dynamite with a laser beam [part ii]
[part i]
i just can’t get no relief | 2007
Laura works Thursday to Sunday, five to midnight, at Hemingway’s Bar on campus. Karaoke Night is Wednesday, so Laura saves herself from that trauma, and even though there’s a rotating door of freshmen with shitty fake IDs who don’t tip well or even, like, at all, there are enough hardened regulars who come in before 10pm that she pulls out ahead. Technically she doesn’t need to work, but technically she doesn’t need to sleep, either, and that’s hardly stopping her.
She’s got a half hour for dinner at six-thirty that she spends hunched over journal articles with a highlighter in one hand and a Reuben from Primanti Bros. in the other. That’s how she meets Chris-mouth full of sauerkraut, forehead scrunched, as she rereads a sentence about the development of heterosis in Iberian populations of sea lavender. She highlights a sentence about a speciation event that she thinks the authors whipped out of their collective asses and writes a demeaning series of question marks next to it; when she looks up, checking the clock above the bar, there’s a man staring at her rather obviously, cradling a glass of whiskey.
Laura lets her eyes linger on the line of his shoulders, the kind of broad that screams yes, the sex would be that good under worn canvas, and then to the V of chest revealed by a Henley that’s so unbuttoned it’s probably a public decency violation. He tips his glass in her direction and drains it, eyes never leaving hers.
If Laura were a little more stupid, she probably would’ve missed the big neon sign hanging over his head blinking HUNTER in flashing green light. But it’s all there, in the metal and oil scent of his hands and the way that blood is speckled in microscopic dots up the right leg of his jeans. He’s still fantastically hot and the blond stubble is doing things to Laura’s insides that she hasn’t felt since before the fire, but he’s also dangerous.
When she packs up her homework and returns to the bar, pulling her hair up into a high ponytail, his eyes are glued to the small of her back, the skin exposed as her t-shirt rides up. She can feel those piercing eyes tickling her skin, and okay, Laura, in deference to Derek’s delicate feelings re: traumatizing sexual experiences hasn’t fucked anyone in so long that she’s basically forgotten what to do with a cock if she found herself alone in a room with one.
Still-he’s a hunter. Even worse, when she moves down the bar to ask him if he wants a refill, his wedding ring clinks against the glass when he shoves it towards her. Laura doesn’t judge open marriages, but she generally doesn’t get involved unless she’s heard about it from both parties; it’s easy to lie about being poly when you’ve got four beers on an empty stomach and your tongue down someone’s throat.
“Refill?” Laura asks, trying to keep her voice from freezing. He looks like he’ll tip well.
The hunter’s smile is more of a smirk and it barely touches his eyes. “Yes,” he says, his voice low but still audible above the hum of human activity surrounding them. “Please,” he tacks on a second later, polite murderous gentleman that he is.
Laura unearths the bottle of top-shelf whiskey from where the staff hides it under the bar and concentrates on pouring it in a long, amber curve of light. He smells dazzlingly appealing, even with the bloodstains and the acrid bite of wolfsbane-Laura’s getting a little bit of Edward Cullen going on, because she wants to lean across the bar and take a big bite out of his neck. She means that in the most sexualized way possible.
Her self-control is so not up for playing mind games; if he’s good enough at hunting to still be alive at what is a very well-preserved late thirties or early forties, he’s probably got the beginning moves of a werewolf-hunter innuendo chess match mapped out already, and Laura’s got three more articles on hybrid zones to read before her seminar tomorrow. “Here you go,” she says curtly, forgoing a tip in favor of getting the hell away from him and his weirdly compelling eyes.
“Thanks,” he says. It’s slow, savoring the word, and Laura doesn’t even try to parse out his meaning from his scent. She turns on her heel, stuffs the bottle of whiskey under the bar, and goes to harass a pair of obvious frat pledges into ordering something ill-advised and fruity.
Four hours and fifty-seven minutes later, as Laura finishes mixing her last strawberry martini of the weekend, he’s lurking at a table near the exit. In no way is Hemingway’s suited to a quiet night of alcohol-induced navel-gazing, so Laura isn’t buying for a second the aura that he’s emitting of a man trying to drown his marital sorrows in some nice Irish.
Derek has been taking up aggressive loafing like he wants to qualify for the national championships; Laura needs to get home, make sure he’s finished his homework, bitch at him until he agrees to wash the sheets on his bed, and annotate the rest of her seminar articles. She delivers the strawberry martini to a haggard graduate student with a sympathetic smile, collects her tips, and tags Meredith in.
The hunter is pretending to be subtly staring into the distance, contemplating the moroseness of his own existence, when Laura slides into the chair across from his. “Your fake brood isn’t even regionally competitive,” she tells him. “Five out of ten, tops.”
“And here I was, thinking the shadows of this corner would lead to me at least a seven for atmosphere,” he says drily, leaning back and crossing his legs at the ankle. She feels the toe of his leather boot nudge against her calf, and she refuses to move on principle. He drops the act; those eyes are too piercing to ever convincingly play at drunk, but the rest of his body language shifts to join them.
“What do you want?” she asks flatly. “You’ve got ‘Code-abiding’ written all over you, and I haven’t broken any of its strictures.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says slowly, lifting his drink and letting it linger near his mouth. He’s picked up that she wants to fuck him; great.
Laura manages not to sigh and massage her temples only by virtue of years of experience dealing with Derek, the surliest of awkward, surly teenagers. “Can we please cut it with the mind games? I’ve got a class at to TA at ten tomorrow and professors generally disapprove of authority figures falling asleep into their notes. What do you want, hunter?”
The knowledge that she’s in public keeps her from doing the stupid thing and letting the Alpha leak into her voice or eyes. Her wolf thinks that ripping his throat out would be a fantastic substitute for sweaty, athletic sex, but her wolf never has good suggestions. As her human is still sort of hoping that sex might be on the table, clearly no one can be trusted.
“An interesting choice of places to settle,” the hunter says pointedly, rolling his glass between his palms. “Space to grow a pack.”
The way he says it tells her that he knows she’s an Alpha. She’s not entirely sure how, since she doesn’t exactly walk around with a sign around her neck explaining her position in her pack’s hierarchy, but he knows and that pisses her off more than it probably should. All of Laura’s emotions fall by hair-trigger now; she’s lost the presence of her family at her back to keep her centered. Derek couldn't center a goddamn yoga instructor.
“My pack,” says Laura carefully, so she doesn’t lose control like a barely pubescent pup, “is none of your business, hunter.”
“Wolves are always my business,” says the hunter pleasantly. Now that he’s not trying to get her attention, his eyes don't dip below her chin. Laura catches herself being disappointed about that-her rack looks pretty spectacular in this shirt-and then hates herself because (a) he’s married and (b) he crawled out of his mommy’s belly with a shotgun in one hand and a bag of mountain ash in the other.
Laura rolls her eyes and informs him in her bitchiest voice possible, “We’re not wolves.” She means that they aren’t animals; the hunter’s mouth tightens in the corners.
“Whatever you like to call yourselves,” he replies, “is not my concern. The safety of the humans around you, however, is a different matter.”
The oddest things trigger Laura. Back, before the fire, she’d had a women’s studies course at HSU and one of their discussions had ended up in a full-thrown yelling match about trigger warnings between a dickish film studies major with pretensions towards making art and the president of their campus’ women’s organization. Laura had spent the class period outlining her final paper for Psych 152. Before the fire, Laura didn’t really have anything traumatic that could be triggered; her life was like a happy family montage in a shitty blockbuster, with gardening and washing her mom’s car with the garden hose and learning to make pie crust.
Everyone in Laura’s memories is always laughing and filtered through golden light and it’s like a greatest hits album of summer. That’s all bullshit, of course-even before the fire there were fights and angry silences and the occasional Omega that had to be scared off of pack territory or destroyed-but that’s the only way that Laura can remember her family, now: Imogene, shirt splashed with tomato seeds, teaching Laura her lasagna recipe.
So, things that trigger Laura now include tomato seeds, and garden hoses, and grilled pork. And, apparently, the hunter’s bitchy comeback about human safety.
Laura stands so quickly that she almost knocks the table backwards into the hunter’s lap, just a hair under supernaturally, obviously fast. “If you want to protect humans,” Laura tells him in a ragged voice, “you should look in-house, hunter.”
~
Laura had been taught about the special difference between herself and other members of the pack very early. The goal was for the children to be gentle with everyone, but that wasn't realistic with preternaturally strong children playing tag and Twister and wrestling on the front lawn. So, Laura was told to be careful with her mother and Joanna and Miles and Jorge and Michael and Isolde; if she scratched them, even with her flimsy human nails, they would heal slowly and bleed a lot.
But it had not occurred to Laura, until the discomfiting hunter with a superiority complex and seriously sexy stubble brought it to her attention, that the hunters who had murdered her family under the justification of protecting the human population were, in fact, burning six humans alive.
The irony scalds her insides; Laura drinks three bottles of Leffe to relax the stiff muscles between her shoulders and goes to bed with her stomach hot and swollen in her throat, pressing her forehead between Derek’s shoulders. He can probably smell her tears but he pretends that he can’t; he is soft in so many places that Laura can’t tell where it’s safe for her to rest her claws.
~
Monday sucks.
~
By the time it’s four-thirty on Thursday and Laura is tugging on one of her work shirts and scanning her email at her desk in the lab, she’s mostly recovered from the shitstorm that had been Sunday night and her own black mood snap that had resulted in Monday degenerating into her verbally flaying her freshmen in her Foundations Bio recitation.
She’s absently twisting her hair up into a particularly peppy ponytail when one of the other graduate students leans back in his chair and says, in a voice designed to be as obtrusive as possible, “Hot date tonight, Hale?”
“Work,” Laura says, rereading a sentence for the third time. Her advisor’s emails read like they were typed by a Capuchin monkey; she has to read them at least twice to understand what the hell he’s attempting to convey.
“Well,” says Rick, waggling his eyebrows, “you look like you’re making a particular effort.”
If by effort he means eyeliner, then he’s right; Laura is wearing eyeliner to make the concealer look less noticeable, and the concealer is to hide that Laura had woken up that morning clawing at her eyes. Alpha injuries always take longer to heal, even if they’re self-induced, and Laura doesn’t need any more evidence to exacerbate her reputation in the Biology department as the weirdest graduate student in twenty years.
“Thanks?” Laura offers.
He gives her a pair of thumbs up. “Work it. Everyone hits on the bartender, don’t they?”
“You say that like you’re not a budding alcoholic who spends more times in bars than in the greenhouse,” Ji says reprovingly from across the room, and Laura leaves fifteen minutes later to Ji and Rick still sniping at each other like the sexual tension isn’t enough to drive everyone in their program up the wall.
Laura doesn't think about the effect question again until it’s almost nine and she’s been hit on so many times that she’s actually lost count. Apparently the combination of emotional trauma + eyeliner + a shirt that’s too small but it’s Thursday and Derek still hasn’t done the goddamn laundry makes Laura especially irresistible to drunk college students. She gets a heart-felt love declaration from a girl celebrating her 21st birthday when Laura fishes the bar’s t-shirt out of a box by the door to the kitchen. “You’re just so everything,” she tells Laura seriously, her head emerging from the neck of a XXL shirt like a drowned cat. “It’s very sexy.”
“Thanks,” says Laura, dry but still much kinder than she’d been to Rick earlier that day.
“You’re welcome,” breathes the girl, and she takes herself and her mojito back to a table full of friends, wobbling on three-inch heels. Laura is grinning at her back-it’s probably the most enjoyable experience she’s had with students trying to pick her up while she’s working-when she sees that the hunter is back, this time at the opposite end of the bar, closer to the door. He’s half-hidden by a knot of people, but he leans forward when she catches sight of him.
Laura tries not to stomp too often because she’s put her foot through a wooden floor before, but she stomps her way over to the hunter, her face morphing into an unattractive snarl. In her defense, it’s been a shitty week and she’s totally within her rights to blame its shittiness on him.
“What?” she demands when she’s within range of his ears. “What can you possibly want?”
“A whiskey would be nice,” he says.
To fuck with him, she reaches for a bottle of the brown shit that they store on hand to dump into the pitchers of mixed drinks. His bitch-face isn’t quite to Derek’s level, but he uses his eyebrow well. “Let’s not kid ourselves,” he says.
Laura reluctantly returns the bottle of isopropyl alcohol masquerading as drinkable liquor to its place and goes to unearth the good whiskey from wherever Meredith has had it stashed this week. “I hope you die of liver cancer,” she tells him pleasantly, shoving the glass across the bar towards him. “Please pay, leave, and never come back.”
The hunter’s mouth twists into the sort of half-grin that has never failed to make Laura extremely interested in sucking the lower lip of the person exhibiting it between her teeth. “A la votre.” He tilts the glass in her direction and swallows a large mouthful, the line of his neck bristled and golden and Jesus.
Fuck everything.
Laura twirls so hard that the end of her ponytail whips around and slaps against the skin of her cheek. She tries not to listen for the hunter’s heartbeat as she does her job, but her ears are traitorous little bastards and they pick it up quickly-and it’s just so steady. He’s got the kind of heartbeat that, Imogene would say, you can set a clock by.
She doesn’t even realize that she’s still listening to it until it changes; one moment, Laura is reaching for the shelf where they keep the extra bottles of pineapple juice, and the next the hunter’s heartbeat has jacked up. She can smell the shift, from suspicious to greased and peppery, and heat floods the skin of her belly, prickling the hairs along her arms.
When she turns around, he’s belatedly moving his eyes away from her ass. Laura knows that she’s got a lot of junk in her trunk and she’s appreciative of how the extra padding makes her a stealth wizard at Twister, but the hunter looks especially interested in it. Laura flushes and she hasn’t blushed in twelve years, at least, but all it apparently takes is one silver fox of a mortal enemy and her body forgets that she’s no longer a teenager.
There are ways to fake that kind of thing-he could, for example, have started thinking about his wife-but his eyes are so clear that Laura can tell, when they finally drift up her torso and make it to her face, he wants her. That explains why he’s back at Hemingway’s when she clearly has no interest in chatting with the local band of werewolf hunters.
He keeps his eyes on hers as he pulls out his wallet and stuffs a handful of bills into the tip jar to his left. “See you around,” he says. His voice is at a normal volume, but Laura’s ears pick it up easy as pie.
You’re in so much goddamn trouble, Laura’s human thinks, and her wolf agrees.
~
Derek is finishing his senior year of high school with the sort of lackluster enthusiasm that would’ve make Natalie proud. His grades are still fine, but in Beacon Hills ‘fine’ had covered every subject equally. In Pittsburgh, he’s borderline failing calculus and biology but he has the highest grade possible in both his French language and English literature classes-according to the professor of the latter, he’s some kind of lit crit savant.
“This is hilarious,” Laura tells him frankly over dinner, scanning the enthusiastic handwritten letter that a message on their answering machine had ordered her to expect. “I’ve never had such thorough analysis from any student in my fifteen years of teaching high school.” She puts down her fork and leans across the counter to punch Derek in the shoulder. “Dude. Dude. How did I not know that you’re secretly a lit ninja?”
“I’m not,” Derek staunchly denies, but he hunches over his bowl of spaghetti and avoids meeting her eyes.
“She wants to make sure that you’re applying to college,” Laura adds a few seconds later, reading the letter through to the signature. “Apparently you’re being evasive.”
Derek shrugs. “You know I’ve applied.”
For Derek, You know XYZ has always been his default mode of communicating deceit. Their parents hadn’t called him on it because it was always a helpful way to tag when Derek was lying, but Laura doesn’t do parenting, so she gives him a long stare over the letter as she folds it back up and stuffs it into its envelope. “Well, I thought you applied,” she says.
Derek’s heart jumps and then evens out; his breathing is steady. For a human, his lie and subsequent panic wouldn’t be visible at all. Derek has been a shitty liar ever since he was first found in the pantry off of the kitchen, one chubby toddler hand stuck inside of the neck of the bottle where they stored the molasses, and in a family of werewolves it wasn’t like he ever got a chance to practice his lying skills. He’s gotten better since they moved from Beacon Hills.
Since their arrival in Pittsburgh, Laura has tried not to think about Derek in anything beyond immediate terms of her dinner-homework-laundry checklist of physical health, but she feels a few pricks along her vertebrae as she considers exactly how and why Derek picked up lying to humans in the past two years. It’s easier to contemplate her brother-the only member of her family not stuck in a vegetative state or scattered across a half-acre clearing in the middle of the Beacon Hills Preserve-in terms of his physical needs, because opening the can of Derek’s mental issues clears a path for Laura’s issues, and those don’t need to be thought about.
“I saw the Pitt application,” Laura says. “I saw you send the Pitt application. So what the hell aren’t you telling me, Derek?”
Derek shoves a forkful of spaghetti into his mouth. “I’m eighteen, Laura,” he finally says. “I can apply wherever the hell I want.”
Fuck. “Derek,” she says, “please tell me you didn’t-”
“Berkeley,” he says shortly. The word sends a frisson of panic across the top layer of Laura’s skin.
(Option one: Each letter speaks of months spent alone in the tiny Shadyside apartment, cooking dinner for herself and tending bar with no one to come home to and Derek, alone, in California, nearer than they’ve been in two years to the shell of their house and the bodies of all of the people that used to fill their heart.)
(Option two: Laura and Derek, holding their breath and trying not to swallow the ash in the air, visiting the beach and tasting the familiar sea and somehow not drowning in the memories and the crushing weight of the open trees and the call of Beacon Hills.)
Derek’s plan had always been Berkeley, since he was ten and learned about its English program, but Laura had given up dreams of Plant Pathology at OSC and chosen Pittsburgh because she’d known that relocating to Corvallis was a fundamentally stupid decision.
“Shit,” Laura gasps, and she realizes that she might be having a little bit of a panic attack as her heart ka-thumps awkwardly off-beat. You have to be fucking kidding me, she thinks, but she can’t get enough air into her lungs to wheeze it. Laura can’t even really think about California before the air around her gets stale and her vision narrows and she has to change the subject or lock herself in a bathroom and sit on the toilet, letting her claws extend and retract from her fingertips; how the hell did Derek get up the strength to apply to goddamn Berkeley?
“Laura,” Derek says, his bowl of spaghetti clattering onto the counter as he comes over it to grip her upper arms, “Laura,” and her panic is spiraling rapidly out of control, because hers is reflecting his and it’s like two mirrors facing each other; a descent into the pinprick of light where Laura has locked away Beacon Hills and Imogene and the one time she had met Kate Argent, lying bitch cunt, with her blithe and empty smile and the casual way that she had slipped her hand into the back pocket of Derek’s jeans.
This is Laura’s fault. It’s always been Laura’s fault, because Laura should have said something. She’d known about Derek’s relationship and that his girlfriend was way too old for him; but what she’d done was slug him in the arm and say, “Nice catch, tiger,” and she’d put condoms in all of his shoes to watch him turn red and then purple and almost swallow his tongue with embarrassment.
Laura was twenty and older and experienced and well versed in shitty relationship decisions and considering that she’d dated a Beta of the Grant pack for like twelve seconds before he’d tried to eviscerate her and frame a pack of migrants for it, Derek’s blushes and tongue-tripping over Kate Argent should’ve set off a bazillion warning signs in Laura’s head. But she hadn’t known then what she knows know, about the silver blood that dripped over the Argent name; she’d thought that Derek’s spot of teenage rebellion was the only one he was going to get before he went to Berkeley and got his degree in Lit so he could sit on the porch of the house in Coos Bay reading the Russians and saying intelligent, bullshitty things about them.
“I’m sorry,” Laura thinks to say-does she say it? Her blood is so loud that it sounds like an ocean, crashing over her head and pushes her towards the surf, the undercurrent dragging her away from where Edith held tiny Greta above the water line, teaching her how to swim, how not to swallow the water up her nose-and it sets off a chain reaction, triggers thousands of apologies for everything that happened in Beacon Hills and the camping trip that had been her idea; the camping trip that has isolated her and her brother on the other side of a river of death from the rest of their family.
“Shut up,” Derek snarls, but it’s whisper-soft and he holds Laura’s head against his chest and then they’re both crying, ripped out of stasis, and Laura begs, Alpha forgotten and claws digging into Derek’s shoulders, don’t go there don’t go please, and Derek says, “I just wanted to see if I could get in,” and it tastes fake and metallic, but he follows it with, “I won’t, Laura,” and that’s real, that’s true.
~
Laura’s body feels like one huge bruise when she wakes up on the kitchen floor, tangled with Derek so tightly that she can’t tell if she is holding him or he is holding her. The front of her work shirt is covered in snot and the entire kitchen tastes like salt. Laura’s eyes and mouth and nose ache from stressful use and Derek is a flushed, unhealthy shade of magenta.
Laura feels now like she should’ve felt two years ago; the scab scratched away and blood sluggishly pouring from an old wound. She lies on the floor and lets her heart push her body with steady pulses, rippling down her arms and legs and leaving her shell-shocked. The decision to bury everything and move on has proven to be just as stupid as Laura had originally suspected. She counts the speckles on the popcorn surface of the ceiling tiles and knows that Pittsburgh is still too close; she knows too that running won’t fix anything about the names that push at her temples, the laughter that she’ll never hear outside of nightmares.
But evidence indicates that Laura doesn’t know how to settle somewhere and make it healthy. Two years in Pittsburgh and she and Derek are just as shattered as they were their first night after in Beacon Hills, holding mugs that said Property of the Beacon County Sheriff’s Department with shitty police station coffee going cold inside of them, waiting for Deputy Stilinski to kneel beside them and hand Laura the list of names.
All Laura can think to do is run.
~
Derek is accepted at NYU. New York is obvious and obviously desperate; but Laura is desperate, so it fits in the kind of poetical way that Derek is going to learn to analyze if Laura has to tie him to a desk in a lecture hall herself.
[part iii]
i just can’t get no relief | 2007
Laura works Thursday to Sunday, five to midnight, at Hemingway’s Bar on campus. Karaoke Night is Wednesday, so Laura saves herself from that trauma, and even though there’s a rotating door of freshmen with shitty fake IDs who don’t tip well or even, like, at all, there are enough hardened regulars who come in before 10pm that she pulls out ahead. Technically she doesn’t need to work, but technically she doesn’t need to sleep, either, and that’s hardly stopping her.
She’s got a half hour for dinner at six-thirty that she spends hunched over journal articles with a highlighter in one hand and a Reuben from Primanti Bros. in the other. That’s how she meets Chris-mouth full of sauerkraut, forehead scrunched, as she rereads a sentence about the development of heterosis in Iberian populations of sea lavender. She highlights a sentence about a speciation event that she thinks the authors whipped out of their collective asses and writes a demeaning series of question marks next to it; when she looks up, checking the clock above the bar, there’s a man staring at her rather obviously, cradling a glass of whiskey.
Laura lets her eyes linger on the line of his shoulders, the kind of broad that screams yes, the sex would be that good under worn canvas, and then to the V of chest revealed by a Henley that’s so unbuttoned it’s probably a public decency violation. He tips his glass in her direction and drains it, eyes never leaving hers.
If Laura were a little more stupid, she probably would’ve missed the big neon sign hanging over his head blinking HUNTER in flashing green light. But it’s all there, in the metal and oil scent of his hands and the way that blood is speckled in microscopic dots up the right leg of his jeans. He’s still fantastically hot and the blond stubble is doing things to Laura’s insides that she hasn’t felt since before the fire, but he’s also dangerous.
When she packs up her homework and returns to the bar, pulling her hair up into a high ponytail, his eyes are glued to the small of her back, the skin exposed as her t-shirt rides up. She can feel those piercing eyes tickling her skin, and okay, Laura, in deference to Derek’s delicate feelings re: traumatizing sexual experiences hasn’t fucked anyone in so long that she’s basically forgotten what to do with a cock if she found herself alone in a room with one.
Still-he’s a hunter. Even worse, when she moves down the bar to ask him if he wants a refill, his wedding ring clinks against the glass when he shoves it towards her. Laura doesn’t judge open marriages, but she generally doesn’t get involved unless she’s heard about it from both parties; it’s easy to lie about being poly when you’ve got four beers on an empty stomach and your tongue down someone’s throat.
“Refill?” Laura asks, trying to keep her voice from freezing. He looks like he’ll tip well.
The hunter’s smile is more of a smirk and it barely touches his eyes. “Yes,” he says, his voice low but still audible above the hum of human activity surrounding them. “Please,” he tacks on a second later, polite murderous gentleman that he is.
Laura unearths the bottle of top-shelf whiskey from where the staff hides it under the bar and concentrates on pouring it in a long, amber curve of light. He smells dazzlingly appealing, even with the bloodstains and the acrid bite of wolfsbane-Laura’s getting a little bit of Edward Cullen going on, because she wants to lean across the bar and take a big bite out of his neck. She means that in the most sexualized way possible.
Her self-control is so not up for playing mind games; if he’s good enough at hunting to still be alive at what is a very well-preserved late thirties or early forties, he’s probably got the beginning moves of a werewolf-hunter innuendo chess match mapped out already, and Laura’s got three more articles on hybrid zones to read before her seminar tomorrow. “Here you go,” she says curtly, forgoing a tip in favor of getting the hell away from him and his weirdly compelling eyes.
“Thanks,” he says. It’s slow, savoring the word, and Laura doesn’t even try to parse out his meaning from his scent. She turns on her heel, stuffs the bottle of whiskey under the bar, and goes to harass a pair of obvious frat pledges into ordering something ill-advised and fruity.
Four hours and fifty-seven minutes later, as Laura finishes mixing her last strawberry martini of the weekend, he’s lurking at a table near the exit. In no way is Hemingway’s suited to a quiet night of alcohol-induced navel-gazing, so Laura isn’t buying for a second the aura that he’s emitting of a man trying to drown his marital sorrows in some nice Irish.
Derek has been taking up aggressive loafing like he wants to qualify for the national championships; Laura needs to get home, make sure he’s finished his homework, bitch at him until he agrees to wash the sheets on his bed, and annotate the rest of her seminar articles. She delivers the strawberry martini to a haggard graduate student with a sympathetic smile, collects her tips, and tags Meredith in.
The hunter is pretending to be subtly staring into the distance, contemplating the moroseness of his own existence, when Laura slides into the chair across from his. “Your fake brood isn’t even regionally competitive,” she tells him. “Five out of ten, tops.”
“And here I was, thinking the shadows of this corner would lead to me at least a seven for atmosphere,” he says drily, leaning back and crossing his legs at the ankle. She feels the toe of his leather boot nudge against her calf, and she refuses to move on principle. He drops the act; those eyes are too piercing to ever convincingly play at drunk, but the rest of his body language shifts to join them.
“What do you want?” she asks flatly. “You’ve got ‘Code-abiding’ written all over you, and I haven’t broken any of its strictures.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says slowly, lifting his drink and letting it linger near his mouth. He’s picked up that she wants to fuck him; great.
Laura manages not to sigh and massage her temples only by virtue of years of experience dealing with Derek, the surliest of awkward, surly teenagers. “Can we please cut it with the mind games? I’ve got a class at to TA at ten tomorrow and professors generally disapprove of authority figures falling asleep into their notes. What do you want, hunter?”
The knowledge that she’s in public keeps her from doing the stupid thing and letting the Alpha leak into her voice or eyes. Her wolf thinks that ripping his throat out would be a fantastic substitute for sweaty, athletic sex, but her wolf never has good suggestions. As her human is still sort of hoping that sex might be on the table, clearly no one can be trusted.
“An interesting choice of places to settle,” the hunter says pointedly, rolling his glass between his palms. “Space to grow a pack.”
The way he says it tells her that he knows she’s an Alpha. She’s not entirely sure how, since she doesn’t exactly walk around with a sign around her neck explaining her position in her pack’s hierarchy, but he knows and that pisses her off more than it probably should. All of Laura’s emotions fall by hair-trigger now; she’s lost the presence of her family at her back to keep her centered. Derek couldn't center a goddamn yoga instructor.
“My pack,” says Laura carefully, so she doesn’t lose control like a barely pubescent pup, “is none of your business, hunter.”
“Wolves are always my business,” says the hunter pleasantly. Now that he’s not trying to get her attention, his eyes don't dip below her chin. Laura catches herself being disappointed about that-her rack looks pretty spectacular in this shirt-and then hates herself because (a) he’s married and (b) he crawled out of his mommy’s belly with a shotgun in one hand and a bag of mountain ash in the other.
Laura rolls her eyes and informs him in her bitchiest voice possible, “We’re not wolves.” She means that they aren’t animals; the hunter’s mouth tightens in the corners.
“Whatever you like to call yourselves,” he replies, “is not my concern. The safety of the humans around you, however, is a different matter.”
The oddest things trigger Laura. Back, before the fire, she’d had a women’s studies course at HSU and one of their discussions had ended up in a full-thrown yelling match about trigger warnings between a dickish film studies major with pretensions towards making art and the president of their campus’ women’s organization. Laura had spent the class period outlining her final paper for Psych 152. Before the fire, Laura didn’t really have anything traumatic that could be triggered; her life was like a happy family montage in a shitty blockbuster, with gardening and washing her mom’s car with the garden hose and learning to make pie crust.
Everyone in Laura’s memories is always laughing and filtered through golden light and it’s like a greatest hits album of summer. That’s all bullshit, of course-even before the fire there were fights and angry silences and the occasional Omega that had to be scared off of pack territory or destroyed-but that’s the only way that Laura can remember her family, now: Imogene, shirt splashed with tomato seeds, teaching Laura her lasagna recipe.
So, things that trigger Laura now include tomato seeds, and garden hoses, and grilled pork. And, apparently, the hunter’s bitchy comeback about human safety.
Laura stands so quickly that she almost knocks the table backwards into the hunter’s lap, just a hair under supernaturally, obviously fast. “If you want to protect humans,” Laura tells him in a ragged voice, “you should look in-house, hunter.”
~
Laura had been taught about the special difference between herself and other members of the pack very early. The goal was for the children to be gentle with everyone, but that wasn't realistic with preternaturally strong children playing tag and Twister and wrestling on the front lawn. So, Laura was told to be careful with her mother and Joanna and Miles and Jorge and Michael and Isolde; if she scratched them, even with her flimsy human nails, they would heal slowly and bleed a lot.
But it had not occurred to Laura, until the discomfiting hunter with a superiority complex and seriously sexy stubble brought it to her attention, that the hunters who had murdered her family under the justification of protecting the human population were, in fact, burning six humans alive.
The irony scalds her insides; Laura drinks three bottles of Leffe to relax the stiff muscles between her shoulders and goes to bed with her stomach hot and swollen in her throat, pressing her forehead between Derek’s shoulders. He can probably smell her tears but he pretends that he can’t; he is soft in so many places that Laura can’t tell where it’s safe for her to rest her claws.
~
Monday sucks.
~
By the time it’s four-thirty on Thursday and Laura is tugging on one of her work shirts and scanning her email at her desk in the lab, she’s mostly recovered from the shitstorm that had been Sunday night and her own black mood snap that had resulted in Monday degenerating into her verbally flaying her freshmen in her Foundations Bio recitation.
She’s absently twisting her hair up into a particularly peppy ponytail when one of the other graduate students leans back in his chair and says, in a voice designed to be as obtrusive as possible, “Hot date tonight, Hale?”
“Work,” Laura says, rereading a sentence for the third time. Her advisor’s emails read like they were typed by a Capuchin monkey; she has to read them at least twice to understand what the hell he’s attempting to convey.
“Well,” says Rick, waggling his eyebrows, “you look like you’re making a particular effort.”
If by effort he means eyeliner, then he’s right; Laura is wearing eyeliner to make the concealer look less noticeable, and the concealer is to hide that Laura had woken up that morning clawing at her eyes. Alpha injuries always take longer to heal, even if they’re self-induced, and Laura doesn’t need any more evidence to exacerbate her reputation in the Biology department as the weirdest graduate student in twenty years.
“Thanks?” Laura offers.
He gives her a pair of thumbs up. “Work it. Everyone hits on the bartender, don’t they?”
“You say that like you’re not a budding alcoholic who spends more times in bars than in the greenhouse,” Ji says reprovingly from across the room, and Laura leaves fifteen minutes later to Ji and Rick still sniping at each other like the sexual tension isn’t enough to drive everyone in their program up the wall.
Laura doesn't think about the effect question again until it’s almost nine and she’s been hit on so many times that she’s actually lost count. Apparently the combination of emotional trauma + eyeliner + a shirt that’s too small but it’s Thursday and Derek still hasn’t done the goddamn laundry makes Laura especially irresistible to drunk college students. She gets a heart-felt love declaration from a girl celebrating her 21st birthday when Laura fishes the bar’s t-shirt out of a box by the door to the kitchen. “You’re just so everything,” she tells Laura seriously, her head emerging from the neck of a XXL shirt like a drowned cat. “It’s very sexy.”
“Thanks,” says Laura, dry but still much kinder than she’d been to Rick earlier that day.
“You’re welcome,” breathes the girl, and she takes herself and her mojito back to a table full of friends, wobbling on three-inch heels. Laura is grinning at her back-it’s probably the most enjoyable experience she’s had with students trying to pick her up while she’s working-when she sees that the hunter is back, this time at the opposite end of the bar, closer to the door. He’s half-hidden by a knot of people, but he leans forward when she catches sight of him.
Laura tries not to stomp too often because she’s put her foot through a wooden floor before, but she stomps her way over to the hunter, her face morphing into an unattractive snarl. In her defense, it’s been a shitty week and she’s totally within her rights to blame its shittiness on him.
“What?” she demands when she’s within range of his ears. “What can you possibly want?”
“A whiskey would be nice,” he says.
To fuck with him, she reaches for a bottle of the brown shit that they store on hand to dump into the pitchers of mixed drinks. His bitch-face isn’t quite to Derek’s level, but he uses his eyebrow well. “Let’s not kid ourselves,” he says.
Laura reluctantly returns the bottle of isopropyl alcohol masquerading as drinkable liquor to its place and goes to unearth the good whiskey from wherever Meredith has had it stashed this week. “I hope you die of liver cancer,” she tells him pleasantly, shoving the glass across the bar towards him. “Please pay, leave, and never come back.”
The hunter’s mouth twists into the sort of half-grin that has never failed to make Laura extremely interested in sucking the lower lip of the person exhibiting it between her teeth. “A la votre.” He tilts the glass in her direction and swallows a large mouthful, the line of his neck bristled and golden and Jesus.
Fuck everything.
Laura twirls so hard that the end of her ponytail whips around and slaps against the skin of her cheek. She tries not to listen for the hunter’s heartbeat as she does her job, but her ears are traitorous little bastards and they pick it up quickly-and it’s just so steady. He’s got the kind of heartbeat that, Imogene would say, you can set a clock by.
She doesn’t even realize that she’s still listening to it until it changes; one moment, Laura is reaching for the shelf where they keep the extra bottles of pineapple juice, and the next the hunter’s heartbeat has jacked up. She can smell the shift, from suspicious to greased and peppery, and heat floods the skin of her belly, prickling the hairs along her arms.
When she turns around, he’s belatedly moving his eyes away from her ass. Laura knows that she’s got a lot of junk in her trunk and she’s appreciative of how the extra padding makes her a stealth wizard at Twister, but the hunter looks especially interested in it. Laura flushes and she hasn’t blushed in twelve years, at least, but all it apparently takes is one silver fox of a mortal enemy and her body forgets that she’s no longer a teenager.
There are ways to fake that kind of thing-he could, for example, have started thinking about his wife-but his eyes are so clear that Laura can tell, when they finally drift up her torso and make it to her face, he wants her. That explains why he’s back at Hemingway’s when she clearly has no interest in chatting with the local band of werewolf hunters.
He keeps his eyes on hers as he pulls out his wallet and stuffs a handful of bills into the tip jar to his left. “See you around,” he says. His voice is at a normal volume, but Laura’s ears pick it up easy as pie.
You’re in so much goddamn trouble, Laura’s human thinks, and her wolf agrees.
~
Derek is finishing his senior year of high school with the sort of lackluster enthusiasm that would’ve make Natalie proud. His grades are still fine, but in Beacon Hills ‘fine’ had covered every subject equally. In Pittsburgh, he’s borderline failing calculus and biology but he has the highest grade possible in both his French language and English literature classes-according to the professor of the latter, he’s some kind of lit crit savant.
“This is hilarious,” Laura tells him frankly over dinner, scanning the enthusiastic handwritten letter that a message on their answering machine had ordered her to expect. “I’ve never had such thorough analysis from any student in my fifteen years of teaching high school.” She puts down her fork and leans across the counter to punch Derek in the shoulder. “Dude. Dude. How did I not know that you’re secretly a lit ninja?”
“I’m not,” Derek staunchly denies, but he hunches over his bowl of spaghetti and avoids meeting her eyes.
“She wants to make sure that you’re applying to college,” Laura adds a few seconds later, reading the letter through to the signature. “Apparently you’re being evasive.”
Derek shrugs. “You know I’ve applied.”
For Derek, You know XYZ has always been his default mode of communicating deceit. Their parents hadn’t called him on it because it was always a helpful way to tag when Derek was lying, but Laura doesn’t do parenting, so she gives him a long stare over the letter as she folds it back up and stuffs it into its envelope. “Well, I thought you applied,” she says.
Derek’s heart jumps and then evens out; his breathing is steady. For a human, his lie and subsequent panic wouldn’t be visible at all. Derek has been a shitty liar ever since he was first found in the pantry off of the kitchen, one chubby toddler hand stuck inside of the neck of the bottle where they stored the molasses, and in a family of werewolves it wasn’t like he ever got a chance to practice his lying skills. He’s gotten better since they moved from Beacon Hills.
Since their arrival in Pittsburgh, Laura has tried not to think about Derek in anything beyond immediate terms of her dinner-homework-laundry checklist of physical health, but she feels a few pricks along her vertebrae as she considers exactly how and why Derek picked up lying to humans in the past two years. It’s easier to contemplate her brother-the only member of her family not stuck in a vegetative state or scattered across a half-acre clearing in the middle of the Beacon Hills Preserve-in terms of his physical needs, because opening the can of Derek’s mental issues clears a path for Laura’s issues, and those don’t need to be thought about.
“I saw the Pitt application,” Laura says. “I saw you send the Pitt application. So what the hell aren’t you telling me, Derek?”
Derek shoves a forkful of spaghetti into his mouth. “I’m eighteen, Laura,” he finally says. “I can apply wherever the hell I want.”
Fuck. “Derek,” she says, “please tell me you didn’t-”
“Berkeley,” he says shortly. The word sends a frisson of panic across the top layer of Laura’s skin.
(Option one: Each letter speaks of months spent alone in the tiny Shadyside apartment, cooking dinner for herself and tending bar with no one to come home to and Derek, alone, in California, nearer than they’ve been in two years to the shell of their house and the bodies of all of the people that used to fill their heart.)
(Option two: Laura and Derek, holding their breath and trying not to swallow the ash in the air, visiting the beach and tasting the familiar sea and somehow not drowning in the memories and the crushing weight of the open trees and the call of Beacon Hills.)
Derek’s plan had always been Berkeley, since he was ten and learned about its English program, but Laura had given up dreams of Plant Pathology at OSC and chosen Pittsburgh because she’d known that relocating to Corvallis was a fundamentally stupid decision.
“Shit,” Laura gasps, and she realizes that she might be having a little bit of a panic attack as her heart ka-thumps awkwardly off-beat. You have to be fucking kidding me, she thinks, but she can’t get enough air into her lungs to wheeze it. Laura can’t even really think about California before the air around her gets stale and her vision narrows and she has to change the subject or lock herself in a bathroom and sit on the toilet, letting her claws extend and retract from her fingertips; how the hell did Derek get up the strength to apply to goddamn Berkeley?
“Laura,” Derek says, his bowl of spaghetti clattering onto the counter as he comes over it to grip her upper arms, “Laura,” and her panic is spiraling rapidly out of control, because hers is reflecting his and it’s like two mirrors facing each other; a descent into the pinprick of light where Laura has locked away Beacon Hills and Imogene and the one time she had met Kate Argent, lying bitch cunt, with her blithe and empty smile and the casual way that she had slipped her hand into the back pocket of Derek’s jeans.
This is Laura’s fault. It’s always been Laura’s fault, because Laura should have said something. She’d known about Derek’s relationship and that his girlfriend was way too old for him; but what she’d done was slug him in the arm and say, “Nice catch, tiger,” and she’d put condoms in all of his shoes to watch him turn red and then purple and almost swallow his tongue with embarrassment.
Laura was twenty and older and experienced and well versed in shitty relationship decisions and considering that she’d dated a Beta of the Grant pack for like twelve seconds before he’d tried to eviscerate her and frame a pack of migrants for it, Derek’s blushes and tongue-tripping over Kate Argent should’ve set off a bazillion warning signs in Laura’s head. But she hadn’t known then what she knows know, about the silver blood that dripped over the Argent name; she’d thought that Derek’s spot of teenage rebellion was the only one he was going to get before he went to Berkeley and got his degree in Lit so he could sit on the porch of the house in Coos Bay reading the Russians and saying intelligent, bullshitty things about them.
“I’m sorry,” Laura thinks to say-does she say it? Her blood is so loud that it sounds like an ocean, crashing over her head and pushes her towards the surf, the undercurrent dragging her away from where Edith held tiny Greta above the water line, teaching her how to swim, how not to swallow the water up her nose-and it sets off a chain reaction, triggers thousands of apologies for everything that happened in Beacon Hills and the camping trip that had been her idea; the camping trip that has isolated her and her brother on the other side of a river of death from the rest of their family.
“Shut up,” Derek snarls, but it’s whisper-soft and he holds Laura’s head against his chest and then they’re both crying, ripped out of stasis, and Laura begs, Alpha forgotten and claws digging into Derek’s shoulders, don’t go there don’t go please, and Derek says, “I just wanted to see if I could get in,” and it tastes fake and metallic, but he follows it with, “I won’t, Laura,” and that’s real, that’s true.
~
Laura’s body feels like one huge bruise when she wakes up on the kitchen floor, tangled with Derek so tightly that she can’t tell if she is holding him or he is holding her. The front of her work shirt is covered in snot and the entire kitchen tastes like salt. Laura’s eyes and mouth and nose ache from stressful use and Derek is a flushed, unhealthy shade of magenta.
Laura feels now like she should’ve felt two years ago; the scab scratched away and blood sluggishly pouring from an old wound. She lies on the floor and lets her heart push her body with steady pulses, rippling down her arms and legs and leaving her shell-shocked. The decision to bury everything and move on has proven to be just as stupid as Laura had originally suspected. She counts the speckles on the popcorn surface of the ceiling tiles and knows that Pittsburgh is still too close; she knows too that running won’t fix anything about the names that push at her temples, the laughter that she’ll never hear outside of nightmares.
But evidence indicates that Laura doesn’t know how to settle somewhere and make it healthy. Two years in Pittsburgh and she and Derek are just as shattered as they were their first night after in Beacon Hills, holding mugs that said Property of the Beacon County Sheriff’s Department with shitty police station coffee going cold inside of them, waiting for Deputy Stilinski to kneel beside them and hand Laura the list of names.
All Laura can think to do is run.
~
Derek is accepted at NYU. New York is obvious and obviously desperate; but Laura is desperate, so it fits in the kind of poetical way that Derek is going to learn to analyze if Laura has to tie him to a desk in a lecture hall herself.
[part iii]