More metrics (imagine that)
I guess I got myself un-stuck from the proverbial Writer's Block -- but I'm sure everyone knows by now that when I get blocked, I just end up writing something else in the meantime.
So along with the 2,000-some words that I did today for LM#12, I have some 3,500 words of a Teen Wolf fic behind the cut (very definitely an AU, very much a Sterek).
But first: metrics.
63000 / 70000 (90.00%)
Peter effectively put an end to the war-planning -- which had escalated to near-nuclear levels -- by reminding them: "You don't bring a knife to a gunfight."
Laura lifted her chin and stared at Derek; Derek studiously ignored her until he'd made the full circuit around the table. Laura was old enough to sit at the table now, had been for years. So was Derek, but Derek couldn't sit still. He never could.
Growing up, he'd eat breakfast in a frantic inhale. At school, he would squirm in his seat, driving everyone to distraction. And now? He was always on patrol, inspecting his pack's territory, because it was the only way to keep his instincts under control.
He was all action and reaction. He could fight his way out of a tight spot. He couldn't sit over a map and talk tactics. He couldn't strategize the way his mother could, the way Laura could. But he could see what other people didn't see, what they didn't want to see. And he knew that if he looked at Laura now, he would see a wily glint in her eye.
He didn't trust it at all.
Derek put his hands on the back of a chair -- his chair -- and stared at Laura long and hard, because then, maybe she would be able to do more than know merely his scent and how he felt. She'd be able to read his mind.
No. Don't even.
Laura tilted her head.
No. No. No.
She arched an eyebrow, and there might have been certainty in her gaze. Except Derek knew better. It wasn't certainty.
They couldn't trust her. She had a plan. She always did. The problem with her plans was that they were never for the pack's benefit, however much that she argued that they were, that it wasn't her fault that the Hunters had intervened.
Derek, Peter, even Michael -- Derek's father -- they always stopped Laura before she went too far. Before she risked the pack. It was a sign of the Alpha's weakness that Laura had survived this long, and in equal measure, it was a sign of the pack's weakness that no one had challenged the Alpha for not doing something about Laura sooner.
For all of her monumental flaws, Laura was family. Laura was pack.
"Maybe a knife is exactly what we need," Laura said, her voice thunderous in the lull. Mother, father, Uncle Peter, Uncle Adrian, Aunt Helen, Neil, Jeremy, Samantha, Lisbeth -- they all turned to look at her.
Derek didn't.
He stared at his hands and silently mouthed along when Laura said, "I have an idea."
More than fifteen years ago, John Stilinski came to Beacon Hills on emergency leave only to turn around and leave town, taking his newborn son with him. It wasn't until they was gone that the Hales realized just how much the pack hadn't known about Mariah's husband, how much they should have known.
Army Ranger. Special Forces. Numerous commendations for bravery. Sharpshooting records that held even these days despite better scope technology, better gun design, new bullets moulded with materials to reduce air resistance and allow them to travel further. There were so many black ops missions in his docket that not even Peter's extensive and shady contacts could have netted anything better than a ream of paper covered in blocked black ink.
John Stilinski was a man who knew how to disappear. He knew how to stay disappeared.
Mariah Williamson-Stilinski had sided with the pack in the Hunter-Wolf war. But the pack had been tricked and betrayed. When they had finally found her, Alpha Evangelina Hale had been forced to prematurely deliver her child on a bloody battlefield even as Mariah's heart stuttered and faltered. Her son was born strong and healthy, and when John Stilinski showed up on their doorstep to take his son, everyone knew that he would never forgive the pack for not doing more to protect his wife.
Father and son were gone two days later. Peter's sources had discovered that John had put in for a compassionate discharge from the army and that it had been granted. He'd vanished without a trace.
The pack never learned the name of Mariah's heir.
"What kind of idea was that? It's not even any kind of fucking plan. It's a myth, Laura," Derek growled. "You don't know how you sounded --"
He shoved supplies in his duffel bag. Laura watched him, her stare even and judgmental, from the doorway. Derek didn't know where she got off being judgmental considering that this whole mess with the war started because of her, but she didn't see it that way. Laura leaned against the doorjamb, her arms crossed, silent for once.
"This is a waste of time. I should be here, where I'm useful, not on a wild-goose chase --"
"Mom says we can't spare anyone else. I told her to send me, but she says she needs me here," Laura said a bit too smugly. Her lips pulled back over her teeth in a grimace that was just as much a challenge. In her head, she was mommy's perfect little girl, just like she was when she was a kid. She couldn't possibly ever do anything wrong. Except she had. In her head, she had done and continued to do what was right for the pack.
In her head --
Derek didn't want to be in her head.
She was sick. They'd tried everything to help her, but it was no use. Whatever it was that Kate had done to Laura? There was no fixing it.
If he wanted to fight her for position, he could. He should. Laura was four years older than he was. She was strong, but she wasn't stronger. She'd made herself weak when she started dating Kate in secret, and again when she practically held the jerry can of Kerosene when Kate tried to burn the house down.
Mom and Dad had tried to help her, even finding a match with an Alpha from another pack, but Laura refused to take a mate, even when taking a mate could have -- might have -- saved her. There were those within the pack who saw her as a liability, too head-strong, too proud, too blind.
A fucking train wreck. But she was his sister, and he'd tried.
The last straw had been before the war started. Derek hadn't been meant to see it, but he had. Laura had snuck out of the house late at night and there had been Kate at the end of the driveway, obvious as a rescue flare in the dead of night, the two of them rubbing it in that they were together. Derek didn't understand how Laura could do it. The Argents were the enemy. Kate --
He'd run down the stairs in a panic to tell his mother, but Evangelina had already known. She'd looked so sad that day, and had shaken her head. I've done all that I can.
Laura would not be the next Alpha. The pack would never accept her. After what happened with Kate --
Derek didn't want to think about Kate. How that bitch had tried for Derek first, thinking that he'd be easier to manipulate just because he was younger. But he'd never liked girls, and Laura... even in a pack where one couldn't turn around without hitting someone, Laura had been lonely.
She still was. And no one noticed. It was their fault. And then Kate --
They hadn't even known that Kate was an Argent. She'd lied about her name. It was only an accident that they'd found out --
No, Derek definitely didn't want to think about Kate.
Instead, Derek shot Laura a dark look. He didn't say what was on the tip of his tongue. The pack could spare her. But he knew why they couldn't. They had to watch her. She might be stubborn, single-minded, blinded by ideals that no one understood, but she was vulnerable. So vulnerable.
A weakness the pack couldn't afford.
Goddamn it.
"You should've kept your mouth shut," Derek said, even though there was a dark, private part of him that was glad that she hadn't.
Mariah had been a --
Derek wasn't sure what she had been. He remembered the sense of her, her scent. Strength, stability. The electrical spark of magic. A perpetual waft of kindness and love.
Whenever she had visited, Derek would sit on the couch beside her and stare until she gave in and let him put his ear against her belly, the better to hear the baby's heartbeat. "He never did that for any of his brothers and sisters," Derek's mother had said. He had never understood the wry smiles that Evangelina and Mariah had exchanged until after Laura insisted that the myth was the answer to all their troubles.
Evangelina had asked Jeremy to patrol the northern edge of Beacon Hills. Peter had picked up his cue and said that it was too much territory for his son to handle alone. Laura had volunteered --
And as everyone scattered, the Alpha asked Derek to stay behind.
"Laura expects me to order her to go," Evangelina said.
"You should. Get her out of the way for a while. Then maybe we'll get some headway --"
"I'm sending you."
There was a long pause -- one in which he accepted the order without question even as he wondered how he was to do this thing -- before Derek could find the words to ask. "How am I supposed to find him? If he's even alive? Just because the circumstances of his birth fit the myth --"
"You'll find him," his mother said. "You'll find him, because you always knew where he was, even before he was born. You're the one who heard his distress when his mother was dying."
Derek stared at Evangelina for a long time before remembering to drop his gaze, but she let the perceived challenge pass. Maybe she scented how stunned he was.
Uncle Peter said nothing, but he must have known, too. Derek's father gave him a weak smile, an apology that he hadn't been told before now.
"Whether or not he is the one from the myth, Derek, he is still yours."
And Derek understood what his mother wasn't saying out loud. What she couldn't say, but what everyone in the room knew anyway -- his father, his uncle, him.
Laura would not be Alpha after her.
The mantle would fall to him.
Getting out of Beacon Hills was not easy. The Hunters were waiting for him. Derek didn't have to wonder how they'd known.
Derek hadn't paid any mind to the myth in years. It was a bedtime story, something told late at night to keep the children calm when there were Hunters trespassing into their property. Besides, it was impossible. The set of conditions for the myth... they were impossible. A million-to-one odds that they would coincide.
Except the more Derek thought about it, the more the vague details that he knew about the birth of Mariah's child fit.
It had been the solstice. There had been a blood moon that night. The pack had survived a long, protracted battle of wolf against wolf -- the Hunters had somehow turned their own kind against them, planting hints that the Hales were going to expand into their territory -- but some had gotten away. The Hale pack had gone after them.
One of the wolves had attacked Mariah. She'd been walking home. She shouldn't have been alone. She'd seen them and she'd run, and they would've left her alone, except they hadn't. They must have scented magic on her. She held on, fighting for her life long enough for the pack to arrive, but they'd been too late.
Mariah been bitten. It had been an Alpha's bite. And in one of her kind, the bite didn't take. It didn't Turn. It killed.
The myth was just that -- a myth. A child born of magic and of wolf under a blood moon on the shortest night of the year. A child that walked the way of the wolf and held the power of the earth in the palms of his hands. A child who walked the balance, who could lead wolf and man.
A child who was Derek's mate.
Derek didn't know where to begin looking.
Derek called home every night. He spoke to his mother. He never spoke to Laura. Derek would hear the exhaustion in Evangelina's voice, the things that she didn't say. The war wasn't going well; the enemy was gaining ground.
"I should come home," Derek said.
"No," Evangelina said. "You need to find him. You will find him."
"But --"
Evangelina sighed heavily. "You never ask the important questions, Derek. You want to, but you never do. Ask me. Ask me now."
"Why --" Derek grimaced. It was hard. It was so hard to question his Alpha, his mother. He'd grown up respecting her. Her word was law. He might not agree with her, but he would always do what she asked. And she was asking now for him to question her, and it was still so, so hard. "Why didn't you tell Laura no? That there's no way the myth could be true?"
"Because I'm the one who told John to run. To hide him. And if she's talking about the myth now, it means that she's figured out that it's true. That Mariah's son is the one."
"Mom --"
"Find him. Be safe," Evangelina said, her tone curt and sharp, and Derek knew that she hung up before someone else could overhear.
Before Laura could hear them.
Derek didn't sleep that night. He had a bad feeling. He turned his car around to head back until he remembered that his mother had told him to find him.
The first sign that something had gone wrong was when his mother called one night and said that Laura had disappeared.
The second was when Peter texted that Derek shouldn't come home.
The third came when Laura called and asked where he was. That was the night he took his phone apart and tossed the pieces away.
And the next night, when he was driving down the interstate, following a pull he was only vaguely aware of, he nearly crashed his Camaro at the overwhelming sense of smoke and flame and heat and burning. He stopped his car, ran out into the open, and howled grief and rage and pain --
That was when it hit.
The hierarchical genetic memory passed down from Alpha to Alpha overwhelmed him with a blinding crash. Every scrap of knowledge, every bit of lore -- he'd been taught these things growing up, sometimes as an afterthought, but now he understood them as never before. Now, he knew the burden his mother had to carry, the burden that she couldn't give to Laura, the burden that was now his to bear, because the last piece of genetic memory was the memory of his mother whispering the rite to pass the power to him before Laura delivered a killing blow that was a moment too late.
Too late for her.
Derek called the house line from a pay phone. No one answered.
He wasn't ready to be an Alpha. He didn't know how to handle the power. He needed to return to Beacon Hills, to find out what happened to his pack, to his family, even though he already knew.
But the wolf in him could feel nothing but broken strands where he should have been able to sense his pack. In the muddled grief and heartache and endless rage, it was his wolf that drove him on to the one thing that he had left.
His mate.
It wasn't so much a trail as a sense. It led him across states, across open plains, through the thick forests, to the mountains. There was a small town in the valley, quiet, idyllic, preparing for the onslaught of seasonal skiers and college kids on break from their studies. Derek found a room, hid the Camaro out of sight. Instead of prowling the streets like he'd done in every city since he left home, he found himself running for the hills.
He didn't know how long he ran. He wasn't following anything in particular. There were ski tracks, snow machine trails, a narrow road that was more ice than gravel and no rail guard to keep anyone from toppling over the side.
It was almost mindlessly that he broke into a warm cabin -- not because he could smell the meat cooking in a stew pot on the pot-bellied iron stove, but because there was a scent that he thought he knew, that he thought he recognized.
No sooner than he had gone through the door than he found himself grabbed and thrown, rolling across the floor to crash into the far wall. When he blinked his eyes open, a snarl caught in his throat, everything tinged a heady Alpha-red, it was to look into the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun.
He could smell wolfsbane.
He froze.
"Who are you?"
Derek tried a few times before he could speak without a growl. The wolf was clawing to the surface. His mate was here. His mate was here. Somewhere. "H-- Hale. Derek. Derek Hale."
He ignored the gun. He swept the cabin, looking for him.
"Where is he?" The question came out more of a whine than a snarl.
"How many are with you? Who else is coming?"
Derek shook his head. He started to stand up. The man raised the shotgun and Derek could smell intent in his actions. "No one. No one -- it's just me. No one knows I'm here."
"You're an Alpha. Your pack can still track you." There was a pause; in that pause, Derek felt the twist of a knife in his heart at the reminder. His pack. His pack was dead. Gone. "Stiles!"
There was a distant scuffle. Faint. Derek probably wouldn't have heard it, but it pulled at him. A soft thump-thump of someone running, except it was less footfalls and more heartbeat. A familiar heartbeat.
"Get your gear, Stiles," the man said, and Derek didn't know how he hadn't recognized John Stilinski, his scent. He must have done something to mask it, to change it.
A teenager came running into the cabin, his hands grasping the door; he was half-frozen, torn between looking at John, at Derek.
Derek gasped softly. The boy's scent permeated the cabin, but it was all the stronger now that he was here. It was him. It was his mate. He was there, so close and still too far, shrouded in the shadows from outside and the dim light inside the cabin.
Derek wished he could see him before the John pulled the trigger. He dug his claws in the wooden floor and braced for the hit.
Instead of the stutter-shock of a gunshot blast, there was the heavy collapse of a warm weight.
"No, dad. No. Don't. Please. Don't," Stiles said, his voice cracked and broken and desperate. There was a growl in his voice, soft and sonorous, tugging at Derek's heart.
Derek wanted to hold him close and never let go. Instead, he pushed at Stiles, wanting him out of harm's way. "Don't do this. Get out of the way --"
"Goddamn it, Stiles, move --"
"No! No! Stop pushing me, quit it, put down the gun, goddamn it, Dad! Put down the gun!" Derek got an elbow to the face. "Don't push me!"
Derek was stronger than Stiles. He knew that he was. But it was a struggle to get a good grasp on him. Stiles was slippery, wild, manic. Somewhere in the battle, Stiles twisted in Derek's grasp and landed in his lap, and he had himself a glimpse of eyes the colour of honey-gold, and he knew...
He couldn't fight anymore. He couldn't fight Stiles.
Stiles threw his arms around his neck. Derek wrapped his arms around Stiles' waist, holding him in place, and for the first time in weeks, Derek felt his wolf settle down, finally knowing peace and calm.
"Stiles. Get out of the way," John ordered, but there was a quaver to his words. He'd lost the battle, and he knew it.
"You can't shoot him," Stiles insisted, a whine in his voice, needy and desperate and happy. "He's mine."
So along with the 2,000-some words that I did today for LM#12, I have some 3,500 words of a Teen Wolf fic behind the cut (very definitely an AU, very much a Sterek).
But first: metrics.
63000 / 70000 (90.00%)
Peter effectively put an end to the war-planning -- which had escalated to near-nuclear levels -- by reminding them: "You don't bring a knife to a gunfight."
Laura lifted her chin and stared at Derek; Derek studiously ignored her until he'd made the full circuit around the table. Laura was old enough to sit at the table now, had been for years. So was Derek, but Derek couldn't sit still. He never could.
Growing up, he'd eat breakfast in a frantic inhale. At school, he would squirm in his seat, driving everyone to distraction. And now? He was always on patrol, inspecting his pack's territory, because it was the only way to keep his instincts under control.
He was all action and reaction. He could fight his way out of a tight spot. He couldn't sit over a map and talk tactics. He couldn't strategize the way his mother could, the way Laura could. But he could see what other people didn't see, what they didn't want to see. And he knew that if he looked at Laura now, he would see a wily glint in her eye.
He didn't trust it at all.
Derek put his hands on the back of a chair -- his chair -- and stared at Laura long and hard, because then, maybe she would be able to do more than know merely his scent and how he felt. She'd be able to read his mind.
No. Don't even.
Laura tilted her head.
No. No. No.
She arched an eyebrow, and there might have been certainty in her gaze. Except Derek knew better. It wasn't certainty.
They couldn't trust her. She had a plan. She always did. The problem with her plans was that they were never for the pack's benefit, however much that she argued that they were, that it wasn't her fault that the Hunters had intervened.
Derek, Peter, even Michael -- Derek's father -- they always stopped Laura before she went too far. Before she risked the pack. It was a sign of the Alpha's weakness that Laura had survived this long, and in equal measure, it was a sign of the pack's weakness that no one had challenged the Alpha for not doing something about Laura sooner.
For all of her monumental flaws, Laura was family. Laura was pack.
"Maybe a knife is exactly what we need," Laura said, her voice thunderous in the lull. Mother, father, Uncle Peter, Uncle Adrian, Aunt Helen, Neil, Jeremy, Samantha, Lisbeth -- they all turned to look at her.
Derek didn't.
He stared at his hands and silently mouthed along when Laura said, "I have an idea."
More than fifteen years ago, John Stilinski came to Beacon Hills on emergency leave only to turn around and leave town, taking his newborn son with him. It wasn't until they was gone that the Hales realized just how much the pack hadn't known about Mariah's husband, how much they should have known.
Army Ranger. Special Forces. Numerous commendations for bravery. Sharpshooting records that held even these days despite better scope technology, better gun design, new bullets moulded with materials to reduce air resistance and allow them to travel further. There were so many black ops missions in his docket that not even Peter's extensive and shady contacts could have netted anything better than a ream of paper covered in blocked black ink.
John Stilinski was a man who knew how to disappear. He knew how to stay disappeared.
Mariah Williamson-Stilinski had sided with the pack in the Hunter-Wolf war. But the pack had been tricked and betrayed. When they had finally found her, Alpha Evangelina Hale had been forced to prematurely deliver her child on a bloody battlefield even as Mariah's heart stuttered and faltered. Her son was born strong and healthy, and when John Stilinski showed up on their doorstep to take his son, everyone knew that he would never forgive the pack for not doing more to protect his wife.
Father and son were gone two days later. Peter's sources had discovered that John had put in for a compassionate discharge from the army and that it had been granted. He'd vanished without a trace.
The pack never learned the name of Mariah's heir.
"What kind of idea was that? It's not even any kind of fucking plan. It's a myth, Laura," Derek growled. "You don't know how you sounded --"
He shoved supplies in his duffel bag. Laura watched him, her stare even and judgmental, from the doorway. Derek didn't know where she got off being judgmental considering that this whole mess with the war started because of her, but she didn't see it that way. Laura leaned against the doorjamb, her arms crossed, silent for once.
"This is a waste of time. I should be here, where I'm useful, not on a wild-goose chase --"
"Mom says we can't spare anyone else. I told her to send me, but she says she needs me here," Laura said a bit too smugly. Her lips pulled back over her teeth in a grimace that was just as much a challenge. In her head, she was mommy's perfect little girl, just like she was when she was a kid. She couldn't possibly ever do anything wrong. Except she had. In her head, she had done and continued to do what was right for the pack.
In her head --
Derek didn't want to be in her head.
She was sick. They'd tried everything to help her, but it was no use. Whatever it was that Kate had done to Laura? There was no fixing it.
If he wanted to fight her for position, he could. He should. Laura was four years older than he was. She was strong, but she wasn't stronger. She'd made herself weak when she started dating Kate in secret, and again when she practically held the jerry can of Kerosene when Kate tried to burn the house down.
Mom and Dad had tried to help her, even finding a match with an Alpha from another pack, but Laura refused to take a mate, even when taking a mate could have -- might have -- saved her. There were those within the pack who saw her as a liability, too head-strong, too proud, too blind.
A fucking train wreck. But she was his sister, and he'd tried.
The last straw had been before the war started. Derek hadn't been meant to see it, but he had. Laura had snuck out of the house late at night and there had been Kate at the end of the driveway, obvious as a rescue flare in the dead of night, the two of them rubbing it in that they were together. Derek didn't understand how Laura could do it. The Argents were the enemy. Kate --
He'd run down the stairs in a panic to tell his mother, but Evangelina had already known. She'd looked so sad that day, and had shaken her head. I've done all that I can.
Laura would not be the next Alpha. The pack would never accept her. After what happened with Kate --
Derek didn't want to think about Kate. How that bitch had tried for Derek first, thinking that he'd be easier to manipulate just because he was younger. But he'd never liked girls, and Laura... even in a pack where one couldn't turn around without hitting someone, Laura had been lonely.
She still was. And no one noticed. It was their fault. And then Kate --
They hadn't even known that Kate was an Argent. She'd lied about her name. It was only an accident that they'd found out --
No, Derek definitely didn't want to think about Kate.
Instead, Derek shot Laura a dark look. He didn't say what was on the tip of his tongue. The pack could spare her. But he knew why they couldn't. They had to watch her. She might be stubborn, single-minded, blinded by ideals that no one understood, but she was vulnerable. So vulnerable.
A weakness the pack couldn't afford.
Goddamn it.
"You should've kept your mouth shut," Derek said, even though there was a dark, private part of him that was glad that she hadn't.
Mariah had been a --
Derek wasn't sure what she had been. He remembered the sense of her, her scent. Strength, stability. The electrical spark of magic. A perpetual waft of kindness and love.
Whenever she had visited, Derek would sit on the couch beside her and stare until she gave in and let him put his ear against her belly, the better to hear the baby's heartbeat. "He never did that for any of his brothers and sisters," Derek's mother had said. He had never understood the wry smiles that Evangelina and Mariah had exchanged until after Laura insisted that the myth was the answer to all their troubles.
Evangelina had asked Jeremy to patrol the northern edge of Beacon Hills. Peter had picked up his cue and said that it was too much territory for his son to handle alone. Laura had volunteered --
And as everyone scattered, the Alpha asked Derek to stay behind.
"Laura expects me to order her to go," Evangelina said.
"You should. Get her out of the way for a while. Then maybe we'll get some headway --"
"I'm sending you."
There was a long pause -- one in which he accepted the order without question even as he wondered how he was to do this thing -- before Derek could find the words to ask. "How am I supposed to find him? If he's even alive? Just because the circumstances of his birth fit the myth --"
"You'll find him," his mother said. "You'll find him, because you always knew where he was, even before he was born. You're the one who heard his distress when his mother was dying."
Derek stared at Evangelina for a long time before remembering to drop his gaze, but she let the perceived challenge pass. Maybe she scented how stunned he was.
Uncle Peter said nothing, but he must have known, too. Derek's father gave him a weak smile, an apology that he hadn't been told before now.
"Whether or not he is the one from the myth, Derek, he is still yours."
And Derek understood what his mother wasn't saying out loud. What she couldn't say, but what everyone in the room knew anyway -- his father, his uncle, him.
Laura would not be Alpha after her.
The mantle would fall to him.
Getting out of Beacon Hills was not easy. The Hunters were waiting for him. Derek didn't have to wonder how they'd known.
Derek hadn't paid any mind to the myth in years. It was a bedtime story, something told late at night to keep the children calm when there were Hunters trespassing into their property. Besides, it was impossible. The set of conditions for the myth... they were impossible. A million-to-one odds that they would coincide.
Except the more Derek thought about it, the more the vague details that he knew about the birth of Mariah's child fit.
It had been the solstice. There had been a blood moon that night. The pack had survived a long, protracted battle of wolf against wolf -- the Hunters had somehow turned their own kind against them, planting hints that the Hales were going to expand into their territory -- but some had gotten away. The Hale pack had gone after them.
One of the wolves had attacked Mariah. She'd been walking home. She shouldn't have been alone. She'd seen them and she'd run, and they would've left her alone, except they hadn't. They must have scented magic on her. She held on, fighting for her life long enough for the pack to arrive, but they'd been too late.
Mariah been bitten. It had been an Alpha's bite. And in one of her kind, the bite didn't take. It didn't Turn. It killed.
The myth was just that -- a myth. A child born of magic and of wolf under a blood moon on the shortest night of the year. A child that walked the way of the wolf and held the power of the earth in the palms of his hands. A child who walked the balance, who could lead wolf and man.
A child who was Derek's mate.
Derek didn't know where to begin looking.
Derek called home every night. He spoke to his mother. He never spoke to Laura. Derek would hear the exhaustion in Evangelina's voice, the things that she didn't say. The war wasn't going well; the enemy was gaining ground.
"I should come home," Derek said.
"No," Evangelina said. "You need to find him. You will find him."
"But --"
Evangelina sighed heavily. "You never ask the important questions, Derek. You want to, but you never do. Ask me. Ask me now."
"Why --" Derek grimaced. It was hard. It was so hard to question his Alpha, his mother. He'd grown up respecting her. Her word was law. He might not agree with her, but he would always do what she asked. And she was asking now for him to question her, and it was still so, so hard. "Why didn't you tell Laura no? That there's no way the myth could be true?"
"Because I'm the one who told John to run. To hide him. And if she's talking about the myth now, it means that she's figured out that it's true. That Mariah's son is the one."
"Mom --"
"Find him. Be safe," Evangelina said, her tone curt and sharp, and Derek knew that she hung up before someone else could overhear.
Before Laura could hear them.
Derek didn't sleep that night. He had a bad feeling. He turned his car around to head back until he remembered that his mother had told him to find him.
The first sign that something had gone wrong was when his mother called one night and said that Laura had disappeared.
The second was when Peter texted that Derek shouldn't come home.
The third came when Laura called and asked where he was. That was the night he took his phone apart and tossed the pieces away.
And the next night, when he was driving down the interstate, following a pull he was only vaguely aware of, he nearly crashed his Camaro at the overwhelming sense of smoke and flame and heat and burning. He stopped his car, ran out into the open, and howled grief and rage and pain --
That was when it hit.
The hierarchical genetic memory passed down from Alpha to Alpha overwhelmed him with a blinding crash. Every scrap of knowledge, every bit of lore -- he'd been taught these things growing up, sometimes as an afterthought, but now he understood them as never before. Now, he knew the burden his mother had to carry, the burden that she couldn't give to Laura, the burden that was now his to bear, because the last piece of genetic memory was the memory of his mother whispering the rite to pass the power to him before Laura delivered a killing blow that was a moment too late.
Too late for her.
Derek called the house line from a pay phone. No one answered.
He wasn't ready to be an Alpha. He didn't know how to handle the power. He needed to return to Beacon Hills, to find out what happened to his pack, to his family, even though he already knew.
But the wolf in him could feel nothing but broken strands where he should have been able to sense his pack. In the muddled grief and heartache and endless rage, it was his wolf that drove him on to the one thing that he had left.
His mate.
It wasn't so much a trail as a sense. It led him across states, across open plains, through the thick forests, to the mountains. There was a small town in the valley, quiet, idyllic, preparing for the onslaught of seasonal skiers and college kids on break from their studies. Derek found a room, hid the Camaro out of sight. Instead of prowling the streets like he'd done in every city since he left home, he found himself running for the hills.
He didn't know how long he ran. He wasn't following anything in particular. There were ski tracks, snow machine trails, a narrow road that was more ice than gravel and no rail guard to keep anyone from toppling over the side.
It was almost mindlessly that he broke into a warm cabin -- not because he could smell the meat cooking in a stew pot on the pot-bellied iron stove, but because there was a scent that he thought he knew, that he thought he recognized.
No sooner than he had gone through the door than he found himself grabbed and thrown, rolling across the floor to crash into the far wall. When he blinked his eyes open, a snarl caught in his throat, everything tinged a heady Alpha-red, it was to look into the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun.
He could smell wolfsbane.
He froze.
"Who are you?"
Derek tried a few times before he could speak without a growl. The wolf was clawing to the surface. His mate was here. His mate was here. Somewhere. "H-- Hale. Derek. Derek Hale."
He ignored the gun. He swept the cabin, looking for him.
"Where is he?" The question came out more of a whine than a snarl.
"How many are with you? Who else is coming?"
Derek shook his head. He started to stand up. The man raised the shotgun and Derek could smell intent in his actions. "No one. No one -- it's just me. No one knows I'm here."
"You're an Alpha. Your pack can still track you." There was a pause; in that pause, Derek felt the twist of a knife in his heart at the reminder. His pack. His pack was dead. Gone. "Stiles!"
There was a distant scuffle. Faint. Derek probably wouldn't have heard it, but it pulled at him. A soft thump-thump of someone running, except it was less footfalls and more heartbeat. A familiar heartbeat.
"Get your gear, Stiles," the man said, and Derek didn't know how he hadn't recognized John Stilinski, his scent. He must have done something to mask it, to change it.
A teenager came running into the cabin, his hands grasping the door; he was half-frozen, torn between looking at John, at Derek.
Derek gasped softly. The boy's scent permeated the cabin, but it was all the stronger now that he was here. It was him. It was his mate. He was there, so close and still too far, shrouded in the shadows from outside and the dim light inside the cabin.
Derek wished he could see him before the John pulled the trigger. He dug his claws in the wooden floor and braced for the hit.
Instead of the stutter-shock of a gunshot blast, there was the heavy collapse of a warm weight.
"No, dad. No. Don't. Please. Don't," Stiles said, his voice cracked and broken and desperate. There was a growl in his voice, soft and sonorous, tugging at Derek's heart.
Derek wanted to hold him close and never let go. Instead, he pushed at Stiles, wanting him out of harm's way. "Don't do this. Get out of the way --"
"Goddamn it, Stiles, move --"
"No! No! Stop pushing me, quit it, put down the gun, goddamn it, Dad! Put down the gun!" Derek got an elbow to the face. "Don't push me!"
Derek was stronger than Stiles. He knew that he was. But it was a struggle to get a good grasp on him. Stiles was slippery, wild, manic. Somewhere in the battle, Stiles twisted in Derek's grasp and landed in his lap, and he had himself a glimpse of eyes the colour of honey-gold, and he knew...
He couldn't fight anymore. He couldn't fight Stiles.
Stiles threw his arms around his neck. Derek wrapped his arms around Stiles' waist, holding him in place, and for the first time in weeks, Derek felt his wolf settle down, finally knowing peace and calm.
"Stiles. Get out of the way," John ordered, but there was a quaver to his words. He'd lost the battle, and he knew it.
"You can't shoot him," Stiles insisted, a whine in his voice, needy and desperate and happy. "He's mine."