hardened himself into rock for everyone around him, became soft as putty after he’d been fucked and bitten and scratched. And when he was soft as putty, he held Stiles close in a way that reminded Stiles of naps with his mom, or popcorn and movie nights with his dad- being safe and warm and knowing there was someone between you and the monster under the bed.
He also learned that Derek was ticklish on the balls of his feet, that he had a thing for biting at Stiles’s mouth, and that the bed in his room had really squeaky springs. And that for all that Scott had put him through in the Scott-and-Allison Harlequin love story, Scott was so offended by the noise the bed made when Stiles was fucking Derek that he banged on the wall twice. Whatever.
*
“Do you see that, Derek?”
Derek turned his face towards where his mother was pointing and squinted. He couldn’t see anything until… oh. “Is that a baby, Mom? In that lady’s stomach?”
“Yes, baby.”
Derek’s eyes widened. He was still getting used to the knowledge that babies grew in mother’s stomachs, and getting over the destruction of the illusion that storks brought them, in the middle of the night to wherever the mothers were at that time. Disney had so much to answer for. “Wow.”
“Yes, wow.” Darcy smiled and clutched her five-year-old boy closer. “Isn’t that amazing?”
“And my new cousin is growing just like that?”
“Just like that.”
Derek pursed his lips and pushed himself on his toes, then let his feet drop back down. He repeated the motion a few times. He was still a little jealous of his sister, who got to go visit Aunt Alex and see the new member of the Hale pack being born, but it was cool to get a glimpse of what she was seeing. “Is that baby a werewolf?”
“Derek!” His mother reprimanded. Little Derek then remembered that they weren’t supposed to talk about werewolves in public, and he supposed the grocery store parking lot counted as public.
“Sorry,” he murmured.
Darcy let her hand brush his hair, swallowing the ache in her that rose up and choked her. She worried about this child. She wasn’t sure why, but she worried about him in a way she didn’t worry about her daughter. “It’s okay, but you know the rules. And no, this baby is the son of the sheriff. He’s going to be a beautiful, normal human boy.”
“Will we be friends?”
“Oh baby, you are going to be the best of friends. And when you are both a little older, that beautiful, normal human boy will play with my extraordinary son. You two are going to do great things together.” Then she turned, and her eyes were dark with an expression of hate her son had never seen before, certainly not directed at him. “And then you’re going to get him killed.”
Derek didn’t open his eyes. He just pulled Stiles closer and breathed him in, as if that would fight the dark future his dreams foretold.
Part Two