rehabituate
At sixteen, Derek's dreams don't go much farther than the edge of Beacon Hills' territory.
Yes, at some point he might to go to college, but the Community College - close enough and plain enough enough for him. He's known from an early age that learning doesn't need a teacher to work, really, the way they make it seem. Derek's always been a little, a little too eager to believe in things, not fairy tales, just life. As a kid he was always spouting off facts at home, things he'd read about how the world was, how sometimes wonderful, sometimes magnificent in nature, where leaves spiraled in their Fibonacci sequenced spirals and thunder brought lightning at a measurable distance, but also sometimes sad and awful - so he knows that knowledge can be bone-deep as a wolf's moon or as knotty, as dense as his boring as fuck Russians, what his sister called his Dostoevsky and Gogol and Tolstoy, with their morality and frustration and deep-seated melancholy so close to their throat.
He is so comfortable knowing about things, never happier than when he's explaining or talking about something he knows, hates being wrong, (but one day, he'll be used to it), hates being afraid, being taken unawares, always wanting to know more about the person in front of him than they know about him.
And sometimes he was a little shit about it, correcting his sister every time she made a mistake about something he'd read, and she told him he was a nerd and he'd be a little proud, because of course. Clammed up in front of other people, though, didn't know how to start talking when he hadn't been sure of a person his whole life, happier with a handful of secrets.
But then there's a fire and someone drives away in a cherry red car and he can practically smell the bright red taste of her mouth in the kiss on the door - and all the words are burned up, and under the dust are all his sad-mouthed Russians, and himself as a child, and Laura herself, a child, too, one who threw herself into everything, a pretty storm (not a beautiful one, he knows what they leave behind) but one with a smiling mouth, only wanting to taste, wanting everything, leading, charging with her teeth first, bared but grinning, too.
And then, there was him, thinking things should be better, could be fixed, always allying himself, his pack, his family and their smooth shifting workings with the measured patterns of nature, with its unbreakable fixity, it's flowering, because that was his naivete, that was how it showed itself.
But this is a fire that does not allow things to grow. This is a dead place and he buries a lot of things there - deepest of all his illusions that a wolf is nature and nature is ineffable, that they were a pattern that couldn't be unshaped.
They bury all of that, their life, and Derek looks away from anything but the sky and the reflection of the sky in the view mirrors - and especially away from the jumping tic in Laura's jaw that never goes away. Laura's driving the junk car she bought for her senior year, the shitshow, the lemonmobile piece of crap but it has character, mom, jeez, and she rides it to hell, jerking through the gears until it grinds to a screaming halt in the middle of a national park, and in the morning, after Derek's come back from the log cabin restroom, the door is twenty feet away, strips of paint and metal curling away from the tracks of her claws.
It still runs, though, and at the next dealership they see on the highway (Derek's in the back, still small enough to fit himself in lengthwise - not for long, though) Laura blows enough money to get the Camaro - totally impractical, but of course she goes up to the salesman and demands the fastest car, the sleekest, and why the hell not, they have a trust fund large enough to hold ten generations of history and a future they left in a heap of ash and what, exactly, the fucking hell else are they going to do with it, two orphans roaming the roads, near-feral, running from a wound and a fire and a family and, this time, when Laura bares her teeth it is not a grin, not a grin at all.
Sometimes Laura pulls the car over in the middle of the highway and hunches over the steering wheel, red-eyed, bloody-eyed and shaking and shaking. She reaches for his arm, then, clutching too, too hard as she struggles for calm. She breaks it three of those times, but he only makes a noise the first time, and figures that at least if it's him, it's not the gear shift, which can't snap itself back together again.
Sometimes it is easier for him to pretend like this is something that has happened to the both of them, instead of something he brought on them - brought crashing down on top of their house, but that only lasts until the next time they take a turn too fast, and he sees her screaming red convertible and the screaming red of her grin that was too much like blood, too much even from the first for him to not have known.
And so he leaves his other guilty love, his reading, behind until they park the car outside the house, the little brownstone that makes Laura sick to her stomach. Derek is the one who has to say yes to it, insist to the realtor they want it, read the contract through and pass it to Laura to sign, and she does, but glaring at the realtor as long as she can see her.
Because the idea of home, of having another one, makes Laura wants to tear out someone's throat, and Derek can see it in the way she moves her hands, and feel it in the air like a cloud, a miasma streaking red, strangling him almost, it is so thick.
There's no where to put the car, so it sits on the street outside.
Laura stands like a shadow outside the door while he buys a ten pack of razors with plastic handles and despite the darkness and the redness of her eyes, Derek and the people on the street being there keep Laura from killing anyone that day.
The week after that, she gets a job, her first, makes a lot of coffee, breaks a man's hand when he grabs her ass, but it keeps her from screaming or dying or breaking any cups.
Derek cleans, finds dishwashing liquid at a bargain, buys wood varnish and buys a swiffer and debates seriously over a vacuum.
On the full moon Laura is the alpha and human all night which has never, never happened which she never let happen as long as she was safe. What frightens Derek is that he joins her, doesn't have to work for it, doesn't fight for it, almost doesn't feel the moon at all through the buzz in his ears.
They are there all night staring at the tv (a movie marathon) and they make small talk occasionally, garishly, in a way that is more false than the butter on the popcorn or the laughter and the tears on the screen.
On the street outside, the car rusts in seedy, sickly red.