dynamite with a laser beam [part i]
Story: guaranteed to blow your mind
Summary: ANYTIME // Laura is better in a crisis than Derek, but that’s kind of like saying that strangling someone is less messy than stabbing them: The comparison doesn’t quite capture the desperation of all parties involved.
Notes: I’m endlessly enthralled by Laura Hale and the mess of strengths and vulnerabilities inside of her that allowed her to keep Derek alive for six years after the fire but still failed to get her past a death-match with her uncle. Soundtrack provided by Queen because of feels-related reasons.
Also, I know canon told us in Stiles’ mad researchin’ binge that eight people died in the Hale house fire, but I found that out after I’d written my personal histories for the Hales and I loved all of them so much that I couldn’t bear to get rid of any of them. So, um, that bit’s slightly AU.
(Guys, I had so many Google Maps tabs open for writing this.)
~
sometimes i wish i’d never been born at all | 2005
Even though every second drags exponentially out underneath her fingernails, there isn’t enough time for Laura to cover every contingency. She fudges a little on what could be categorized as necessary and she picks out of the mess of her brain the first important thing that comes to mind, which is: They can’t get information out of this. Later, Laura will be impressed by the ice that ran through her veins, shocked that she never ate or stopped to pee or checked her cell phone, and frustrated by the whole host of things she forgot to do; but for now, Laura just moves.
She cold-cocks Derek, who is still babbling Kate’s name like it will erase what she’s done, with her elbow and a blank apology and shoves him into the back of the car. Freezing and numb, she waits on the hood of the car until Erin and Natalie’s hearts are snuffed out, the last to go in their room in the attic. Afterwards, when all she can hear is the crackle of her entire life incinerating into ash, she rests her eyes against the base of her palms and breathes through the Alpha change. Someone will smell the smoke from inside the Preserve and call 911, so the scene is about to be crawling with fire and police department personnel. Technically Laura and Derek aren’t even supposed to be home-their camping trip wasn’t due to end until tomorrow.
So Laura takes the part of her that wants to collapse into pieces and she sticks a pin into it and tags it for a later date. She drags a blanket over Derek in the backseat and carefully locks him in with a seatbelt so that there will be no reason for them to be pulled over, and then she drives like a bat out of fucking hell, using her hearing and her nose to detect speed traps. It’s a little under three hours to Lookingglass if you obey traffic laws, but Laura makes it in one and a half.
Peter and Joanna’s house is on the small and lopsided end of the Arts & Crafts movement, painted dark turquoise with yellow trim. Joanna’s forsythia and Chinese witch hazel greet Laura with shocking bursts of colors against all of the plants that are still shaking off their winter sleep. The sun has just begun to rise; Derek is still unconscious. Laura can taste the Alpha in the back of her throat. Use me, it urges, fight with me, but Laura doesn’t have time to let her wolf rule her head.
She doesn’t want to think about her father, or being the Alpha, so she climbs out of the car and uses the fourth key on her key ring to open the back door. She almost trips on one of Miles’ toys in the kitchen, a little Fischer Price truck thing made of big plastic pieces. It squeaks as she steps on it, scattering blocks across the linoleum. Laura swallows down the thickness in her throat and goes to Peter’s study, where his journals line the shelves above his desk. Laura still has to make it to Coos Bay and then Tule Lake before she and Derek can go back to Beacon Hills; there’s no time for sorting. She packs all of Peter’s journals into boxes, and then the four volumes that Joanna had borrowed from the family’s library on their last visit to Beacon Hills.
Laura tries not to think about how little she knows about being Alpha, but there’s so much that she’s not thinking about that it all sort of runs together and begins to bleed across her consciousness. Her chest starts to feel tight as she puts the box of books into the trunk of her car and checks on Derek. He’s moved out of unconsciousness into sleep. The slightly traumatized look of his face has tightened; his mouth is a long, thin, angry line.
It begins to rain halfway to Coos Bay. The road is framed by nothing but trees, and the green blurs and stretches the harder it rains. Laura has supernatural reflexes but her mom’s Subaru sure as hell doesn’t, so she loses the thirty minutes she could’ve gained by driving like a madman and pulls into the driveway that deposits half a mile up into the house that Karl, Jorge, and Edith share at a time closer to midday than she’d really like. Laura is just old enough to have picked up the odd strains in their relationship, but they’re pack-and more than pack they’re family-so she doesn’t care that their marriage has one more person than humans would probably be comfortable with.
Their door is unlocked because Edith’s head is stuffed full of cotton fluff when it comes to practical things like locking the fucking doors. Laura lingers outside, under the cover of the porch, smelling for hunters or drifters or omegas, but the house reeks of family and love, things that sharpen and stab at Laura’s chest. There aren’t any toys scattered in the entryway, although there are boxes from UPS that look big enough to hold the crib for the coming baby.
They have the beginnings of a library in the den behind the kitchen. Half of it is stocked with Jorge’s poor taste in romance and science fiction and then whole shelves’ worth of the kind of poetry they make you read in Intro to Poetic Thought-Yeats and Coleridge and Wordsworth and Shelley and the entire collected works of Tennyson-that scent heavily of Karl, who is the only member of their family who could place in competitive brooding ahead of Derek. Against the back wall are the books on lore and theory. They’re copies of the books at the house in Beacon Hills, or newer editions, or musty old books in languages that only Edith knows how to read.
Laura takes them all, even the ones in Sanskrit; and because she’s running on fumes and sheer willpower and Jorge makes sure that their house actually recycles cardboard boxes instead of stuffing them into the back of the pantry like Joanna does, she has to unpack the baby’s crib and what looks like a stroller that passed through the Federal Patent Office on its way to Oregon in order to pack up the books against the rain.
Derek is waking up again when Laura slams the trunk shut. “Laur?” he says groggily from the backseat, lifting his head and frowning. Laura would feel bad about the next part, except he’s her only family now and she can smell the indecision and dawning horror growing inside him as he comes back to himself. She hits him again, this time with a solid pulse of Alpha strength, and out he goes. Hopefully he won’t remember much of this. Laura giddily realizes that she’s wishing permanent brain damage on her baby brother, but it seems in line with the rest of her day.
It’s midmorning now, grey with rain, and the drive to Tule Lake is a little over five hours. Provided that there aren’t any surprises, like hunters with buckshot and monkshood, waiting for them at the house on Tule Lake, they should be back in Beacon Hills by a little after sunset. Laura turns on 88.5 FM and listens to NPR as she drives-recklessly, considering the state of the slick roads-across Oregon. She gets tired of the news and bantering pundits and eventually turns to the public radio classical station, just in time to catch the overture of the Saturday matinee at the Seattle Opera.
It’s Samson et Dalila.
The parallels are hard to ignore, even if Laura doesn’t know a word of French beyond the chorus of “Lady Marmalade.” Laura doesn’t know everything that happened with Kate Argent, but Derek being rather obviously in love with someone had been hard to ignore, even with Laura at Humboldt State for most of the week. Making him listen to this opera-and Derek does speak French, because he’s the biggest girl in a family of girls-would be needlessly cruel; she uses it as validation for keeping him unconscious.
What with the rain and the cold, they have the road mostly to themselves, so Laura stops pretending to have human reflexes by the time she turns onto OR-39 and the radio begins to go in and out, static messing with the pure, lilting cruelty of Dalila’s voice in the Philistine temple. Laura finally gives up and turns it off when she can see the glittering stretch of the lake in front of her. Imogene’s house is the last on the left before the turn towards the lake; the California Bay Laurel that Imogene had planted when Laura was born is huge now, at least six meters tall, and it sweeps over the pale blue clapboard structure like loving arms.
It takes Laura twenty minutes to pull herself together, swallowing compulsively with her forehead against the steering wheel. She cracks one of the windows and acclimatizes to the scent, the warm stickiness of the lake and the sweetness of the laurel. The tree blooms in the late winter, and Laura can taste it, like she can taste the sandalwood and cedar of Imogene’s perfume and the still-unfamiliar cologne that Michael has recently adopted. If Laura tried, she could pull Greta and Steven and Isolde out; she could roll them over her tongue and taste their arguments and their happiness and their lack-but Laura doesn’t try because Laura doesn’t have time for this right now.
She doesn’t even test her willpower by trying the front door; she goes in through the basement, unearths Imogene’s journals from where they are stored in a carved cedar chest under a box of wolfsbane bullets, and carries the chest back to her car. She thinks very briefly about going in and trying to find anything that Isolde and Steven might have, but they’re only a little bit older than Laura and Laura sure as hell isn’t keeping journals at this point in her life.
With that rationale sorted, Laura turns over the engine and guns it, with the lake to her back and Imogene’s beautiful house in her rearview mirror. She makes it twelve miles before she has to pull over, breathing heavily through her nose, her eyes bleeding red and brown indiscriminately, her claws digging into the padded plastic of the steering wheel. This is going extremely not well.
Kill, her wolf prods. You want it. Take life from her. Take everything.
Laura knows better than to listen to her wolf in situations like this, but if she doesn’t do something she’s going to end up transforming in her mom’s Subaru along the side of US-97 and that’s going to be unpleasant for everyone involved, including the Subaru.
In the end, she drives back to Imogene’s house, goes in through the front door, and takes every framed photograph from the mantel above the fireplace in the living room. Two of them are of Imogene with her children gathered around her, Greta and Michael younger and grinning toothily, Steven and Isolde older and attempting to look surly. Three are of a collection of the cousins: Laura holding Miles and blowing a raspberry into his belly; Isolde carrying Derek on her shoulders as she runs across the lawn towards the house in Beacon Hills; Natalie and Erin in matching ugly early-80s bathing suits emerging from Tule Lake, back when they still played the twin card as though their scents didn’t make them easily distinguishable. One is of Imogene, holding Laura on her first birthday-the day that Imogene was made Laura’s godmother and the guardian of her wolf.
To keep the glass in the frames from breaking, Laura wraps them in a tablecloth from the linen drawer in the kitchen and then she puts them in the cedar chest with Imogene’s journals and she finally, finally escapes the house, the ghost of Imogene’s arms around her, the smell of pack and family. She escapes them all the way down US-97 into Beacon Hills, where the fire climbs into her nose and clings, banishing everything except the sooty remains of her family’s corpses.
~
The sheriff’s department finds the final body count to be 14; the survivors are listed as three, although calling Peter a survivor is very generous-Laura heard his heart die. A wolf’s heart never stops. Laura is fairly certain he is never going to wake up.
She gets a list of their names, as though she’s ever going to forget them, along with a portfolio thick with assets and insurance claims. Edith’s baby isn’t on the list, so Laura adds Matilda to the end before she tears it up into little pieces and leaves it for one of the hotel maids to clean up.
~
When Derek wakes up, he doesn’t remember anything about the driving or the houses or Laura punching him, so she decides not to mention any of it. He looks broken by everything, including the simple fact of his own existence.
~
Laura keeps Peter’s book of contacts but leaves everything else packed. The boxes go into long-term storage in Eureka, on a table specifically bought so that the damp won’t get to them from the ground. Possessions could theoretically be salvaged from the other houses, but by the time Laura officially drives up with a lawyer to take a look at them, they’ve been rifled through by hunters and everything reeks of Kate Argent and her psycho buddies. The scent trail always begins and ends abruptly at the base of the driveway; Laura couldn’t track Kate even if she folded to the pressure exerted by her wolf to ruin.
She doesn’t even make it into Imogene’s house; she sits on the front steps, breathing shallowly and trying to focus on the laurel blossoms, as the lawyer walks around inside and yells out things about estate sales and recouping property and other stuff that Laura, a twenty-year-old botany major, knows nothing about. He’s a partner from Jorge’s firm and his smile is faintly acrid along the edges, like he wants to shout at the universe for putting Laura and Derek into this position. She appreciates the sentiment, in a detached, nonverbal sort of way.
Laura tells him to sell everything.
~
Laura can’t really think in Beacon Hills; every time she pulls a yellow legal pad towards her and flips to a blank page, all she can manage to do is write TO DO across the top before she can feel the beginnings of a panic attack setting in. The obvious human answer to her problems is to just leave; Derek won’t be going back to school any time soon, she’s sure as hell not ready to finish out the semester, and they’ve got more money than any pair of people should receive in their lifetime and the freedom that comes with all that cash.
But leaving comes with its own set of issues. Laura has to find somewhere without a pack or with one that won’t mind a little pack settling in along the fringe of their territory. That means a big city, one where packs have their land assigned by street blocks instead of by miles. She’s never lived away from the forest, from the hundreds of square miles of nature preserves and national forests that the Hale pack called home; neither has Derek. Laura wasn't raised to be an Alpha and she’s never truly been alone before, so God help her but she’s completely fucked.
She might as well be fucked somewhere that doesn’t drain energy out of her like a vampire. There’s a map in the back of Peter’s journal, drawn in Joanna’s small drafting hand, that shows the territorial boundaries of North America. Canada is claimed in splotches that would make it easy for Derek and Laura to slip in unnoticed, but Laura’s desire to live in Canada about equals her desire to paint her naked body with human blood and dance in front of Beacon Hills Town Hall. New York is an obvious destination; millions of humans, four major packs, and as far away from Beacon Hills as she and Derek can get without actually flinging themselves in the Atlantic Ocean and swimming for Ireland.
Laura has an instinctual desire to avoid the obvious, bred into her by generations of powerful, paranoid werewolves; she ends up picking Pittsburgh on a cold night in the middle of March, three days before their first full moon with Laura as the Alpha. She picks a neighborhood without a pack, sends emails to the two Alphas listed in Peter’s Packs That Don’t Actively Hate Us list as a friendly heads-up, and pays the lawyer to find them an apartment.
The motions-transferring her credits to the University of Pittsburgh, enrolling Derek in high school, replenishing the scent markers along their land so that a migrant pack doesn’t get stupid ideas about open territory-keep Laura’s head above water. She sells the cars that Kate Argent had so helpfully left, with their tires slashed, unburned. She drives with a silent Derek in the passenger’s seat to HSU, where she empties her dorm room of all of her belongings and hugs her roommate, pretty much the only person on campus who can stand her, good-bye. She talks to the lawyer again, seriously considers fucking him, and then makes the adult decision not to exploit his stinking sympathy for her untenable situation. She sells her mom’s Subaru and replaces it with a burgundy two-door Toyota that makes Derek replace his perpetually angst-filled man-pain expression with a fabulous bitchface.
It’s not a prologue to anything. There is no doing over, no beginning again, no fresh start. Almost the entirety of Laura’s family is dead, and she is carrying her father’s memories inside her head, where she’s trying to paint over them like she’d tried to paint over the hideous mermaid wallpaper in her bedroom when she turned thirteen.
Pittsburgh is an attempt to jolt herself into living, but there will be no efforts at salvation.
~
Their first full moon doesn’t turn into a disaster only by the skin of Laura’s teeth. The pull of the Alpha form is too strong to control and, recognizing that, Laura locks herself and Derek into the catacombs underneath the house and lets it take over. The sensation of the change is entirely different from when she was a Beta; Laura’s wolf ceases to act as a personality supplementary to her human one and simply becomes everything.
Across the room, Derek falls into submission with a faint, bruised smell of eagerness. He wants accepting Laura as Alpha to do something for them. Laura knows better, but she pads over to where Derek is lying with his back to the cold concrete of the floor and nudges him with her nose, letting her breath ease across the thin, exposed skin of his neck. He smells like home, and home will always smell like smoke, now, where once it tasted like her father’s cookies and her mother’s perfume.
After the submission, things get spectacularly worse. Laura hadn’t realized that Derek had brought Kate into the catacombs, but once she isn’t devoting 90% of her senses towards bringing Derek into her power, she can scent Kate everywhere, dank and moldy, like old skin. Kate smells like the mummy narrator looks on Tales from the Crypt; as Laura gags, she honestly can’t imagine getting any enjoyment out of fucking her.
Derek whines and presses backwards, slithering off of the floor and protecting himself by edging into a corner. Her baby brother is scared of a human; Laura can almost feel it, like a wave of depressed sweat rolling off of him. One day, Laura hopes, anger will replace the fear. Right now, she feels enough anger for both of them.
KILL, Laura’s wolf opines. KILL HER.
Laura still doesn’t know exactly what happened the night of the fire, but it’s only her human, rational side that cares about that. Her wolf would much rather rip out Kate’s throat and bathe in her blood before asking questions about what or why or how. On the full moon, Laura’s human gets barely a mention in the credits-her wolf is running the show.
The walls were specifically designed to keep werewolves in check, even Alphas with more anger issues than Sigmund Freud could shake a cigar at, so Laura spends her first full moon as Alpha throwing herself bodily against a reinforced steel door, her claws raking holes in the surrounding stone. She won’t be able to follow Kate’s scent trail outside of the catacombs-if she had, she would’ve done it already-but her wolf doesn’t think that it will be a problem. Her wolf doesn’t trust her human instincts. Her wolf mostly just wants to go Patrick Bateman on Kate Argent’s ass.
Derek watches her all night, eyes blue and blinking and luminescent, his scent hovering somewhere between confusion and terror. He wants to do something to help her, but he doesn’t know what. Laura can sense things like that now; she can hear Derek’s emotions as if he’s whispering them to himself in his little protected corner, a mantra of Laura Kate why scared sex blood, thundering against the inside of her skull.
Laura breaks four bones and dislocates her left shoulder. She has to wait until she’s human the next morning to pop it back in, and the pain almost knocks her out. As she’s inspecting her ribs for signs of incomplete or wrong healing, she realizes that she can see them through her skin. Laura has always been the most voluptuous Hale sister, so she gets a bit of a shock when she realizes that her hip bones have made a valley directing between her legs, her skin ashen and pulled tight over bones that Laura has never seen before.
“You smell sick,” Derek tells her flatly as he watches her prod at the ball socket where her leg meets her hip. “You aren’t eating.”
“Yes I am,” says Laura automatically, although she doesn’t know if that’s actually true.
Derek shrugs and leans back against the metal door, resting his head against the latch that will need human, dexterous fingers to open it. He means, Whatever my Alpha says I know to be true, but it comes across as, Whatever you want to fucking tell yourself, which is like twelve degrees less encouraging. He’s lost weight, too, and it’s hollowed out cheeks that were always pinchable and adorable.
With a thin ripple of shock, Laura realizes that he’s become attractive and maybe even manly since the last time she looked at him through the critical lens of my pathetically emotionally stunted little brother. Ants crawl up her spine at the thought of Kate Argent taking advantage of that adolescent awkwardness. Her wolf bitchily points out that killing Kate had totally been an option that Laura’s human had vetoed previously.
Laura decides right then to get the hell out of Dodge, and they’re gone by midmorning, their car packed with the clothes that Laura had brought back from her dorm room at HSU and yanked without really looking from a rack of Derek’s size at Kohl’s. She leaves the radio tuned to classical until Derek looks like he wants to rip off his ears and stuff them down her throat, at which point she takes pity on him and changes to blues.
It’s too early for the stuff they really want to hear: David Bowie’s high whine and Freddie Mercury’s melodies and Jim Morrison being Jim Morrison; if Laura plays that, they’re just going to stare out of the windows and think about their dead family, which is about as far from productive or emotionally healthy as you can get without actually becoming a serial killer. Seeing as how Laura is staring out of the windshield, her white knuckles squeezing the plastic of the steering wheel until it becomes malformed, she’s probably already thinking about them too much and not concentrating hard enough on the road.
Midway through Nevada, Derek leans over and turns off the radio. He has his I would prefer to brood without all of this goddamn crooning look in his face.
“Fucking deal,” Laura tells him. She turns the radio back on, cranks it three increments louder, and adds, “Driver picks the tunes.”
Derek’s face tells her that he wants her to shove an icepick in her heart and fall over dead.
“Tough fucking luck,” Laura says. Peter likes the blues, and as he’s not dead it’s the only safe place that Laura can think to rest. The silence isn’t right for this; the silence scares Laura and reminds her of the way that Kate’s scent had turned Derek’s wolf into a terrified little mouse. She opens her mouth and sings them across Nevada, I-80 black and grey under the new tires of her used burgundy Toyota, until her throat is scratchy and dry and Derek is physically clawing at the door.
“Stop, stop,” he hisses at a rest stop outside Salt Lake City. “I get it, now please shut the fuck up.” He slams the door behind him and stomps off to glare at himself in the shitty bathroom mirror as Laura fills up the tank and then goes inside to critically survey the gas station’s snack collection. She feels like she should eat, as if Imogene is hovering over her shoulder and pointing out that just because Erin and Natalie are tiny little sticks doesn’t mean Laura needs to develop an eating disorder to make a point, but she also gets nauseous just looking at the different flavors of Combos and Doritos and Lays.
She ends up buying the cheesy Chex Mix because everyone in the Hale family has always hated Chex Mix + cheese powder, and then she gets herself a flavor of local soda that sounds unfamiliar and disgusting. Derek will eat anything because he’s sixteen and got hollow legs, so she buys him five packages of beef jerky and then a big bottle of water. Derek still hasn’t come back from the bathroom when she tumbles their purchases out of her arms and into his seat, hoping that the condensation from the water bottle will annoy him.
No one else is waiting for gas and the attendant’s heart sounds bored as hell, steady and lethargic as a metronome; Laura sits on the hood of the car and opens the bag of Chex Mix. She picks out one of the cracker pieces and looks at it for a long time. It smells as unappetizing as her ex-boyfriend’s feet, which is fairly astounding for a snack food (also, impressive), and it takes a massive amount of willpower and desire not to faint on their road trip and wrap the Toyota around a tree for her to put it on her tongue.
It takes like sandpaper and wet cat and the box that Kraft macaroni & cheese is packaged in. Laura’s stomach makes an unhappy, squelching noise, although that could be because she’s introducing it to a concept-sustenance-that it hasn’t seen in a long time. She tries a pretzel next in the vague hope that nothing will be as disgusting as the cracker, and she’s right. The pretzel is better; the pieces of Chex cereal go down the easiest.
Laura spends the next six minutes picking out the crackers and dropping them onto the cement to her left. The attendant doesn’t even bother complaining when the birds begin to hop closer, interested in the potential for a free meal, and Laura is so distracted by the way that the birds sound-different from the ones at home, throatier and piercing-that it takes her longer than it should to pick out that the attendant’s heartbeats are too even, and inside of the store the cashier has fallen into that same rhythm.
Derek is still gone. Laura checks her watch, remembers that it was lost in the fire, and digs her cell phone out of her pocket. Twenty-two minutes is a long time, even for a champion brooder like Derek, and Laura’s human begins to panic slightly as her wolf turns the volume down on the noxious cheese smell and dials up the surrounding area. She can hear Derek’s heart, the shuffle of his feet as he moves across the tiled floor of the bathroom, but they’re muffled and slow. Controlling her Alpha senses is still hit-or-miss, but if she closes her eyes and imagines zooming in on the room, blocking out everything immediately surrounding herself, she can hear a steady drip, drip, drip; too thick for water.
“Oh, Jesus,” she mutters, her teeth already growing, her claws pushing out of her fingertips. She stays the transformation at a half-change and leaps off of the car, across the lot, to where two hunters wearing protective charms are holding longbows and blocking the doorway to the men’s restroom. “Get. Out,” Laura growls at them, extending her arms to the side. Thank the Lord her body remembers all of her dad’s lessons about making your body appear bigger and more threatening than it actually is; her mind is too occupied.
The first hunter, smaller, blanches. Laura can see the sweat bead against his temples, but there is a curious disconnect where she can’t smell it. “Y-you can’t touch us,” he blusters, pushing his chest out so Laura can see the amulet more clearly. That was a stupid move, because Laura can see immediately that it only protects against the wolf’s body; she picks up a wooden crate from the pile next to the Dumpster and breaks it against the wall.
“Want to bet?” she asks, and she advances on both of the hunters with big wooden shards in either hand. Never before has she felt like a bigger fraud, with the red of her irises reflecting in their glassy stares, holding the remains of a packing crate that still smells of tangerines and pesticides.
The taller, microscopically less stupid hunter grips his friend by the upper arm and says, “She knows,” and then he turns and fucking bolts for a pick-up parked across the street. It looks tangentially familiar-after a few seconds, Laura places it as the one she’d seen outside of the gas station in Wendover where she’d parked to pee and buy herself a Coke. His friend stumbles after him a second later, and Laura forgets about them as she runs for the door-and she can’t get in, because the bottom of the frame is lined with a thick dusting of mountain ash.
“Unfuckingbelieveable,” she tells Derek, who is hunched over the sink with a bitchy expression on his face as he considers the arrow sprouting out of his chest. “Barbed?” she asks, examining the structural integrity of the doorframe.
“No fucking shit,” Derek replies. “Not wolfsbane, at least.”
“They were clearly amateurs,” Laura says dismissively. She raps against a likely looking spot with her knuckles and hears nothing except the dull reverberation of insulation. “Can you get it out?”
Derek’s hand hovers over the arrow. “Wrong angle,” he says. “Are you just going to stand there or you going to pay zoo admission?”
“Witty,” Laura replies, “so witty that I might just leave you here.”
Derek wheezes in laughter in response; he has to lean his hip against the sink to do so without falling to the floor. The mountain ash doesn’t completely dull Laura’s senses, but it still feels like she’s looking at and smelling him through a thick wad of cotton padding. Her wolf becomes furious at the thought of being separated from her pack; Laura yanks back her hand and pushes it as fast as she can into the doorframe, tearing with her claws until she reaches a part that she can pull back. About two feet of wall collapses, raining plaster and pink bits of insulation over Laura, and she tugs on the edges until the hole is big enough for Derek to climb through. The steady heartbeat of the attendant ticks on in the background, and Laura wonders how in the hell no one has come by to see this yet.
She gets her answer after she’s held Derek against the side of the Dumpster and pushed the barbed arrow through to the other side of his chest. There’s an OUT OF ORDER banner hanging over the sign to the rest stop near the ramp back to I-80. It’s clever in the short term, stupid in the long term, and Laura parks to pull it down when she realizes that she’s left Derek’s blood all over the bathroom and they’ll probably get stupid questions about it.
The attendant is still asleep, so Laura orders Derek to eat at least two of the packages of beef jerky as she jogs back to the rest stop, unearths a bottle of bleach from a janitor’s closet that is now missing half of a door, and pours it over everything that smells like a blood stain. She can’t do anything about the security cameras, but at least there’s not DNA evidence waiting for an enterprising CSI with shit to prove; besides, she’s hoping the hunters were smart enough to do something about video evidence before they shot barbed arrows at a sixteen-year-old washing his hands in a public restroom.
“You stink,” Derek informs her when she climbs back into the car. He sneezes twice, and blood bubbles on the front of his shirt.
“Your fault,” Laura says. “I’m not the one with the NCIS obsession, babe.”
“Don’t call me babe,” Derek growls, but his mouth is full of beef jerky and he loses all of his intimidation points because he’s so goddamn adorable, trying to regenerate flesh for the big hole in his chest.
~
Laura doesn’t panic until they stop for the night just past Evanston. She gets them a motel room just for the entertainment value of watching Derek suspiciously sniff the bed sheets, and then she shotguns the bathroom, tells Derek to order Chinese from the menu helpfully left on top of the television, and goes to pieces in the shower.
A big part of why Laura is shit at making human friends is that she doesn’t understand the importance of concepts like privacy and personal independence; wolves don’t do either of those things, so Laura is used to feeling the adults in her life panic and swear and stink of confusion. Laura has never wanted to do her own thing or discover herself or learn it on her own. A pack is about togetherness, about the whole being more than the sum of the pieces, and Laura is better at being a piece than she is at faking the whole.
It isn’t in Laura to be ashamed that Derek can hear her cry. She does it in the shower because she can get snot everywhere and not have to worry about how abused her nose will be by the shitty one-ply toilet paper; also, she knows that Derek will be awkward if forced to watch her dissolve into tears, and Derek has already reached his awkwardness quota of the day, when the clerk at reception had seriously asked Derek if he was with Laura of his own free will or if the clerk should call the police-he’d seen the bloodstains on Derek’s shirt.
She crawls out when she smells the delivery guy pull into the parking lot. MSG has a very distinctive smell and Laura’s stomach, renewed by half of a bag of Chex Mix, grumbles long and hard about not currently being stuffed with sesame chicken. Laura piles half of the chicken on top of an order of pork chow mein and huddles over it with a pair of chopsticks while Derek steadily inhales everything else in the bag, his butt pressed against her hip. She doesn’t want to turn on the television and she doesn’t want to talk about today, but the silence slides down her throat and upsets the food therein.
“We should probably establish some ground rules,” she says to the back of Derek’s neck, sucking down a noodle.
“What, like a bat signal?” Derek says. He must be awfully tired, if he’s just opening himself up to the dork jokes like that.
“Cute,” Laura says. “It’d be cuter if I didn’t know you were deadly serious.”
“You should never joke about Batman,” he says seriously, and Laura can’t help cracking a grin at that. She feels emptied out, after the tears, and still not at all ready to keep her brother from dying on their cross-country road trip.
“Let’s shelve that one for now, Bruce,” she suggests drily. “I meant more, like, when they shot you, you could’ve said something along the lines of, ‘Laura, sister dear, I appear to have been shot by a pair of morons with more flannel than balls.’” After critically examining something that might’ve once been a sugar snap pea, Laura abandons it in favor of more sesame chicken.
Derek shrugs. He doesn’t say anything, which is not exactly rare when it comes to graduates of the Derek Hale School of Communication, but Laura has sixteen years of being his sister and the Alpha senses on her side. “Derek,” she says. “Look at me.”
He reluctantly shuffles to the side, scooting his butt further up the bed. His current position qualifies as ‘looking at Laura’ by the skin of its teeth, but Laura knows how to pick her battles. “Don’t ever do that again,” she tells him. She lets the Alpha bleed into her voice and her eyes; she can feel her face shift, but it’s the smoothest transition she’s ever had. The wolf assures her that this is right; this is good. Derek smells like a vessel full of liquid-all blood and tears and saline solutions-and hers to control. It tickles her nose.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Derek says, but he’s not even trying; his voice is flat and hard like a paving stone. There’s no inflection on any of the words.
Laura has so much sympathy for her father right now. Beyond simply how fucking difficult it is to suppress Alpha instincts, he’d also raised four children within a pack structure, and Laura knows that Natalie and Erin were worth more trouble than most sextuplets during their formative years. “Derek,” she chides, gathering the growl deep in her chest, “you aren’t ever going to do something so goddamn fundamentally stupid again.”
She knows how the next sentence goes-it’s not your fault, they would’ve wanted us to live, don’t you fucking dare leave me here by myself-but she can’t force her mouth into the proper shape for the words. Derek knows all of them, but he did it anyway; he stood in a bathroom at a shitty rest stop outside of fucking Salt Lake City and took a barbed arrow to the chest.
We could kill her, Laura’s wolf points out, and hysteria bubbles helplessly, pushing at her diaphragm. Laura’s wolf is insane and also insanely unhelpful.
“I’m your Alpha,” she tells him crisply, “and we are the only ones left. I don’t care what she did to you, but she’s a murdering psychopath and she’s gone and one day, we’re going to rip out her intestines and eat them, but that day is not today. You have to live to see that day. You have to live, Derek.”
Derek has a thick, square jaw that looks like it could cut glass, and it tenses when she mentions eating Kate Argent’s body. He wants to; she can smell the spike of interest and he’s too young to keep the bloodlust from turning his eyes a sharp, uncompromising blue.
“Okay?” Laura says, and she kicks her forgotten carton of Chinese off of the bed and drags Derek down into a hug; the tight, octopus kind, with her palms pressed flat against his shoulders. She draws his head in so he can smell her neck, smell pack and family and other tricks. The particulars-Imogene, grassy and deep; Miles, powdery and basic like baking soda; Edith, citrus and ink-are lost for forever, but she will always smell like the pack, until the day she dies.
[part ii]