FIC: To Dare, To Will (Teen Wolf, Derek Hale-centric) (1/1)
Fic: To Dare, To Will
by LJ [ljs_lj]
Fandom: Teen Wolf (TV series)
Type: Gen; epic Derek Hale existential man pain
Spoilers: Vague Season Two? If you know the end game of Peter and Lydia, I think you’re okay. Not intended to follow or precede any specific episode.
Warning: Religious themes.
Notes: See notes at the end for definitions of unfamiliar terms and explanation of the title. This is the first fic I’ve completed in a very long time. SPN and Superman fans, be aware that I am still working on the next installments of those fics, even though it has been ages.
Many thanks to beatrice_otter, who beta’d and was very supportive of my return to fic writing.
Summary: Derek Hale might an atheist, but culture has a way of keeping its claws in you.
To Dare, To Will
1.
Derek Hale is an atheist.
His mother would be scandalized if she knew. She haunts him, they all haunt him, but with the atheism came a disbelief in the Great Beyond.
2.
They have it figured out, him and Laura, when they are still pretty small. She is a natural leader and everyone knows she will be the Othalan, the Alpha, of their generation. But it takes more than an Alpha and some loyal Betas to make a pack.
“Derek,” Laura says one day, “you’re going to be the Ansuz.”
He wrinkles his nose at. “What about Kevin?” he demands with childhood seriousness. “Why can’t he be the Ansuz?”
“’Cause he won’t know the stories,” she says, and Derek sighs. It is true - their cousin Kevin can’t sit still long enough to learn the stories by heart, word by word, won’t be able to when he’s old enough, but Derek can. “Then he’ll be the Nauthiz,” he says after a moment.
Laura looks across the room. Kevin is still little more than a toddler really, but he is always moving if he’s awake. A good Nauthiz needs to have enough energy for two people - it’s only logical. “Okay,” he says after a moment.
It’s done. Derek can feel it. He smiles.
3.
He lied about the tattoo. Alpha, Beta, Omega - how would an Omega fit in with pack members? No, he lied his ass off and doesn’t care that he did.
4.
Uncle Peter is the Ansuz of his generation, and Derek is always a little uncertain of how to act around him. One minute he’s the cool uncle, only a little older compared to the other adults, the next he’s mysterious and otherworldly. Derek watches Peter carefully, the brown and green robes and the staff of pine in his hand, and squints at the candles and the little bonfire. He sets down his offering - a small rabbit, the fur barely marked by its own blood - and meets Peter’s moonlit eyes without flinching.
Peter smiles, but it’s a little predatory, a little uncanny. “Are you certain?”
Derek takes a breath. “As certain as I breathe. As certain as the moon. As certain as the Earth.”
His uncle - and it is his uncle now, the moon gone from his eyes - nods, the smile sweetening and growing on his shadowed face. “Then we’ll start the day after the next full moon.”
5.
Derek finds human religion vaguely interesting from a distance but he’s not certain what to think about it. He knows a little about Christianity - it’s hard not to in North America - and from what he knows of that guy they call Jesus, he was a good pack leader: the story about the fish and the bread shows he was a good provider, the healing miracles are obvious, especially to a Hale wolf, and the crucifixion just proves that he was willing to sacrifice for his pack, as any good Othalan should. He’d always found the resurrection thing a little strange, but then Peter came back from the dead, so he can’t say anything more about it.
It’s other things about religion that confuse him. The pack mentions Christmas, and then Easter, but it never seems to mean anything to them, not the way that Short Night and Long Night had once meant something to him, or any of the other dates burned into his brain despite having gone years without celebrating them properly. They talk about presents - inane chatter that makes him grind his teeth - and family get-togethers - which he tries to ignore - and decorations and ice skating and giant rabbits.
Derek had had a piece of rabbit fur once, the skin tanned and cut himself, stitched with gut string. The most valuable piece of an Ansuz’s collection of tools - the first piece they make themselves.
It burned before he ever used it, even as an apprentice to his uncle.
6.
Laura forces him to go to the house. They’re going to leave, they’re going to run as fast and as soon as they can, but she makes him go back, just once. “You’re the Ansuz now,” she says with some urgency in her voice. “You need to do the rites.”
He shudders and his hands are shaking. He can’t light the candle, the thought of a flame near his skin, near this place, turning his stomach. His heart is beating faster than the rabbit’s, that beautiful grey and brown rabbit he’d brought Peter only two new moons earlier. The rabbit hadn’t been afraid - it hadn’t know what was about to happen.
He drops the match - Peter had been, no, is a traditionalist, a bit of flint in his hand - and runs.
Laura calls his name, chases him, grabs him with unfamiliar strength. She’s the Alpha now, but he’s not an Ansuz, not really. Less than two months into his apprenticeship, and Peter still alive - not that becoming Ansuz is anything like becoming Othalan. There will be no sudden rush of power, no new form under the moon - nothing. Ansuz is knowledge, skill; Nauthiz - energy and talent; but Othalan is everything.
They fall into the underbrush under a fir tree. The needles make his skin itch. “I can’t,” he gasps. “I can’t.”
She murmurs something into his hair and holds him close. The birds in the tree fly off; there’s a faint crash deeper into the forest that sounds like deer. “It’s okay,” she whispers. “We can do it another time.”
He chokes on his tears. “No,” he finally says, “you don’t understand.” He sucks in a breath. “I don’t know how.”
Two moons an apprentice. And he’d skipped the lesson on how to lay the spirits of the dead to rest to meet Kate Argent.
7.
The Othalan is the war-leader and the protector of the pack. The Alpha, humans say.
The Nauthiz is the healer and the hunter.
The Ansuz is the priest and the tradition-keeper.
Derek is an atheist now and he’s tried to forget all the old stories.
8.
Stiles’s rabbit heart always precedes him. Derek’s long gotten accustomed to his random appearances and strange questions. He natters on like a squirrel, regaling Derek with tales of senior-year drama.
The latest excitement is actually academic in nature and, ignoring his own good judgment, Derek starts paying attention.
“- so we’re going to read creation myths and all sorts of awesome legends and have storytellers from the reservation visit and I thought, well, what about werewolves? I mean, you guys are like an oppressed ethnic minority or something and you probably have your own culture and legends and stuff and maybe if you told them about it they’d come together better as a pack -”
“Stiles,” he interrupts. “Breathe.”
“Well?” the boy asks. “Do you?”
Derek wants to say no, to ignore the question all together and get away, but his mouth disobeys. “Yes.”
Stiles boggles, like Derek has made all his dreams come true. He opens his mouth, probably for a deluge of questions, but Derek stops him: “One question and then you’re gone.”
Stiles nods, pacified, and seems to think for a moment. “Start at the beginning,” he says and Derek regrets even offering. It doesn’t stop with Stiles - one question will turn into ten and into one hundred. Stiles continues: “Creation story.”
Derek frowns and Stiles quickly quotes something that sounds like the start of a vaguely-familiar human legend - “You know, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” - gesturing in his own way.
No, he doesn’t know. But he thinks he knows what Stiles is asking for.
“Okay,” Derek says and suddenly he’s shaky, palms sweaty and his breath nervous. This had been his calling once, his vocation. He can tell this story - any born wolf can tell this story by their fourth birthday. “Okay.” He breathes out and then:
“When She first opened her eye in the night, we were all wolves - ”
Stiles interrupts and it’s vexing and tedious but part of Derek revels in it, like he never knew what he was missing, the power and delight in teaching someone something about being a werewolf that has nothing to do with claws and teeth and fighting to live another second, another minute, another hour. It matters little that it’s one of the pack humans asking, but then the Hales had been liberal wolves. One of his great-aunts had been human; the husband of a cousin; Peter’s girlfriend the last two years of high school and Laura’s the third year in New York.
And so he explains everything: how the eye of the Creatrix was the Moon; how some packs recited the opening without the word ‘all’, because not all wolves think that their human brothers and sisters were wolves once too, but the Hales believed that humans had wolves in them that were hidden away until they were given the bite, which was a gift to remind them of where they really came from; how having a human form was a gift from the Moon for the days She could not see them and how the first werewolf - the first Alpha - had learned to walk on her hind legs when she tried to reach for Mother Moon as She climbed the night sky; and how of course the first Alpha was female, because everyone knows that women make the best Alphas, and so of course - he doesn’t quite say this out loud, mumbling something that conveys a bit of it in some vague way - of course he can’t be as good an Alpha, as good an Othalan as Laura had been, or his mother, or his great-grandmother, because men just don’t have the right instincts most of the time.
Somehow, when he finally finishes, Stiles nods, thanks him politely, and leaves without requesting anything more.
Derek finds it impossible to sleep that night. He runs, sometimes in human form, sometimes not, and chases the winking Moon.
9.
Laura offers to talk to the pack upstate, to see if their Ansuz would take him on as an apprentice, since she’s made a kind of treaty with them for protection and help and they were so sympathetic, but Derek is stubborn. He has choice words about the idea the few times she tries to bring it up and soon she gives up.
Every now and again he feels guilty about it, but he brushes it aside. He’s never going to be part of a real pack again, and he’s never going to have children, so what use is knowing anything?
One afternoon, just before Short Night, she brings it up again. She wants to celebrate - it’s been two years of mourning, she tells him, and she wants something from the old days back in her life.
For half a second he considers it. It would be easy, he thinks, to believe again, even though everyone knows that you take the stories with a grain of mountain ash, since even werewolves know that science has disproved quite a lot from the old stories. It would be comfortable. He can imagine it, being part of the pack upstate and celebrating with them. But it only lasts a moment, less than a moment. “No,” he says.
“Derek,” Laura says softly. “It’s okay to be happy. It’s okay to do things we used to do with them but with different people now.”
The pain of that night is still with him. “Go if you want,” he finally says. “But I’m staying here.” And then he admits it to her, the thought that has been hiding in his mind for months: “I don’t believe any more.”
Laura frowns. “You don’t believe -” She breathes then. “Oh. Okay. I won’t ask you again, but you know you’re always welcome.”
She celebrates Short Night with the pack upstate, reports that they were sad to hear that he wasn’t up to coming but that they hope he’ll change his mind in the future, but admits that it was strange to celebrate with near-strangers. She makes excuses when Long Night comes around and they stay in with some rented DVDs and cartons of Chinese. He finally masters using chopsticks that night and Laura teases him about the fortune cookies.
The photo of her on his phone, the one he never sees again when he returns to Beacon Hills because she can’t call him from beyond the grave, is from that night.
10.
It’s Scott the next time, smelling puzzled but intrigued when Derek notices him approaching. Derek doesn’t say anything, waiting for the boy to speak first. He’s tired, sleepless nights blurring together a little, and something in his mind still hurts from the visit Stiles paid him earlier in the week.
“Stiles told me...” Scott starts. pausing with uncertainty. “Stiles said that werewolves have their own legends?” There’s a tone to his voice, the lift at the end of the question, that is a little disbelieving.
Derek makes a noise, something like a snort, in response. “What, did you think that was something unique to humans?”
Scott’s eyes go a little wide at the response. “No, no, of course not,” he backtracks. “I guess I never thought about it.” He approaches, cautiously, until he finds a place to sit down, close enough to feel like a normal conversation, Derek notes, but far enough away to have a split-second’s head start if things go south. He wonders if that will ever change.
Silence.
“When I first - one time, you told me that the bite was a gift,” Scott says hesitantly after a few moments. “And Stiles said that there’s a story behind that.”
Derek stares at him.
“Could you,” Scott continues, strangely deferential. “Could you tell me about that?”
And that’s how Derek finds himself telling the story of Hilamesh, the first male Alpha, and his friend, Enkit, the first bitten werewolf.
He doesn’t tell Scott that humans have their own version of the story, the names a little different, but the story largely the same. It’s an ancient tale and for all he knows the human version is more accurate.
(Then again, it’s not like anyone alive today actually speaks ancient Sumerian fluently, so they may have a few of their details wrong.)
All he can think is what a good story it is for someone like Scott. Enkit starts out not knowing anything, a creature from a different world, but Hilamesh is a good Alpha to his friend and soon makes him civilized.
(The humans have a different idea about what that means, too. Some wolves say that Hilamesh is the reason that humans have any civilized behavior at all. The Hales, at least in more recent generations, have been of the opinion that ‘civilized behavior’ is relative. This is something Derek should have remembered when he found Scott: culture is learned and no one had taught Scott what to do. Instinct only goes so far.)
When he gets to the part where Hilamesh and Enkit hunt down the forest monster, Hubbap, Scott laughs at the name and Derek is startled - not because of the laugh, but because he finds himself smiling.
11.
In New York he relapses, if that’s the word for it, only once.
He gets a job stocking the shelves at a grocery store and works the graveyard shift, getting full moons off without much trouble because the manager has ‘a daughter who practices Wicca’ and therefore ‘understands’. She offers to introduce them; he politely declines; she offers to introduce her son instead; he politely declines again; her son shows up an hour later that evening with his new boyfriend and the matter is dropped.
During a waning moon, he goes for a run after work. He likes the quiet of the early morning, the peace and the lack of interaction with people who always want to know something about him, the eyes that fall on his face and his body, sometimes too reminiscent of his failing. But his meditations are interrupted by a whimper and he slows down and finally stops, searching for the source of the sound.
After a minute he finds the dog in an alley. It’s badly injured - hit by a car, he would guess; it had managed to crawl away from the street, but from the smell of things it’s bleeding internally and now in too much pain to move again. It’s a slow, painful death.
But werewolves - and Hale wolves in particular, even if they’re not Nauthiz - can give comfort in a way that humans cannot. Derek shushes the dog, murmuring nothing but soft, comforting sounds, and reaches out a hand to the mud-streaked fur. It takes a moment and he finds himself whispering a kenning for Eir, asking Her assistance, and he almost pulls his hand back when he realizes what he’s saying. But it’s a dog and despite their kinship with wolves that don’t stand on two legs, it won’t understand what he’s saying so it doesn’t really matter what he says, so long as his tone is soft and gentle.
When the dog is calmer, he picks it up and heads for the nearest animal clinic. It doesn’t survive, but its last hour could have been much worse, he tells himself.
Back at the apartment, he slips into bed, a nest of heavy blankets and pillows, and sleeps for ten hours.
12.
Isaac is the one who lets it slip that he and Scott have been taking the pain of animals at the clinic.
Derek is proud of them and wishes he knew how to express that properly. He has a strange urge to perform the saining, to welcome them into the pack as proper Hale Betas, something that should have been done months ago, but he holds back. He realizes that he doesn’t remember the story of Kahoolen well enough and for the first time he is embarrassed by that realization.
The saining is the first thing an apprentice Ansuz learns, and he didn’t have many lessons.
In the end he manages to say, “Keep up the good work,” and disappears into the forest.
Peter finds him by the river, staring at the setting sun. “Let me guess,” his uncle says - and it’s his uncle now, not the feral wolf who rained down destruction for most of a year. “Your Betas are happier with you all of a sudden for some reason and you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Derek shrugs.
Peter sighs and eventually settles down on a boulder with few patches of moss compared to its neighbors.
“I don’t believe any more,” Derek finally says. “Before the fire...I was hardly the most devout, even though I was going to be an Ansuz, but I believed. I knew the Moon was watching me, helping me, that she could hear me. But now - that part of it is so fake to me.”
“And?” Peter says when it’s clear that Derek’s not continuing.
Derek frowns. Peter can be sarcastic and cutting, but he’s usually truthful and he doesn’t make a big deal out of nothing. And what’s strange is that he’s not making a big deal out of it. Derek shrugs it off - it must be a mind game - and says, “But I’m starting to think that I need the rites and the traditions to be the Othalan they need me to be. For us to be the pack we need to be.”
Peter stares at him and lets out a long-suffering sigh. “Nephew,” he says, “you don’t have to believe to follow traditions. Do you really think that every Ansuz literally believes that the Moon is a giant wolf’s eye? If you do, you’re a bigger idiot than I thought you were.”
Derek isn’t certain what to say to that, so he keeps his mouth shut.
“I always fancied myself a secular wolf as it was. The myths and the stories were great for keeping you pups in line, but it’s not like there was actual magic in the rites - in the saining or the rite for the dead or any of the other rituals. I mean, we’ve run into some crazy shit that science can’t explain yet-”
(Peter gestures at himself as he speaks, his meaning so very obvious, a familiar sort of smirk on his face, and Derek wonders how it could have been anything but magic that resurrected him, what sufficiently-advanced technology could have planted a mad wolf’s soul into the mind of a teenage girl and looked all the while like magic.)
“-But it’s not as if the Moon Goddess literally reaches down and touches a new wolf when we welcome them into the pack. It’s just a fancy way of saying, ‘Hi, you’re with us from now on, so don’t be a screw up’. Tradition doesn’t have to be about belief - it’s just a social glue.” Peter stands up and brushes off non-existent specks of dirt and moss from his slacks. “If you think your pups need some wolfy mumbo-jumbo so they’ll actually work together and be a pack, then go for it.”
Peter has only gone a few feet when Derek summons up enough courage, enough strength, to admit to the real problem: “What if I can’t remember how to do it?” he whispers.
Peter pauses, turns slightly, and smirks. The moon is in his eyes, his smirk lunatic in every meaning of the word. “Then I guess it’s a good thing I came back from the dead, now isn’t it.”
13.
The day after the sainings - which take place with surprising cooperation; Derek suspects Stiles and Boyd’s hands in this - Derek goes hunting.
He shifts and chooses a direction, following his nose and his ears. He finds his intended prey four times and each time is a success - not only a success, in that he got his prey, but that it went better than he hoped. He says a kenning for the god of the hunted, showing his gratitude for the lives that will continue no more, and when he has all four he returns.
The candles and the bonfire are already lit. Without the robes and the staff, Peter looks more mad scientist than pagan priest in the firelight, but it’s not the details that matter - it’s the result.
Derek sets down the squirrels and steps back.
Peter looks at him. “Squirrels?”
He squares his shoulders. “The smaller the offerings and the cleaner the fur, the more dedicated the apprentice.”
Peter looks faintly impressed. “I recall a rabbit last time.”
Derek shrugs. “I didn’t have the control or the speed for squirrels then.” He doesn’t say, I didn’t know why I was doing it then but he thinks it. He also doesn’t remind Peter that he had gotten some blood on the rabbit. The squirrels are clean and that speaks for itself.
“Well, then,” Peter draws out, “I guess it’s time to get started.”
Derek breathes. “I guess it is.”
[End]
Notes:
The title comes from a popular saying among practitioners of Wicca - ‘to know, to dare, to will, to keep silent’. A quick overview of the meaning of this saying can be found here: http://paganwiccan.about.com/od/glossary/g/ToKnowToDare.htm
The tale of Hilamesh and Enkit fighting the monster Hubbap is intended to be a variation of the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, who fight a forest monster named Humbaba. While I am not familiar with Sumerian linguistics, the werewolf names for these characters would be reasonable possible mutations of the names given enough time, based on the English pronunciations.
Eir is listed on Wikipedia as a Norse goddess or Valkyrie associated with healing and medicine. She is mentioned in both the Prose and Poetic Eddas and in runic inscriptions. Kennings are poetic expressions or circumlocutions - a kind of nickname - used to describe characters, places, and things, especially in Norse sagas, in formulaic ways.
A saining is any welcoming ritual, such as a christening or baptism, which brings a new member - usually an infant, but sometimes adults - into a religious group. In Wicca it is sometimes referred to as ‘wiccaning’. ‘Sain’ comes from Scottish English and is derived from Latin signus ‘a mark’. Kahoolen is Cu Chulainn, a hero in Irish mythology, who got his name (‘the hound of Culainn’) when he killed Culainn’s guard dog and offered to take its place.
The werewolf pack roles - othalan, nauthiz, ansuz - come from Norse runes, specifically the elder futhark. Othalan means ‘inheritance, estate’ - an Alpha inherits the position and the pack on the death of his or her predecessor. Nauthiz means ‘need, distress’ - the healer does what is necessary for the health of the pack. Ansuz is related to Old Norse words meaning ‘god, deity’ and is related to the word ‘Aesir’, referring to specific Norse gods - the priest communes with the gods and keeps their stories and traditions for the pack.
by LJ [ljs_lj]
Fandom: Teen Wolf (TV series)
Type: Gen; epic Derek Hale existential man pain
Spoilers: Vague Season Two? If you know the end game of Peter and Lydia, I think you’re okay. Not intended to follow or precede any specific episode.
Warning: Religious themes.
Notes: See notes at the end for definitions of unfamiliar terms and explanation of the title. This is the first fic I’ve completed in a very long time. SPN and Superman fans, be aware that I am still working on the next installments of those fics, even though it has been ages.
Many thanks to beatrice_otter, who beta’d and was very supportive of my return to fic writing.
Summary: Derek Hale might an atheist, but culture has a way of keeping its claws in you.
To Dare, To Will
1.
Derek Hale is an atheist.
His mother would be scandalized if she knew. She haunts him, they all haunt him, but with the atheism came a disbelief in the Great Beyond.
2.
They have it figured out, him and Laura, when they are still pretty small. She is a natural leader and everyone knows she will be the Othalan, the Alpha, of their generation. But it takes more than an Alpha and some loyal Betas to make a pack.
“Derek,” Laura says one day, “you’re going to be the Ansuz.”
He wrinkles his nose at. “What about Kevin?” he demands with childhood seriousness. “Why can’t he be the Ansuz?”
“’Cause he won’t know the stories,” she says, and Derek sighs. It is true - their cousin Kevin can’t sit still long enough to learn the stories by heart, word by word, won’t be able to when he’s old enough, but Derek can. “Then he’ll be the Nauthiz,” he says after a moment.
Laura looks across the room. Kevin is still little more than a toddler really, but he is always moving if he’s awake. A good Nauthiz needs to have enough energy for two people - it’s only logical. “Okay,” he says after a moment.
It’s done. Derek can feel it. He smiles.
3.
He lied about the tattoo. Alpha, Beta, Omega - how would an Omega fit in with pack members? No, he lied his ass off and doesn’t care that he did.
4.
Uncle Peter is the Ansuz of his generation, and Derek is always a little uncertain of how to act around him. One minute he’s the cool uncle, only a little older compared to the other adults, the next he’s mysterious and otherworldly. Derek watches Peter carefully, the brown and green robes and the staff of pine in his hand, and squints at the candles and the little bonfire. He sets down his offering - a small rabbit, the fur barely marked by its own blood - and meets Peter’s moonlit eyes without flinching.
Peter smiles, but it’s a little predatory, a little uncanny. “Are you certain?”
Derek takes a breath. “As certain as I breathe. As certain as the moon. As certain as the Earth.”
His uncle - and it is his uncle now, the moon gone from his eyes - nods, the smile sweetening and growing on his shadowed face. “Then we’ll start the day after the next full moon.”
5.
Derek finds human religion vaguely interesting from a distance but he’s not certain what to think about it. He knows a little about Christianity - it’s hard not to in North America - and from what he knows of that guy they call Jesus, he was a good pack leader: the story about the fish and the bread shows he was a good provider, the healing miracles are obvious, especially to a Hale wolf, and the crucifixion just proves that he was willing to sacrifice for his pack, as any good Othalan should. He’d always found the resurrection thing a little strange, but then Peter came back from the dead, so he can’t say anything more about it.
It’s other things about religion that confuse him. The pack mentions Christmas, and then Easter, but it never seems to mean anything to them, not the way that Short Night and Long Night had once meant something to him, or any of the other dates burned into his brain despite having gone years without celebrating them properly. They talk about presents - inane chatter that makes him grind his teeth - and family get-togethers - which he tries to ignore - and decorations and ice skating and giant rabbits.
Derek had had a piece of rabbit fur once, the skin tanned and cut himself, stitched with gut string. The most valuable piece of an Ansuz’s collection of tools - the first piece they make themselves.
It burned before he ever used it, even as an apprentice to his uncle.
6.
Laura forces him to go to the house. They’re going to leave, they’re going to run as fast and as soon as they can, but she makes him go back, just once. “You’re the Ansuz now,” she says with some urgency in her voice. “You need to do the rites.”
He shudders and his hands are shaking. He can’t light the candle, the thought of a flame near his skin, near this place, turning his stomach. His heart is beating faster than the rabbit’s, that beautiful grey and brown rabbit he’d brought Peter only two new moons earlier. The rabbit hadn’t been afraid - it hadn’t know what was about to happen.
He drops the match - Peter had been, no, is a traditionalist, a bit of flint in his hand - and runs.
Laura calls his name, chases him, grabs him with unfamiliar strength. She’s the Alpha now, but he’s not an Ansuz, not really. Less than two months into his apprenticeship, and Peter still alive - not that becoming Ansuz is anything like becoming Othalan. There will be no sudden rush of power, no new form under the moon - nothing. Ansuz is knowledge, skill; Nauthiz - energy and talent; but Othalan is everything.
They fall into the underbrush under a fir tree. The needles make his skin itch. “I can’t,” he gasps. “I can’t.”
She murmurs something into his hair and holds him close. The birds in the tree fly off; there’s a faint crash deeper into the forest that sounds like deer. “It’s okay,” she whispers. “We can do it another time.”
He chokes on his tears. “No,” he finally says, “you don’t understand.” He sucks in a breath. “I don’t know how.”
Two moons an apprentice. And he’d skipped the lesson on how to lay the spirits of the dead to rest to meet Kate Argent.
7.
The Othalan is the war-leader and the protector of the pack. The Alpha, humans say.
The Nauthiz is the healer and the hunter.
The Ansuz is the priest and the tradition-keeper.
Derek is an atheist now and he’s tried to forget all the old stories.
8.
Stiles’s rabbit heart always precedes him. Derek’s long gotten accustomed to his random appearances and strange questions. He natters on like a squirrel, regaling Derek with tales of senior-year drama.
The latest excitement is actually academic in nature and, ignoring his own good judgment, Derek starts paying attention.
“- so we’re going to read creation myths and all sorts of awesome legends and have storytellers from the reservation visit and I thought, well, what about werewolves? I mean, you guys are like an oppressed ethnic minority or something and you probably have your own culture and legends and stuff and maybe if you told them about it they’d come together better as a pack -”
“Stiles,” he interrupts. “Breathe.”
“Well?” the boy asks. “Do you?”
Derek wants to say no, to ignore the question all together and get away, but his mouth disobeys. “Yes.”
Stiles boggles, like Derek has made all his dreams come true. He opens his mouth, probably for a deluge of questions, but Derek stops him: “One question and then you’re gone.”
Stiles nods, pacified, and seems to think for a moment. “Start at the beginning,” he says and Derek regrets even offering. It doesn’t stop with Stiles - one question will turn into ten and into one hundred. Stiles continues: “Creation story.”
Derek frowns and Stiles quickly quotes something that sounds like the start of a vaguely-familiar human legend - “You know, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” - gesturing in his own way.
No, he doesn’t know. But he thinks he knows what Stiles is asking for.
“Okay,” Derek says and suddenly he’s shaky, palms sweaty and his breath nervous. This had been his calling once, his vocation. He can tell this story - any born wolf can tell this story by their fourth birthday. “Okay.” He breathes out and then:
“When She first opened her eye in the night, we were all wolves - ”
Stiles interrupts and it’s vexing and tedious but part of Derek revels in it, like he never knew what he was missing, the power and delight in teaching someone something about being a werewolf that has nothing to do with claws and teeth and fighting to live another second, another minute, another hour. It matters little that it’s one of the pack humans asking, but then the Hales had been liberal wolves. One of his great-aunts had been human; the husband of a cousin; Peter’s girlfriend the last two years of high school and Laura’s the third year in New York.
And so he explains everything: how the eye of the Creatrix was the Moon; how some packs recited the opening without the word ‘all’, because not all wolves think that their human brothers and sisters were wolves once too, but the Hales believed that humans had wolves in them that were hidden away until they were given the bite, which was a gift to remind them of where they really came from; how having a human form was a gift from the Moon for the days She could not see them and how the first werewolf - the first Alpha - had learned to walk on her hind legs when she tried to reach for Mother Moon as She climbed the night sky; and how of course the first Alpha was female, because everyone knows that women make the best Alphas, and so of course - he doesn’t quite say this out loud, mumbling something that conveys a bit of it in some vague way - of course he can’t be as good an Alpha, as good an Othalan as Laura had been, or his mother, or his great-grandmother, because men just don’t have the right instincts most of the time.
Somehow, when he finally finishes, Stiles nods, thanks him politely, and leaves without requesting anything more.
Derek finds it impossible to sleep that night. He runs, sometimes in human form, sometimes not, and chases the winking Moon.
9.
Laura offers to talk to the pack upstate, to see if their Ansuz would take him on as an apprentice, since she’s made a kind of treaty with them for protection and help and they were so sympathetic, but Derek is stubborn. He has choice words about the idea the few times she tries to bring it up and soon she gives up.
Every now and again he feels guilty about it, but he brushes it aside. He’s never going to be part of a real pack again, and he’s never going to have children, so what use is knowing anything?
One afternoon, just before Short Night, she brings it up again. She wants to celebrate - it’s been two years of mourning, she tells him, and she wants something from the old days back in her life.
For half a second he considers it. It would be easy, he thinks, to believe again, even though everyone knows that you take the stories with a grain of mountain ash, since even werewolves know that science has disproved quite a lot from the old stories. It would be comfortable. He can imagine it, being part of the pack upstate and celebrating with them. But it only lasts a moment, less than a moment. “No,” he says.
“Derek,” Laura says softly. “It’s okay to be happy. It’s okay to do things we used to do with them but with different people now.”
The pain of that night is still with him. “Go if you want,” he finally says. “But I’m staying here.” And then he admits it to her, the thought that has been hiding in his mind for months: “I don’t believe any more.”
Laura frowns. “You don’t believe -” She breathes then. “Oh. Okay. I won’t ask you again, but you know you’re always welcome.”
She celebrates Short Night with the pack upstate, reports that they were sad to hear that he wasn’t up to coming but that they hope he’ll change his mind in the future, but admits that it was strange to celebrate with near-strangers. She makes excuses when Long Night comes around and they stay in with some rented DVDs and cartons of Chinese. He finally masters using chopsticks that night and Laura teases him about the fortune cookies.
The photo of her on his phone, the one he never sees again when he returns to Beacon Hills because she can’t call him from beyond the grave, is from that night.
10.
It’s Scott the next time, smelling puzzled but intrigued when Derek notices him approaching. Derek doesn’t say anything, waiting for the boy to speak first. He’s tired, sleepless nights blurring together a little, and something in his mind still hurts from the visit Stiles paid him earlier in the week.
“Stiles told me...” Scott starts. pausing with uncertainty. “Stiles said that werewolves have their own legends?” There’s a tone to his voice, the lift at the end of the question, that is a little disbelieving.
Derek makes a noise, something like a snort, in response. “What, did you think that was something unique to humans?”
Scott’s eyes go a little wide at the response. “No, no, of course not,” he backtracks. “I guess I never thought about it.” He approaches, cautiously, until he finds a place to sit down, close enough to feel like a normal conversation, Derek notes, but far enough away to have a split-second’s head start if things go south. He wonders if that will ever change.
Silence.
“When I first - one time, you told me that the bite was a gift,” Scott says hesitantly after a few moments. “And Stiles said that there’s a story behind that.”
Derek stares at him.
“Could you,” Scott continues, strangely deferential. “Could you tell me about that?”
And that’s how Derek finds himself telling the story of Hilamesh, the first male Alpha, and his friend, Enkit, the first bitten werewolf.
He doesn’t tell Scott that humans have their own version of the story, the names a little different, but the story largely the same. It’s an ancient tale and for all he knows the human version is more accurate.
(Then again, it’s not like anyone alive today actually speaks ancient Sumerian fluently, so they may have a few of their details wrong.)
All he can think is what a good story it is for someone like Scott. Enkit starts out not knowing anything, a creature from a different world, but Hilamesh is a good Alpha to his friend and soon makes him civilized.
(The humans have a different idea about what that means, too. Some wolves say that Hilamesh is the reason that humans have any civilized behavior at all. The Hales, at least in more recent generations, have been of the opinion that ‘civilized behavior’ is relative. This is something Derek should have remembered when he found Scott: culture is learned and no one had taught Scott what to do. Instinct only goes so far.)
When he gets to the part where Hilamesh and Enkit hunt down the forest monster, Hubbap, Scott laughs at the name and Derek is startled - not because of the laugh, but because he finds himself smiling.
11.
In New York he relapses, if that’s the word for it, only once.
He gets a job stocking the shelves at a grocery store and works the graveyard shift, getting full moons off without much trouble because the manager has ‘a daughter who practices Wicca’ and therefore ‘understands’. She offers to introduce them; he politely declines; she offers to introduce her son instead; he politely declines again; her son shows up an hour later that evening with his new boyfriend and the matter is dropped.
During a waning moon, he goes for a run after work. He likes the quiet of the early morning, the peace and the lack of interaction with people who always want to know something about him, the eyes that fall on his face and his body, sometimes too reminiscent of his failing. But his meditations are interrupted by a whimper and he slows down and finally stops, searching for the source of the sound.
After a minute he finds the dog in an alley. It’s badly injured - hit by a car, he would guess; it had managed to crawl away from the street, but from the smell of things it’s bleeding internally and now in too much pain to move again. It’s a slow, painful death.
But werewolves - and Hale wolves in particular, even if they’re not Nauthiz - can give comfort in a way that humans cannot. Derek shushes the dog, murmuring nothing but soft, comforting sounds, and reaches out a hand to the mud-streaked fur. It takes a moment and he finds himself whispering a kenning for Eir, asking Her assistance, and he almost pulls his hand back when he realizes what he’s saying. But it’s a dog and despite their kinship with wolves that don’t stand on two legs, it won’t understand what he’s saying so it doesn’t really matter what he says, so long as his tone is soft and gentle.
When the dog is calmer, he picks it up and heads for the nearest animal clinic. It doesn’t survive, but its last hour could have been much worse, he tells himself.
Back at the apartment, he slips into bed, a nest of heavy blankets and pillows, and sleeps for ten hours.
12.
Isaac is the one who lets it slip that he and Scott have been taking the pain of animals at the clinic.
Derek is proud of them and wishes he knew how to express that properly. He has a strange urge to perform the saining, to welcome them into the pack as proper Hale Betas, something that should have been done months ago, but he holds back. He realizes that he doesn’t remember the story of Kahoolen well enough and for the first time he is embarrassed by that realization.
The saining is the first thing an apprentice Ansuz learns, and he didn’t have many lessons.
In the end he manages to say, “Keep up the good work,” and disappears into the forest.
Peter finds him by the river, staring at the setting sun. “Let me guess,” his uncle says - and it’s his uncle now, not the feral wolf who rained down destruction for most of a year. “Your Betas are happier with you all of a sudden for some reason and you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Derek shrugs.
Peter sighs and eventually settles down on a boulder with few patches of moss compared to its neighbors.
“I don’t believe any more,” Derek finally says. “Before the fire...I was hardly the most devout, even though I was going to be an Ansuz, but I believed. I knew the Moon was watching me, helping me, that she could hear me. But now - that part of it is so fake to me.”
“And?” Peter says when it’s clear that Derek’s not continuing.
Derek frowns. Peter can be sarcastic and cutting, but he’s usually truthful and he doesn’t make a big deal out of nothing. And what’s strange is that he’s not making a big deal out of it. Derek shrugs it off - it must be a mind game - and says, “But I’m starting to think that I need the rites and the traditions to be the Othalan they need me to be. For us to be the pack we need to be.”
Peter stares at him and lets out a long-suffering sigh. “Nephew,” he says, “you don’t have to believe to follow traditions. Do you really think that every Ansuz literally believes that the Moon is a giant wolf’s eye? If you do, you’re a bigger idiot than I thought you were.”
Derek isn’t certain what to say to that, so he keeps his mouth shut.
“I always fancied myself a secular wolf as it was. The myths and the stories were great for keeping you pups in line, but it’s not like there was actual magic in the rites - in the saining or the rite for the dead or any of the other rituals. I mean, we’ve run into some crazy shit that science can’t explain yet-”
(Peter gestures at himself as he speaks, his meaning so very obvious, a familiar sort of smirk on his face, and Derek wonders how it could have been anything but magic that resurrected him, what sufficiently-advanced technology could have planted a mad wolf’s soul into the mind of a teenage girl and looked all the while like magic.)
“-But it’s not as if the Moon Goddess literally reaches down and touches a new wolf when we welcome them into the pack. It’s just a fancy way of saying, ‘Hi, you’re with us from now on, so don’t be a screw up’. Tradition doesn’t have to be about belief - it’s just a social glue.” Peter stands up and brushes off non-existent specks of dirt and moss from his slacks. “If you think your pups need some wolfy mumbo-jumbo so they’ll actually work together and be a pack, then go for it.”
Peter has only gone a few feet when Derek summons up enough courage, enough strength, to admit to the real problem: “What if I can’t remember how to do it?” he whispers.
Peter pauses, turns slightly, and smirks. The moon is in his eyes, his smirk lunatic in every meaning of the word. “Then I guess it’s a good thing I came back from the dead, now isn’t it.”
13.
The day after the sainings - which take place with surprising cooperation; Derek suspects Stiles and Boyd’s hands in this - Derek goes hunting.
He shifts and chooses a direction, following his nose and his ears. He finds his intended prey four times and each time is a success - not only a success, in that he got his prey, but that it went better than he hoped. He says a kenning for the god of the hunted, showing his gratitude for the lives that will continue no more, and when he has all four he returns.
The candles and the bonfire are already lit. Without the robes and the staff, Peter looks more mad scientist than pagan priest in the firelight, but it’s not the details that matter - it’s the result.
Derek sets down the squirrels and steps back.
Peter looks at him. “Squirrels?”
He squares his shoulders. “The smaller the offerings and the cleaner the fur, the more dedicated the apprentice.”
Peter looks faintly impressed. “I recall a rabbit last time.”
Derek shrugs. “I didn’t have the control or the speed for squirrels then.” He doesn’t say, I didn’t know why I was doing it then but he thinks it. He also doesn’t remind Peter that he had gotten some blood on the rabbit. The squirrels are clean and that speaks for itself.
“Well, then,” Peter draws out, “I guess it’s time to get started.”
Derek breathes. “I guess it is.”
[End]
Notes:
The title comes from a popular saying among practitioners of Wicca - ‘to know, to dare, to will, to keep silent’. A quick overview of the meaning of this saying can be found here: http://paganwiccan.about.com/od/glossary/g/ToKnowToDare.htm
The tale of Hilamesh and Enkit fighting the monster Hubbap is intended to be a variation of the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, who fight a forest monster named Humbaba. While I am not familiar with Sumerian linguistics, the werewolf names for these characters would be reasonable possible mutations of the names given enough time, based on the English pronunciations.
Eir is listed on Wikipedia as a Norse goddess or Valkyrie associated with healing and medicine. She is mentioned in both the Prose and Poetic Eddas and in runic inscriptions. Kennings are poetic expressions or circumlocutions - a kind of nickname - used to describe characters, places, and things, especially in Norse sagas, in formulaic ways.
A saining is any welcoming ritual, such as a christening or baptism, which brings a new member - usually an infant, but sometimes adults - into a religious group. In Wicca it is sometimes referred to as ‘wiccaning’. ‘Sain’ comes from Scottish English and is derived from Latin signus ‘a mark’. Kahoolen is Cu Chulainn, a hero in Irish mythology, who got his name (‘the hound of Culainn’) when he killed Culainn’s guard dog and offered to take its place.
The werewolf pack roles - othalan, nauthiz, ansuz - come from Norse runes, specifically the elder futhark. Othalan means ‘inheritance, estate’ - an Alpha inherits the position and the pack on the death of his or her predecessor. Nauthiz means ‘need, distress’ - the healer does what is necessary for the health of the pack. Ansuz is related to Old Norse words meaning ‘god, deity’ and is related to the word ‘Aesir’, referring to specific Norse gods - the priest communes with the gods and keeps their stories and traditions for the pack.