Inspired by the poem "Hand Me Downs" by Sarah Kay. Youtube it, it's worth it.
Hand Me Downs
They knew they should have left town immediately after the fire, should have gotten out the moment they realized. But they didn't. They could leave, not while Peter and Isabella were still in intensive care, not while they didn't know who had caused the fire.
Derek didn't want to be in the hospital, didn't like the way it smelled. Like… like death. But Laura took his hand in hers and pulled him out of the elevator and down the sterile halls. It felt silly for a sixteen year old boy to be holding the hand of his big sister, like he's just a little kid. He wanted to pull away, but her grip was strong and he wasn't brave enough to challenge her as his sister, let alone as his Alpha. So he went along with her, stood beside her as she politely asked the nurse what she could tell them.
The nurse was young and new, and spoke with a nervous stutter, but took them to Peter's room. He wasn't well; Derek could smell the pain all over him, even before they entered the room. Laura opened the door and took a step in, but Derek pulled his hand from her before she could pull him in with her. He couldn't. The smell was too much.
Laura nodded when she realized why he didn't want to go in, and so he watched from the bedside as she approach their uncle's bedside. He didn't look like Peter. He was covered in bandages, and for all Derek could see, he might not have even been Peter.
Derek could hear the nurse tell Laura that he was stable, but in a coma, and he briefly thought that sounded a bit like a contradiction, but didn't say anything. After a few more words, the nurse bowed out of the room, leaving Laura alone. Derek could see her reach out to an unbandaged section of skin, and he knew she was trying to take some of his pain, but he doubted whether it would make much difference.
The hospital was so full of sounds and scents that it all kind of blurred together, and Derek still wasn't very good at drowning it all out, not like Laura was. The longer he stood there, the more deafening it all was, the more dizzy he got.
Until one scent overrode everything and he felt himself choking on it. He turned and ran, faster than he knew he should, but he could feel Laura right behind him, just as frantic.
Isabella was in a different ward, on the other side of the hospital, two flights up, but they're there in the blink of an eye, though it felt like an eternity.
But they were too late.
They could see into the room through the big glass wall. Doctors and nurses surrounded the bed, in a frenzy, until suddenly they all stopped. None of them look happy, and a few look distressed, and Derek felt like he couldn't breathe.
The doctors disbanded and the first one out the door moved toward Laura.
"I'm so sorry, Miss Hale," he said, and Derek could feel rage boiling up inside of him. This, anger, rage, was supposed to be the first thing he learned to control, but he'd ever been very good at that, never was very good at blocking it. He turned away from the doctor, knowing his eyes would betray him, betray what he was. He shoved down the anger, the transition, but didn't look back at the doctor. Instead he stared into the room that was no nearly empty. There was now just a bed, with a tiny child lying in it. For a moment, his memories took over, and the girl was only sleeping, a small smile across her lips as her dark brown curls covered the pillows. But the memory quickly faded and he was left with the image of his tiny sister, six years old, her skin all wrong, melted like plastic, and her hair was singed, no more curls. And her smile was gone. Derek choked and his vision went red.
The next thing he knew, he was on the ground, with Laura over him, holding him down. There was broken glass all around him, and for a moment he wasn't sure what had happened, where it had come from, until he realized it was him, he broke window.
He reached out to Laura, clinging to her like a lifeline, and he understood then, why she didn't want to let go of his hand before, why she had clung to him so tightly. Because they're all they have left.
She pulled him from the hospital before anyone could call them out on the broken window, and shoved him into the car.
They stayed in town a lot longer than they should have, a lot longer than either of them wanted to, but there were things they still had to take care of, things Laura still needed to do. The Sheriff, and older man who knew their secret and had protected them for many years, kept telling her they needed to go before the arsonist came back to finish the job, kept telling her he could get everything in order, but she needed to see to it that the family was properly buried, couldn't leave it to someone else, not even someone as trusted as the Sheriff.
They spent the better half of a day burying the family at the back of the Hale property, and it was the last thing Derek wanted to be doing, but she sure as hell didn't want anyone else doing it.
It was dark out when they finished, and as they headed back to her truck, she told him they'd leave in the morning, as soon as they'd had some rest. Derek would have rather to have left right then, rather not spend any more time in Beacon Hills, but Laura was adamant.
Until she got the call from the Sheriff.
He told them to run, that the hunters were coming and they needed to get out immediately. And then the line went dead.
But Laura didn't listen to his warning, because the Sheriff was kind of like pack and she had to make sure he was okay.
By the time they arrived at the office, the Sheriff and three of his men were dead.
So finally they ran.
Derek pressed his face to the cool glass as they sped down the highway in the pouring rain. He felt… angry. He didn't know how Laura remained so calm, while he was in a constant state of almost transforming. How was she not completely engulfed in anger, in outrage at the loss of everyone that mattered? Was it an Alpha thing, was that what kept her cool? Their parents had always maintained calm, even their father through his anger, but Derek had always kind of thought that kind of control came with experience, not with being Alpha.
He would never really know for sure though.
For the next several months, they were on the road, never spending more than a few days in one place. They couldn't sit still, for fear they might have been followed.
The months did nothing for his rage. If anything, the time made him angrier, made him hate more.
Eventually they settled in New York. Laura didn't think anyone would have stuck with them this long without making some kind of move against them, and she's tired of driving, tired of living off stale coffee and fast food. So they got a little flat in a place Derek didn't bother to remember the name of, and they both got jobs, he fixing job at a mechanic's around the corner, her at the coffee shop down the street.
Working on cars maybe helped his anger a little bit, but not really.
"I know you've taken to wearing your father's hand-me-down anger," she said one night, crawling into bed beside him. A few months ago he might have complained at the closeness, at the silliness of her need to be close to him, but now he needed her as much as she needed him, needed to know he wasn't alone, that she was still there. "I wish you wouldn't."
He didn't say anything back. He was too tired, and having her next to him, hearing her voice in his ear was comforting, like his mother's had been, almost. Pack meant everything, but Alpha meant safe.
"It's a few sizes too big," she continued. "Everyone can see it doesn't fit you, makes you look silly, even if it does match your skin color."
He didn't care that her words formed a strange analogy; it was the first time in months he'd felt so close to sleep.
"I know you think you'll grow into it, that your arms will beef up after all the fighting, that it will sit on your shoulders, if only you pin it in the right places with well placed conviction."
And years later, after she was dead and gone and he was all alone, back in the place where it all started, it was still her voice he heard as he fell asleep.
"The bathroom mirror tells you you look good in it, that it makes your fists look a lot more justified, and when you dig your hands deep into the pockets, you'll find stories he left there for you to hand out to the other boys like car bombs."
His anger was his control. His anger was the thing that kept him human. It's the one thing he can wrap himself up in, the thing that protects him, helps him sleep at night. It took her a long time to figure that out.
"The longer you wear it, the better it starts to fit, until some of those stories become your own, maybe the holes in your sleeves are from the bullets you dodged yourself."
When Derek would close his eyes, would finally allow himself to get a few hours sleep, it was his sister he dreamt of.
"When it rips, don't worry, 'cause I'll always be there to help mend it: patch a hole, sew the tears, replace a button or two and help you back into it, tell you how proud I am, tell you how good it looks on you, like it looked on your dad, and your granddad too, and on his dad before him, and on his dad before him."
Anger always started somewhere; with a line drawn in the sand, or a stone thrown, or a wall built. But he was starting to learn…
Anger wasn't everything. It wasn't the only way to control, wasn't the best way. Everyone had suffered, his family had suffered just as many broken windows, broken hearts, broken bones. But anger wasn't everything. There was a time and a place.
And try as he might, he was finding a lot less reasons to be always angry.
"And when the time comes, when you come down to dinner, and your son is sitting at the dining room table with your hatred on his shoulders, who's gonna be the first to tell him that it's finally time to take it off?"