Work Text:
“Were you lonely?”
---
Derek drives east, toward the sunrise, thinking about new beginnings.
It’s cheesy enough that he doesn’t say anything to Cora for a while, both quiet as they watch the sky turn pink after driving all night.
There wasn’t much to pack, and his loft was a wreck anyway. He thought about giving it to Isaac, but Isaac needed to be around people, not in a place where one of his packmates died.
Not someplace his alpha killed one of his packmates.
Thinking about it makes him wince, his claws prickle in his fingertips as his hands clench around the steering wheel.
Derek drives and Cora sits in the passenger seat, staring out the window.
“I wish I had a Kindle,” she says the second day into their grand roadtrip to nowhere in particular, so Derek pulls off the highway the next time a sign promising “Shopping” shows up.
“Is this a Best Buy?” Cora asks, and Derek shrugs.
“We can grab you one and charge it in the car. I guess you probably need one with like, wi-fi or something? So you can use it on the road?”
"Are you serious right now?"
Derek looks at her. "You have something better to do with your time?"
Cora keeps stealing glances at him as they walk into the store.
“You could have tried to buy my love earlier,” she says once she picks one out, and grabs a cutesy case for it.
“I...we could get you some more clothes and stuff, too, if you want.” Derek wants to say, I’ll do whatever it takes, I’ll give you anything you ask for, I’m so sorry we didn’t find you.
She grins at him and punches him in the shoulder. It’s very much like Laura. “You don’t need --”
“I do,” he says, quickly. “I really do.”
-
“I can’t believe the insurance paid out that much,” Cora says on day three. They’re looking through movies they can pay for and eating room service, spending money that Derek hasn’t thought about since moving back to Beacon Hills.
Derek swallows. “I mean, I can set up a trust or something for you with it. I...Laura left me a lot.” He thinks they probably still have that apartment in New York, even -- the bills get paid automatically. It hasn’t been that long.
“Tell me about you two,” Cora says suddenly, turning the TV off. “Tell me about you and Laura in New York.”
“It was different,” Derek says carefully. He doesn’t know where Cora was and he doesn’t know why they weren’t looking for her, and it feels important to know that.
“Laura and I got our GEDs and spent time with a local pack, but mostly we just kind of…” Hung around, smoked weed because they couldn’t get drunk, had sex with questionable partners to annoy each other. Drifted and didn’t see therapists.
“It was hard,” he says finally. “I got a job bartending, even though I couldn’t drink and can’t get drunk. Laura was going to go to college, I wanted to get a motorcycle,” and it’s the first time he’s talked about it since Laura left. “I was thinking I could roadtrip around, work odd jobs, see the country, but...Laura didn’t really like the idea.”
Cora raises her eyebrows. “Yeah, but you’re driving this weird dad car now.”
Derek laughs, and it’s a surprise. “Isaac said the Camaro wasn’t practical. He said I should get something bigger so when we found Boyd and Erica, I could take them around.”
There’s a long, silent pause.
“I miss Boyd,” Cora says, “He was always good to me.”
“I’m sorry,” Derek says, and he squeezes her hands.
-
In the car, they normally listen to the radio and talk about what’s shitty, what’s good, which songs they can’t stand anymore.
Derek catches himself singing along to Taylor Swift with Cora at one point and shakes his head.
“I gotta figure out this Bluetooth thing so we can play some real music.”
“Oh? I didn’t think you ev -- wait, are you secretly in a band?” She looks delighted at the prospect.
“I left my guitar in New York,” Derek says.
Cora laughs. “I should have guessed. It goes with your whole leather jacket aesthetic.”
Derek frowns. He’s played guitar since high school, before the fire. He picked it up to impress Paige, though, struggling since it’s hard to get calluses on werewolf hands.
“Yeah,” he says, because it’s stupid to expect Cora to remember any of that, maybe. “You play any instruments?”
“I played flute,” Cora says. There’s a long pause -- because, “You don’t remember?”
It doesn’t sound like a lie but there’s a weird feeling, almost a scent of something, or expecting a smell that isn’t there.
“You didn’t remember about my guitar,” Derek says, trying to be casual, but she winces.
“Six years...I mean. I have my own life too,” she says.
That’s fair, Derek thinks.
-
Cora wants to stop and look at every roadside attraction, but there are really fewer than Derek expected. He allows for the Grand Canyon, because he’s never been either. The Hales weren’t big on family vacations -- kids are unpredictable and volatile enough on a plane as it is, if they’re untrained werewolves who knows what could happen.
The Grand Canyon makes Derek feel something in his chest. It’s too big, and the expanse of the place worries at his ribs. It’s beautiful in a way he isn’t sure how to appreciate.
There’s a lot of sun.
Cora wants to rent donkeys and go exploring and he says she’s free to, but he doesn’t want to.
He buys a postcard and some stamps and then can't think of anything to write, so Cora scrawls 'wish you were here' on it and signs it for both of them. He sends it to Stiles, because Cora likes Stiles and still doesn’t trust Scott, not quite.
He sends something else to Scott, a bundle of healing herbs he buys from a roadside farm stand with a pack symbol painted on the sign.
“How do you know they’re legit?” Cora asks, and Derek shrugs.
“I remember some of what dad taught me.” The man had had a good handshake, smelled like a wolf who was happy with his land and his life. He almost didn’t remember that smell at all.
-
Some nights, they get rooms with one giant bed and sleep piled together, like a pack, like family. It’s less weird than Derek expected, more relaxing and warm with Cora’s scent in his nose. Her hair is soft and she’s muscled and lean all over, like Laura before the fire, like his mother in the winter.
He tries to remember what this must have been like, before the fire. He and Laura used to lie in their parents' bed on Sunday mornings, after breakfast, breathing in the scent of them, and surely Cora would have joined them.
His dad would make pancakes and cut up bananas to top them with, and his mom would play jazz standards. They had a nice stereo system, Derek thinks. He could probably listen to music more these days.
Cora hates bananas, it turns out, and he doesn’t know what to say to that.
-
Cora reads Harry Potter to him in the car.
He sighs, says, “I bet Michael would have loved these.” Michael was a cousin on his father’s side, and never got to finish the series. Derek hates that he even brought it up. Suddenly, that lurch in his gut that he spent years ignoring is back.
“Yeah,” she says eventually. She keeps reading, trying out different voices. She’s not a great reader but she gets better each chapter.
Derek drives.
-
They pick hotels by a secret alchemy -- best name, best promised amenity, best color shutters. Derek and Cora buy swimsuits and spend time sampling hot tubs as they crawl east across the United States.
It takes her another couple days before she asks, “Where are we going, anyway?”
They’re at lunch, eating at the hotel bar. He’s drinking a beer because he managed to condition himself into liking them during a stint as a bartender, and because it’s vacation, dammit.
“I…” He was thinking of New York, the deep clean feeling of a real biting winter. He still has an apartment there, in his and Laura's name, and he’ll have to deal with it eventually. It’s probably really gross -- he never intended to stay in Beacon Hills at all, just to get Laura and leave. Save her.
Something.
“Do you even have a place in mind?” She looks at him, incredulous, eyebrows like Laura. Her voice never has that undercurrent of confidence that Laura had, that Laura faked until she didn’t have to anymore. Derek thinks it’ll come in time, if she stops picking fights.
“I was thinking New York. We had a place there, me and Laura. Unless there’s someplace you want to go.”
Her jaw twitches when she clenches it. “No. I don’t have anywhere to be, now that the alphas are…” She trails off.
“You’ll like New York,” Derek says after a minute. “The pack there’s friendly, and there are a couple wolves your age. Some of them homeschool, so you could get caught up on the stuff you missed, if you want.”
She hums, noncommittal.
“What is it?”
Cora shakes her head. “It’s not important.”
“If we’d known,” Derek says, “if we’d known we would have found you. We wouldn’t have gone to New York without you.” It’s what he’s wanted to say, what he tried to tell her the night she and Boyd almost ripped him apart, that he was so sorry. His mouth tastes sour and he swallows hard and Cora doesn’t say anything for a while.
“Yeah,” she says finally. “I know that now. It’s fine.”
“It’s not.” Derek says it firmly, like he’s still an alpha. He thinks about the nights he and Laura spent curled into each other, cried out and hollow and alone, the way his body mourned for the loss of his family the same way his heart did, how the pack bond shattering left them both weak and defenseless. His claws were blunt, teeth short those first few moons.
Laura even wanted Peter, who had been Peter even before the fire, just less effective, maybe.
“Okay,” Cora says.
They sleep with backs touching that night, curled up and warm, and he thinks sharply to himself, this is it, this is the family you have, this is the family you must keep, nothing else should matter.
-
“Stiles says thanks for the postcard, and he wants you to look at something from the bestiary. Should I forward it to you or tell him to fuck off?”
“Stiles is emailing you?” That’s news. Stiles emails him occasionally, but never conversationally. Normally for stuff like this, actually.
“Yeah. Well, he found me on Facebook and complained about how you never check your email or respond to text messages.”
“Huh.” Derek wonders if he should get an iPad or something, but doing that just to get messages from one person seems kind of pathetic.
“Whatever, we’re on vacation. I’ll tell him it can wait.”
“Okay,” says Derek. “Wait. Ask him if the pack is doing alright. It might be important.”
She eyes him warily but shrugs. “Sure. Fine.”
-
“What’s your best memory of our parents?”
Derek knows what he should say. It’s a memory he’s probably distorted, replaying it too many times: making cookies with his mom in the winter. It’s a cliche, but she never had too much time for him, busy making sure Laura was learning what she needed to to take on the mantle of alpha, to transform herself totally into the wolf that sang in her blood.
He was never going to take that on, was never supposed to be an alpha at all, didn’t have his mom’s gifts or his dad’s smarts. He was charming, and he was strong -- a born right hand man to somebody better than him. It wasn’t even something that bothered him too much.
But his most vivid memory is different. The only one that hasn’t been blurred by time or nostalgia is the feeling of his mother’s claws in his neck, pulling something vital out of him -- a memory. Losing that memory almost killed so many people and that’s what he thinks of when he thinks of his mother, grabbing that place, Peter, Paige, out of his mind. Peter said he was doing Derek a favor, that the family would never accept her if she wasn’t a wolf, and Derek wanted to believe him then, he thinks. He thought.
Derek thinks of his father.
“Dad would train us on the weekends,” Derek says, “You have to remember that.”
It’s impossible to forget. His father was more of show, don’t tell, teacher. He remembers his dad taking them out running, the visceral thrill of hunting with him, how good it was to take down a deer with him. The feel of meat in his teeth.
Derek thinks of his dad teaching him to tie a tie, helping him with geometry.
He remembers the loud crack his shoulder made when his father wrenched it, shattering the bone and leaving Derek wailing in the middle of the woods, alone and waiting for his body to heal before he could crawl home and grab an ice pack while the bruising faded into nothing.
Cora is looking at him with wide eyes. “I was pretty young.”
He tries to think of Cora, of how she must have been sleek and fast in comparison to his and Laura’s heavier frames. Like his mother, lithe.
“I was 10 when he first,” Derek says and he mimes wrenching his shoulder. “You weren’t that young.”
“He broke your arm?” Cora is saying, somewhere outside his head. She looks disgusted and Derek doesn’t know what to say. His dad broke Laura’s leg the one time she tried to run away from home, and she healed. It took about fifteen minutes. It wasn’t a big deal. Like a skinned knee to a human child.
Derek tries not to think of Isaac because Isaac was human once, soft and bruisable.
“Do you remember mom’s wolf?” Derek asks.
Cora nods, slowly, then says, “Tell me.” She’s eager, and Derek is hurting in that full-body way that only his mom could soothe. Growing pains, she’d say, as his bones shifted at night, folding around themselves.
Derek can hear her kicking her feet nervously and wonders again why he can’t remember talking to Laura about her, why they must have thought she was dead.
“What do you miss most about our parents,” he asks, because he wants this. It’s been crawling in his chest since they found her, since something in his mind said pack and family and sister, and then there was too much happening to ask. “Do you remember them?”
“It’s been six years,” she says and tugs at her hair nervously.
“It’s not...you make it seem like that’s a whole lifetime ago.” Derek remembers all of those six years, wandering around the country until they settled on New York because none of the packs there gave a shit about historic bloodlines and tragedy.
-
The farther out from Beacon Hills they get, the more different she smells. It’s subtle, maybe. But there’s not that Hale undertone, the one his uncle lost after he died and went crazy. Peter smells like graveyard dust and ashes, curled with a hint of the sickly sweet smell of decay. It’s awful.
Derek sniffs her hair -- they’re sleeping, barely. He knows that smell, but it’s not familiar. It feels more alien than even how Isaac smelled, Boyd’s laundry detergent, Erica’s shampoo.
“Do you think they were wrong to train us that way?” Derek asks that morning, eating an Egg McMuffin. They hit the road early.
“Dad shouldn’t have been breaking bones,” Cora says. “That’s messed up, man. The pack I lived with in Mexico didn’t do any of that shit. The alpha had us do yoga and stuff to prepare for a full moon. Join a sports team. We didn’t learn how to fight.”
He’d noticed. “You have to learn how to fight,” Derek says. “Hunters are everywhere.”
“You’re lucky I didn’t,” she says, “Boyd and I could have killed you.”
Derek grunts, reaches for his hash brown. “Maybe you could have fought your way away from Deucalion.”
“Don’t tell me it’s my fau --”
“No, hey, sorry, sorry.” Derek’s spooked because she’s been calm this whole time, since she was sick, really, and he didn’t mean that.
“Don’t,” she snarls, and that feels right. It feels real.
-
They stay someplace really fancy in Las Vegas, after winding their way around the Southwest for a while. Cora watches Derek swagger in, show just enough white teeth while wearing a slim cut blazer, and get them a suite. He used to be good at this, charming people, and it's not so hard to fake it now.
Cora tans by the pool and on her tablet, but after a while looks up and asks, “Do you think we would have been friends?”
Derek raises an eyebrow, peeking over his sunglasses, looking up from his paperback.
“Laura and I were pretty close,” he says, wondering if they were friends the way Scott and Stiles seem to be friends. He had a lot of friends in high school, sure, but not like that, not like he and Laura either. “So...I think so.”
“Why did you sleep with that teacher?” She winces after she says it, but doesn’t apologize. “Did you fall in love with her?”
Derek looks at her, and she can’t tell if he’s hurt or just thinking.
“No.” He pauses, squints at the sky. There aren’t stars here. “I probably could have though.”
“She was a monster,” Cora says. “Everyone we met was a monster. Jesus.”
“She liked reading. She wasn’t scared of me.”
“Low bar,” Cora says, rolling her eyes. “You’ve got a serious self-esteem problem.”
Derek looks at Cora and says, “Did Peter tell you about Kate?”
“Yeah, Kate Argent, the psychopath that murdered our whole family? He filled me in on what I didn’t know, about how he killed her.” Cora can feel her lip curling in a grin, her fangs sliding out, and she doesn’t try to stop it. The feeling is real. “I’m glad she’s dead.”
“She was my girlfriend,” Derek says, leaning against the back of the chair and settling his hands on his stomach. “She was a lifeguard and I was on the swim team.”
“You slept with that bitch?” Cora’s fangs stay out.
Derek nods. It doesn’t feel good, exactly, to tell her. Telling Stiles felt similar -- a twist in his stomach and the nauseating feeling that someone knows exactly how weak he is, exactly how low he can be. It’s easier saying it to Cora, maybe it gets easier every time.
But Stiles threw it back in his face. Cora might do the same.
-
Derek checks his email and sees that Stiles has sent him a couple things. One reads:
I know this is morbid but double-checking the list of who survived is probably relevant to your family bonding trip. But maybe the omission was a safety measure?
There’s an attachment, too.
Stiles’ emails never have salutations or signatures -- he tells Derek his emails are old fashioned at best.
He means well, too -- he even gave Cora an out. But Derek’s read his parents’ obituaries. They had them in a scrapbook in New York. He knows them by heart.
He knows. It’s like a rubber band snapping in his skull, suddenly realizing two contradictory things.
Derek thinks of the sickly slide of claws into his neck, by someone unfamiliar. He ignores it. He doesn’t have to...he doesn’t. He can do whatever he wants.
He wants breakfast.
Cora comes out of the bathroom. “Any news from home?”
Derek shakes his head. “Stiles had to go stag to the homecoming dance.”
She laughs. “I should have stuck around.”
-
Week three leaves Derek comfortable. The days are sunny and long, and he likes driving, likes Cora, likes fast food and tiny diners. He likes the expensive places she looks up on Yelp.
Cora eats a lot of salads and even more french fries, and she makes him order wine for the table even though she’s too young and they can’t get drunk.
“Where’d you even get a taste for this stuff?” Derek asks. Red wine is too dry for him and makes his mouth itch.
Cora looks at him. “I know you don’t think I was goody-two shoeing around before I showed up in Beacon Hills.”
He puts the menu down on the table and decides she won’t run. And if she does, he can catch her, even if they’re both betas. He will. He’s still got to take her somewhere safe.
“Where exactly have you been for the past six years.” He feels too earnest. Vulnerable.
Cora swallows hard. “With a pack in Mexico, mostly. I wasn’t with the alpha pack for more than a year.”
“Okay,” Derek says. He doesn’t think he wants to know how that happened.
“I was in Mexico visiting a family friend when the fire happened.”
This he knows isn’t true. They were all there in the Hale house for Wolf Moon, for a reunion, to run together. He was going to beat his cousin and his parents were going to be proud. All their family’s friends were on their way.
“Did they know our parents?”
“Yeah, obviously,” she says, but she’s looking anywhere but Derek’s face. He frowns, tries to listen to her heartbeat and then feels shame creep up his throat because he still doesn’t want to know.
“I mean...I thought you knew. I thought you and Laura just couldn’t handle me being around, that I was too young. I already said it was okay.”
Derek watches her fidget and isn’t sure what to say. His head hurts, a sharp ache, and he’s not used to the kind of pain that lasts.
“I don’t want to talk about this shit anymore,” she snaps, finally, some red wine sloshing out of her glass as she slams it on the table.
-
Derek checks his email in the hotel, while Cora’s in the shower.
You doing okay man?
is from Stiles, with a couple other similar ones and then a photo of an Asian girl with just the subject line “Do you think she’s a vampire?” Derek squints at that.
don’t be ridiculous. vampires aren’t real.
he types out. His hands are a little too big for the size of his phone.
“Do you miss Beacon Hills?” Cora’s in PJs, toweling her hair. She has no familiar smells on her.
“I miss feeling safe.” He doesn’t mean to say that.
She climbs up onto the enormous bed and scoots next to him. Wolves are social and they’ve both been touch-starved, so he grabs the brush on the nightstand and starts to braid her hair.
Laura taught him when they were kids; she used to braid their cousin Erin’s hair and decided he needed to learn too. He’s glad he hasn’t forgotten -- it’s soothing.
-
“Where are your parents,” Derek finally asks when they pass their first “Welcome to Texas” sign. The dirt around them doesn’t look much different than it did in New Mexico. “Your actual parents.”
Cora’s jaw clenches and her face shutters closed, like Laura, not like Laura. He can hear her claws slide out, but he mostly smells fear.
“They’re dead.”
“Okay,” Derek says.
“My parents sent me away when hunters came to our town. They didn’t make it.”
“Okay.”
“The pack I was sent to was nice, too nice. They didn’t...I wanted revenge.” She shifts and he doesn’t look away from the road, just listens to her growl in her throat. “You understand that, right?”
Derek doesn’t say anything, because he knows that burn will haunt you forever. He still feels it, like he couldn’t kill Peter or Kate enough times to feel better.
“I wanted to be strong, I wanted to rip out their throats. The people that killed my family, that hurt the pack in our town, I just wanted them dead and the pack I lived with couldn’t understand. They’re not…they’re a safe pack. They stay away from everybody.”
Cora’s claws dig into the door of the car.
“Deucalion came by, and the pack was nice to him, very respectful, but my madre told me not to trust him. Deucalion only cares about power, not pack, not people.”
She stares out the window and her nostrils flare.
“I love them, okay? But they don’t know what it’s like to feel this way. They built their pack to be safe, so they wouldn’t have to fight. Deucalion knew why I was there right away. He said...he said he needed someone like me, that he could teach me, that after I played this role they’d find me an alpha to kill and help me kill the hunters.”
“Okay,” Derek says again. The road is empty. This part of the state looks like a cartoon backdrop of Texas, cacti and hot sun and a long stretch of asphalt. “What did they tell you?”
“They said they’d help me kill them. I wanted to kill them. Now...I don’t know what I want to do.”
“You’re not sorry, though.” Derek doesn’t know how to speak carefully -- never has. He was smoother when he was younger, he knows, but the pretense just doesn’t seem worth it now. Laura told him to stop being a dick.
Cora looks down at her hands. “I’m sorry about Boyd,” she says, softly. “I’m sorry about him and Erica. I...I tried to get Erica to wait, because we were supposed to go free that night. That we just had to hold out, but I couldn’t tell her.”
Derek nods. He can’t think too much about Erica or Boyd, because his body feels hot with shame. He yearns for them like he feels the tug of his dead cousins, aunts, uncles, late at night in Beacon Hills. The pack bond took too hard, too fast, too much. It’s still there in his skin, reaching out for the betas he created, waiting.
“My pack is probably worried about me,” she says and her voice has all the fight drained out of it.
“Yeah.”
It takes ten minutes before Cora actually cracks something in the door and screams at him, “That’s it? That’s all you’re gonna fucking ask?”
Derek pulls over and can see now, how her wolf isn’t like Laura’s at all, her nose is wrong, the fury in her crackling in her fur as it grows doesn’t smell right. Still, it’s familiar -- the whirlwind of anger he remembers from being sixteen and out of control.
“What do you want me to say?” he says, and she yelps, almost howls, and throws open the door. It’s not graceful, how she stumbles out onto the road, and they’re lucky no one is around because she’s all the way transformed.
He steps out and clicks the lock button on his keychain, and watches her run.
When she howls, he howls back.
-
Cora finally comes back, covered in dirt. There’s a hole in her new jeans. Derek cocks an eyebrow at her and she scowls.
“I ripped a tree down.”
“Do you feel better?”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she says, punching him in the chest with human hands.
“I don’t know what you need me to do.” He finally grabs her, hugs her shoulders and just pulls her close. It’s weirdly intimate -- when was the last time he really hugged someone? It feels different, too; she’s not pack and probably never will be.
“Why aren’t you angry at me?” He can’t tell if she’s been crying for a while or if the tears just started, if she’s angry or sad or both.
“I...I don’t know. What good would it do me?” He just feels blank, like he’s lost something he’s only just discovered. It’s a low disappointment, a grey feeling. Like it should be raining or something.
“Fuck.” She sags.
“Yeah.”
“I’m glad I didn’t kill anybody,” she says into his chest, and he honestly isn’t sure how she managed that.
“Me, too,” he says, inhaling the smell of her hair. “I...you should avoid it, if you can. It changes something.”
“I wanted to so bad, Derek,” she says, “I just. I needed to do something for them.”
He tightens his grip. “I know,” he says, “I know.”
-
In the car, she’s more angry than sad, but it’s not at him, mostly.
“Aiden said the alpha pack wouldn’t make me stay if I wanted to go. That they wouldn’t make me kill anyone if I didn’t want to. That you probably wouldn’t die. The twins tried to be nice.”
“He’s a killer,” Derek says, doesn’t snap it. “They both are.”
She swallows. “So are you.”
He doesn’t deny it. His eyes changed that day Peter...but thinking about that day is the same as trying to think of Cora at family Christmas, jumbled, fuzzy. Like a tape of a tape. Memory in, memory out.
“And you wanted to be.” This is one of the truths about Cora that makes him feel like they could be related.
“I did,” she says and she’s not looking at him still, looking everywhere but him, and maybe he should pull over again. “I thought I wanted that, that I could, but I couldn’t. And Peter...he told me things.”
“He’s not any happier,” Derek says, “not any better now that she’s in the ground than he was after the fire.”
“He thinks you and Laura should have done it first.” The way Cora tilts her chin, the hammer of her heart. Derek can tell that she’s not so sure anymore that he’s right.
“Laura and I just wanted to get on with our lives.” Derek thinks about how hunters pass through New York City all the time, every month, and how they never even tried. Kate could have shown up and he might have let her walk away.
Maybe he and Laura were scared. They were certainly lonely.
“I wanted Kate dead for a long time,” he says, “and when she finally was, I didn’t feel any different. Mostly felt relieved that I wasn’t the one who did it.”
“Maybe it’d be different for me.”
“Get a GED first, is what Laura said to me.”
“We could stick together, if you wanted,” she says. She sounds tired and small. “I mean. I picked you. I tried to be your sister.”
“I know,” Derek says, because it’s true. Cora tried so hard. “You were even nice to Peter.”
“Like I said, he told me a lot of things. I don’t know who he thought I was.”
And Derek doesn’t know either. Peter should have warned him but Derek doesn’t have the patience to figure out his game. He’s not even angry -- Peter will help him, at least, if he needed it.
“I don’t have any family left.” She swallows. “My whole pack is dead. Well, mean, I have the Rodriguez pack, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t born there. My wolf doesn’t match.”
“Yeah,” Derek says, “but that doesn’t mean they’re not family.” He isn’t sure if he believes it as much as he should but maybe Cora doesn’t have to end up like him, either.
“Do you think I should go home?” she asks, finally. Her hands are folded in her lap, body slack with the exhaustion of emotions.
“I think,” he says, “they probably miss you.”
-
The pack she’s been living with is in a border town, and Derek expects grit and tumbleweeds but it’s actually just humid and hot, green and well-tended.
“Sorry about the trouble,” an alpha tells him. “We told her, if she was going to pretend to be someone, at least pick a good pack name. I guess she took yours.”
“It’s...it’s fine. She can keep the name,” Derek says, and the alpha’s eyebrows raise. He’s young looking, maybe a secondary alpha. The pack isn’t huge but it’s not small, either.
Cora looks at him and scowls, and he smiles at her. “You can.”
A woman with gray-streaked hair and bronze skin comes running out of a neat, tidy looking house and up the dirt road, swooping Cora off her feet.
“I thought you were dead!” she yells, and Derek almost winces. There’s so much love there and he doesn’t know how to deal with that, suddenly gets why Cora needed to leave, not out of spite, but because she’s got something dark inside her too.
“Ma, no, you didn’t. I wrote,” Cora says, half-heartedly pushing her off. “Derek, this is Mama Josafina.”
“I’ve been looking after her for the past couple years,” she says, “My own kids are out of the house and live out in Houston. They all keep leaving me!”
“But the pack is home,” Cora says with a little eye-roll, and Josafina squeezes her close again.
“And now you’re home, too.”
-
Derek practices his Spanish and stays there a week, eating homemade tamales and drinking aguas frescas and tepeche and showing some of the younger pack members how to flip off of walls. They like scrapping with him, and he likes it too, which is a surprise. Without the pressure of imminent death, fighting feels more like play.
The pack is friendly and tightly-knit, and he doesn’t tell any of them how he used to be an alpha, and Cora doesn’t tell anyone she’s been sick.
The head alpha talks to him, too, respectfully, and it makes Derek feel weird. All he’s got is the name of a respected family with nothing else to show for it.
“Cora told me you guys do yoga instead of fight training,” Derek says during a lunch break. The alpha’s name is Fernando and he has a deep belly laugh, which is how he responds.
“I know you Hales are quite the traditionalists, but the Rodriguez clan likes to lay low. Our strategy is just to go where the hunters aren’t.”
“That doesn’t mean they’ll always be safe. Like Josafina says, your children grow up and sometimes they leave.”
Fernando shrugs. “It’s true, and the older children learn self-defense, of course. But ten is a little young to be breaking bones and biting with fangs, don’t you think?”
Derek shrugs. He wasn’t too young at ten. It might have saved his life.
“No offense, of course,” Fernando says, but he looks like he’s pitying Derek and that’s a new swell of emotion he can’t handle.
The pack is too full of good people, he thinks, even though he knows that’s crazy. Maybe he’s never felt safe in his life, and didn’t know it.
-
“You should stay,” Cora says at dinner, five days in. She looks tanned and happy again.
“It’s not home for me,” he says.
“I don’t know if it’s mine, either,” she says. “Everyone here...everyone here is too nice. I’m just going to fuck it up again.”
He grabs her hand and looks at her, eyes flashing blue, and hers flash back, sunny yellow instead of an angry amber.
“If you keep thinking like that then you need a therapist, not a murder spree,” he says, and she laughs, startled.
“I’m serious. Get more of your shit together before you try another adventure,” he says, squeezing her hand. “These people love you just fine. And they’ll let you leave when it’s time. You don’t have to run away.”
“But if I did,” she says, squeezing back, “could I...what if I called you?”
He shrugs. “I’ll answer.”
-
Cora packs his car with a cooler of food, provided by Mama Josafina, and downloads some audiobooks into his phone.
“They’re really boring but you’ll listen to them to be nice,” she says, programming her contact info into his phone, too.
“You’re probably right,” he says.
“You have to write. You have to keep in touch,” she says, earnest, leaning close to him, and he tries another hug. It’s easier this time, and she smells like she’s found something important, the agitation gone.
-
Derek drives west.