Derek Hale's first day of being a professor goes pretty well, all things considered. Some of the kids in his Shakespearian Lit class actually seem to have their brains turned on, the students in his Technical Writing course are snarky and clever, and half of his English Comp 102 class is just a little bit terrified of him.

Really, it couldn't have gone any better.

He might be humming to himself just a little as he crosses the quad at the end of the day. He'll grab some dinner on the way back to the spacious loft apartment he's still settling into, have a beer or two while making sure he's prepped for all of tomorrow's classes, and get to bed early enough that waking up for his normal 5AM run won't seem like torture.

His life here at Greymar University is simple. Uncomplicated. Normal.

You should call home, says a nagging little voice in the back of his mind.

Yeah, no, he thinks.

Just to check in. The full moon's less than a week away and you haven't talked to them since the move.

Derek shuts that train of thought down hard. No. He hasn't talked to them, and he's not going to talk to them. It's over. It's done. He didn't move 3000 miles across the damn country to be haunted by the ghosts of his former pack.

This is precisely why the faint scent of werewolf drifting across the quad slams into him so hard that he literally stops walking, causing a group of cross country runners to awkwardly skitter around him. He's torn between fight and panic and what the hell? and turns all of his senses on high, zooming in on a tall brown-haired kid on the other side of the lawn. He's got a messenger bag slung across his chest, a cell phone pressed to one ear, and is wearing an oversized hoodie that he's cuffed back twice but still can't keep from falling over his hands.

"I'm the TA, Scott, of course I stayed after class, the little jerkbutts had a zillion questions," he's saying into his phone. "Look, will you just ask Isaac to vote on pizza or Thai? I know I said I'd cook, but I want to get ahead on my reading for tomorrow."

Derek finds himself following the guy, keeping far enough back that humans won't be able to tell unless they're paying very close attention. He and the person on the other end of the phone reach an agreement about pizza and he hangs up, and then Derek's just tracking him by his heartbeat and the complex mix of scents trailing him. Werewolf is rolling off that ridiculously large sweatshirt, but the pervasive notes underneath it are fresh-cut grass, coffee beans, a hint of bonfire, slightly acidic medication, and – above all – human.

Derek tails him all the way to the parking lot north of campus, watches him climb into an old, light blue Jeep that looks like it's been to hell and back. For a brief, insane moment, Derek considers confronting him – whether to yell at him because how dare he bring this supernatural crap back into his life or to say Hi, I'm Derek, what's your name? he hasn't decided – but he ends up just staring after his taillights, long after they've faded into the gathering dusk.

Maybe he borrowed it from someone, he rationalizes as he begins what'll be a 25-minute walk to his own car, in the faculty lot on the south side. A friend from back home. Or maybe it's his roommate's boyfriend's from back home. His roommate's sister's boyfriend's brother's uncle's, who now lives in Russia.

Because playing Six Degrees of Separation with the Supernatural has always worked out so well for him in the past.


Derek doesn't see the kid again for awhile, and he actually allows himself to think that it was a fluke. Maybe – just maybe – the kid really had just borrowed the sweatshirt from someone else. So Derek focuses on surviving his first two weeks of professorship, and it's honestly not that bad – he actually likes some of his students, his colleagues are friendly and welcoming, and it turns out that the Pacific Northwest is pretty great place to be a werewolf. There's a huge forest bordering the ocean out west of campus and he spent the night of the full moon just running. Based on some preliminary topographical research (mainly courtesy of Google Earth), it looks like this whole region is densely wooded enough that he could feasibly run from Greymar's campus – 50-ish miles south of Portland – to Seattle to Denver and back, without ever crossing into civilization. He'd have to clear it with all the local packs, of course, and he'd have to be incredibly fucking bored to give it a whirl but the fact that he could if he wanted to is pretty damn freeing. His days are full of intellectual chatter with people that, for the most part, don't entirely make him want to jump out of his skin, and after classes he retreats to his apartment to bask in the still-foreign glory that is actually being alone and having some privacy.

And if the quiet is sometimes just a little too quiet, well, this is what he signed up for.

Then he rounds the corner on the library and literally mows the kid over, sending all of his books and Derek's stack of his Comp 102 class's first offerings to the ground.

"Crap on a stick!" The guy exclaims, rubbing his forehead from where it careened into Derek's shoulder. "Are you okay? I'm so sorry, I totally wasn't looking where I was going, completely my fault, are you okay? This is so like me, you know, you're, like, the tenth person I've run into today – sorry, are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Derek says when the human stops to breathe. He stoops to help collect the other's books – everything from Norse mythology to Germanic languages to Differential Equations. "Are you?"

"Me? Oh yeah, I'm good, I'm great, totally okay. Like I said, I've been bouncing off people all day."

He continues to babble about nothing, giving Derek plenty of time to reassess his scent – grass and coffee and fire and acid, and irretrievably human. The werewolf scent is still there, but he can almost place the familiarity now. The Hale pack was never overly involved with humans, but some of the packs they were friendly with would show up at the Summer Solstice festival with a human or two in tow, and Derek remembers at least two mated humans in the Donovan pack. This kid isn't mated to a werewolf – that's an entirely different scent – but he's around them a lot. Lives with them, maybe, or is actually one of a pack's humans.

Derek is royally screwed.

"What are you doing at the library at 2AM on a Saturday, anyway?" He asks, interrupting the guy's tenth apology. A large portion of his brain wants him to just grab his stuff and get the hell away from he-who-runs-with-wolves, but he's so morbidly curious about this boy that he can't stop the traitorous question from escaping.

The human unfolds himself from the ground one limb at a time, all elbows and knees. "Reading. You see, this is a library, and it contains a bunch of these things called books."

Derek just barely contains his eye roll. "Anything interesting?"

The boy's heartrate picks up. "Oh. Uh, well, it's mostly just stuff for class…wait, aren't you Professor Hale?"

He blinks. "Yeah, that's me."

"Oh, cool – I tried to get in to your Shakespearian Lit class, but the roster was full. Are you teaching it again next semester?"

He blinks again. Whatever he was expecting out of this encounter, it wasn't a discussion of his teaching schedule. "No, probably not until fall of next year."

The boy's face falls, almost comically. "Ah, okay. Bummer. Well – nice to meet you!"

He takes off toward the north parking lot again, and Derek is once again torn between wanting to follow and wanting to fling himself off a cliff for even considering it. And being really, really confused because that boy – no matter what else he might be and whatever ties to hellhounds or pixies or mermaids he may have – is just plain weird and disarming.

He settles for calling his little sister when he gets back to his apartment.

"Derek!" Cora answers, surprise clear in her voice. "I didn't think you'd call."

"I wasn't really planning on it," he admits, putting the phone on speaker and leaving it on the kitchen counter. "I miss you, kiddo, but I just…"

"I know," Cora says quietly. "I'd leave too, if I could."

"Just a few more years," he calls, stripping off his tie and toeing his shoes into a corner. He still feels guilty for leaving Cora behind, but his appeal to become her legal guardian in the wake of their parents' death was denied. And if he'd stayed, he would have ended up doing something stupid and reckless and violent out of misplaced rage and guilt.

Something else stupid and reckless and violent.

"You can come out to Greymar for school. Or Oregon, or UW."

She doesn't respond immediately, then says, "Full moon was weird without you. With it just being me and Uncle Peter."

He swings back to the counter and scoops up the phone. "I can imagine. It was okay, though?"

She sighs, and he imagines her flopping back onto the rug in her bedroom in the pack house back in Maine. The way she used to, before that house burned down. "Okay, I guess. Uncle Peter found a pack upstate and he's been thinking about talking to them."

"This soon?" Peter talking to another pack can only mean that he's thinking about negotiating a merge. Derek grabs the stack of ungraded essays and drops them by the side of his bed. "It's only been…"

"It's been over three years." Cora says. "It's been over three years since the fire, and we're small and weak in a pack this little, especially since you left. Plus he says he's worried about me not socializing with wolves my own age."

"So you'd want him to do it?"

"I dunno. What do you think?"

Derek sprawls across his bed. "It doesn't really matter what I think. I'm not your Alpha-to-be anymore, Cora – I'm not even pack anymore."

"You could change that. You could just come back. Come home, Derek."

"It's not my home anymore, kid," he says, as gently as he can. "Take care of yourself, okay?" He hangs up before she can respond and plugs the phone in to charge overnight, studiously not thinking about his family as he forces himself into a restless sleep.


The third time he sees the boy, it's at a coffee shop across the street from his apartment building and he spots him through the window as he returns from a long, lazy Sunday morning run. The kid's got books, notebooks, and a laptop spread out across a table and a deep furrow between his eyebrows, and Derek makes a split-second decision to walk in and talk to him again.

He orders a coffee and a scone, watching him out of the corner of his eye as he waits for his order to be up. The guy never seems to be still – always drumming the end of a pencil against the table, tapping out a rhythm against the corner of the table, shifting to a different chair to study a new set of notes.

"Who exactly are you?" Derek says without introduction when he receives his scone, taking the empty seat across the table.

The boy crinkles his nose, but doesn't look up from his laptop. "What sort of a question is that?"

Derek shrugs, carefully keeping his face passive. "I saw you on the first day of class. Then again two weeks later, when I ran into you leaving the library at 2am. Today you appear at the coffee shop across from my apartment, but I still don't even know your name. Asking you who are seems like a logical question."

The boy squints up at him, and Derek is momentarily startled by the depth in the light brown eyes. "You do realize that recounting every time you've seen me is a little creepy. And makes you sound like a stalky stalker who stalks."

He shrugs again and takes a sip of his coffee. "You're the one within spitting distance of where I live."

"Fine," he sighs. "But only because I need a break from geomapping the land from here to Canada. I'm Stiles. I'm a junior here at Greymar University. Undeclared. I hail from Beacon Hills, California, and I have contacts in law enforcement who will not hesitate to run a background check."

"What kind of a name is 'Stiles?'"

"The kind of nickname you give yourself in kindergarten when your actual first name contains more letters than the former Czechoslovakia. Is it my turn now?" The boy shuts his laptop.

"What?"

"I can only assume we're playing 20 Questions. You asked yours, so now it's my turn."

He sits back in his chair. "Go ahead."

The boy – Stiles – leans forward to make up the space between them and plants his chin in the palm of his hand. "How exactly does a werewolf end up teaching English at a lesser-known American university?"

Derek splutters so hard that coffee snorts up into his sinuses and holy crap, does that burn for a second before the healing kicks in. "What – what – what?"

Stiles rolls his eyes. "Oh, come on, Professor Hale. Let's skip all the awkward introductory steps. We've known you were a werewolf since before you were even offered the job."

He splutters again and shoots darting glances at all the tables close to them, but none of the other patrons seem to be clued in on the conversation. "We?"

Stiles arches an eyebrow. "Don't tell me you can't smell the pack on me. I'm told that even when showering regularly, it's not something that just washes off. Yes, we. Eight of us here at Greymar."

He sits even further back in his chair, stunned. How in the hell did he not notice a pack of eight – a decently sized pack by any standard – running around campus? Greymar's not exactly a huge place.

When Derek doesn't immediately respond, Stiles continues right on talking, undeterred. "You can stop glaring at the adorable old couple next to us, you know. I charmed a line around the table so no one would look at my addendum to the bestiary based on the rugaru Ethan and Cole took out last week and get the wrong idea, and it covers auditory cloaking, too."

Derek finally manages to marshal his face back under control and looks at Stiles flatly. "I have no idea what you just said."

The boy heaves a dramatic sigh, scribbles something on a corner of notebook paper, and tears it off and hands it over. "Here. There's a pack meeting tonight at that address, 7 o'clock. It's about time everyone started getting to know one another."

Derek looks at the address – it's a street he knows, just off the west end of campus. He pushes back from the table, slightly in a daze. There are dozens of questions swirling around in his head, but nothing he can pin down. Stiles already has his laptop open and is back to typing furiously. He's two steps from the door when Stiles calls, "Hey, Sourwolf!" and he looks back on instinct.

The boy grins a wide, wild grin. "Leave the coffee."

Yeah. Derek is definitely screwed.


Derek spends most of the afternoon trying not to break shit in his apartment and attempting to distract himself through menial labor. Move the couch here, move the couch there, assemble this bookshelf he got from Ikea that has eight thousand tiny wooden parts and blob-like figures in the instruction books that look so fucking thrilled about the eight thousand wooden parts -

How? How did he not know? He checked for local packs before he accepted the job out here – had Peter ask all of his contacts, and –

Peter.

His phone is in his semi-clawed hand with an outbound call to Peter ringing before he even finishes processing the thought.

"Nephew!" Peter answers, his voice overly jovial. That's how things always are with Peter, hopping from one extreme to the next – he's too happy, then he's too depressed, then he's too murderous to even be in the same room with when his thoughts fall to the Argent girl who set the fire that burned nearly their entire family alive –

"Peter," Derek curtly growls. "Did you know?"

"Did I know what? It is so good to hear your voice."

Derek lets his claws fully slide out and then digs them into the fleshy part of his palm, allowing the pain to push him back to human form. Fangs make talking on the phone kind of challenging. He struggles to keep his voice calm as he re-asks the questions, this time being specific – that's another thing about Peter. He'll dodge anything unless he is firmly, inescapably pinned in your sights. "When I asked you to check the area surrounding Greymar for existing packs, and you came back two days later and said no, the closest pack would be the Ritter family in Portland, and they were okay with me living just outside their territory. Did you know about the pack of eight that apparently fucking attend the school?"

There's a beat of silence, then Peter says, "Ah, well. I couldn't exactly risk you falling to Omega, could I, nephew?"

"So you risked sending me, unannounced, into a strange pack's territory without even letting me know so I could do them the common courtesy of saying 'Hey, I'm Derek, promise I'm not trying to kill anyone, I'm just here to teach'? Peter, they could have killed me!"

"Did they?"

Peter's abrupt question stops Derek in the act of shredding the bookshelf's instruction packet into confetti. "What?"

"Did they kill you? Or try to? Have they been even slightly hostile?"

Derek sinks slowly to the couch. "No. Not really. One of them invited me to a pack meeting tonight."

He can practically hear Peter's oily grin spreading on the other end of the phone. "Good. Derek, I know your opinion of me isn't very high, but you're one of my last remaining family members. As I said, I didn't want to risk you falling to Omega, even though you seemed so determined to do so when you left here. When you asked me about Greymar and I found out about the McCall pack, it seemed like the best option out of a host of shitty ones."

Derek's quiet, thinking. Peter cursing means that he's falling out of his crappy "I'm the Alpha" façade and might actually be capable of holding a real conversation. "What did you find out about them?"

"Not much, honestly, but they've gone up against a lot of bad shit in the past and come out the other side mostly intact. I spoke with their Alpha and Emissary before you moved. They won't make you join, but they're fine with you being on claimed land so long as you agree not to harm anyone. Even said they'd watch out for you against hunters in the area."

"Peter, I – "

"Yeah, yeah, I know," the older wolf cuts him off, and for a second it's like they're kids again – Derek's 6, Peter's 13, conspiring on a prank to play on Laura. And then the armor schicks back up into place when Peter continues, "Very well, nephew, is there anything else?"

"I – uh – no," Derek manages, still reeling from the information and the fact that some part of Peter – no matter how minute – actually seems to still care. "Thanks, Alp – thanks, Peter."

The phone makes a small click when Peter disconnects, and Derek stares at it in astonishment before shaking himself out and digging a roll of Scotch tape out of a drawer. Time to reassemble the happy blob figures and get back to putting the bookshelf together.


At 7:02, Derek is standing outside a renovated firehouse, checking the address from Stiles' note against the GPS on his phone and wondering if he's making a big mistake. He left his old pack – what was left of his family – and moved clear across the country to start a new, supernatural-free life. Being a werewolf ended up causing so much heartbreak and loss that he all but swore it off, so what is he doing, about to willingly walk into another pack's territory?

It's Peter's words that get him in the end. And common sense, really – he likes Greymar so far, and if there's already a pack here, custom dictates that he should at least try to be on friendly terms with them and make it clear that he's not a threat. Tentatively, he knocks on the door, and pattering footsteps inside preclude Stiles swinging open the door while shouting over his shoulder, "Isaac, don't encourage him!" before turning back to Derek and giving him that same wild grin from earlier.

"Hey! Glad you made it. Come in! Shoes stay by the door." Stiles walks back into the house immediately, leaving Derek pretty much no choice but to kick off his boots and follow. He catches up as they enter what looks like a main living area, and Derek is immediately faced with 6 snarling, half-shifted werewolves, one amused-looking human male who offers a friendly wave from one of the several couches in the room, and Stiles, who stomps a foot on the ground, mutters something under his breath, and causes a ring of mountain ash to fall out of the sky and into a perfect circle around Derek.

"Cool, Stiles!" Remarks the other human.

"Thanks," Stiles says, brushing imaginary dust from his hands. "Been working on that one. Now, Derek, sorry for the upfront hostility, but – guys! Seriously, with the Beta faces? We talked about this!"

One of the wolves abruptly shifts back, revealing himself to be a tall, lanky guy in his early twenties with curly blond hair. "You're the one with the mystical circle of mountain ash."

"Yeah, which renders all other forms of aggression basically redundant, Isaac." Stiles shoots an exasperated look at the wolf standing closest to Derek. "You going to help me out on this?"

The wolf flashes red eyes at Derek once, before turning to the rest of his pack. "He's right, guys. Everyone back down."

One by one, they all return to fully human, and Derek is left in a room of –

"Kids," he says, startled. "You're all just kids."

"Kids is what we were six years ago when a rogue Alpha showed up in Beacon Hills and started biting anything that moved," says the Alpha, turning back to Derek. Derek appraises the way he moves, the way the rest of the pack seems to orbit him, and although the guy's young, there's something right about him, and Derek knows without a doubt that he'd submit to this wolf. He'd be a Beta to this Alpha, and he'd trust this Alpha to lead him.

If he were, you know, looking for a pack. Because he's not.

"A lot's happened since then," the Alpha continues. "We're not kids anymore."

Derek holds up his hands innocently. "I didn't mean offense. I come from a family-based pack, not a self-made one. I'm not used to everyone in a pack being the same age."

"We know about your old pack. Like I said earlier, we did our homework on you before you were even hired here," Stiles says, and then his eyes darken. "We're sorry that you've lost so many people you care for."

Derek struggles to keep his emotions off his face. "It was a long time ago."

"We've lost people longer ago," says one of the other betas, a boy with short brown hair and an absurdly strong jawline. The human boy reaches out to take his hand. "We still miss them."

Derek swallows hard against the lump in his throat. "What am I doing here?"

"This is our third year on this campus," says the blond one – Isaac.

Funny, Derek thinks, how the Alpha's so content to let his betas speak for him. Back home – and in all the other packs he encountered growing up – Alphas were always the primary speakers, especially with an outsider in the mix. Alphas, or the pack's Emissary. He tunes back in to hear Isaac finish some sentence with, "…so no one has any problems."

"I'm not looking for trouble," Derek says. "I didn't even know there were other werewolves at Greymar. I just needed…something different."

"That's what your uncle said," Stiles says thoughtfully. "He's a total creep, by the way."

"Do you want to join our pack?" The Alpha asks sharply.

"No," Derek says emphatically.

"Do you mean harm to our pack?"

"No! I just said, I didn't even know you guys were here."

The Alpha nods to Stiles, and Stiles slides a few steps to break the circle of mountain ash with a socked foot. The Alpha strides forward, smiling broadly, and shakes Derek's hand firmly. "Great! I'm Scott McCall, and I run this little shindig."

"He thinks he does," Stiles says with a roll of his eyes. "Everyone knows I'm actually the one in charge."

"About that," Derek interrupts before the introductions can continue. The abrupt changes in atmosphere are making his head hurt, but he definitely has questions. "What are you? With the whole magic circles thing?"

Stiles grins. "Longer story that we've got time for now, buddy. C'mon, meet the rest of the pack."

And so he does. The Beacon Hills contingent is Scott and Stiles, along with Isaac Lahey, who's Scott's second, and Ethan Bresner, who's dating the pack's other resident human, Danny Mahealani. Newer to the pack are Bree Thompson, who's a year younger than the rest of them and met them by chance when she decided to attend Greymar, and Cole and Tiffany –

"Argent," Derek snarls, dropping into a fighting stance and letting his fangs slide out. Argent, like Kate, like my entire family burning alive - Bree and Scott throw themselves in front of him, but it's Stiles who puts a hand on his chest and forces him to take several steps back in quick succession to avoid being knocked on his ass by the sheer power rolling off the human in waves.

"Cole, Tink, you good?" Stiles demands, without breaking eye contact with Derek.

"Yeah," comes a shaky response from behind her. A shaggy head of blond hair and huge brown eyes peek out at him from between pack members' elbows, and Derek realizes that Cole's even younger than Bree.

"Yes, Argent," Stiles confirms, apparently satisfied that Cole and Tiffany are okay for the moment. "And ours. We know what Kate Argent did to you, Derek, but this pack has a long history of allegiance with certain Argents, and when Cole and Tink were turned accidentally, we got them away from other, less understanding family members. Is this going to be a problem?"

Derek is caught in a swirl of hazy, nightmarish flashbacks and guilt. A girl he thought he loved, a broken trust, flames illuminating the night, the smell and sound, his mother's screams…

"HEY!" A shout breaks through his memories and drags him back to the present. "I said, is this going to be a problem?"

Slowly, Derek shakes his head and straightens up, willing his fangs to recede into his gums. "No. No, I can't…it's fine. I'm okay."

Convinced that Derek isn't about to slash anyone's throat, Stiles pushes through the pack to the Argents and pulls each one in for a hug. "You sure you're okay, kiddos?"

"Bloody brilliant," the boy, Cole, sighs, and it's that's not a sure sign that he's British, Derek doesn't know what is. "Just startled me for a mo', that's all."

"You okay with him staying, Cole?" Scott asks, still holding Derek in place with Alpha eyes.

"It's all right, Alpha," the boy says, slowly making his way forward, keeping Stiles' fingers locked in his. The other Argent, the one Stiles keeps calling Tink, looks even younger, and trails them with a finger locked in Cole's belt loop. Cole comes to stand in front of Derek and looks up at him evenly. "I'm not Kate," he says. "Neither is Tink. We never even met her. I'm a wolf now, and I got tossed out of my family. This is my family now – my pack. Tink?"

Cole loops an arm backwards and pulls the girl forward. She scuffs at the carpet with her toes for a few seconds, giving Derek time to further study her. She can't be more than twelve or thirteen, and with the blonde pixie cut and the tiny frame – the nickname makes sense.

Cole prods her in the side again to make her speak. "'M not Kate," she finally says. "Look, you don't have to, like, like me or whatever, but me and Cole are stuck here and so – yeah. Pack, family. Whatever."

Derek stares at the little former hunters. He still doesn't trust either – probably never will – but there's so much earnestness shining up out of the Cole's eyes and so much careful indifference from Tink that he shrugs and relegates his well-earned trust issues to a corner of his mind.

A timer goes off somewhere to Derek's left, and Danny's up off the couch in an instant. "Dinner's ready!"

The pack cheers, and the tension in the room dissipates so quickly that Derek's almost not sure it was real to begin with. Again with the group mood swings.


Dinner with the McCall pack is comfortable. It's so comfortable that it makes Derek uncomfortable, and he finds himself thinking back through the bookshelf instructions and trying to figure out what he missed that caused the entire thing to collapse in a pile of sawdust when he put the first book on it so he doesn't have to pay attention to how amazing it feels to be around a functioning pack again. Everyone is smiling and laughing, and they bicker in that way you can only do when you know someone's in your life for good. He tries not to notice the easy physical contact between everyone – Isaac and Danny's shoulders pressed together as they dish out seconds and thirds, Bree and Tink linking elbows throughout most of the meal, Scott's hand trailing along the backs of everyone's necks when he gets up to use the bathroom. He tries not to hear the calm, quiet conversation Scott and Cole have in a corner of the kitchen when the meal's wrapping up ("You don't have to call me Alpha, Cole, we've talked about this." "I know, I wasn't thinking, it just came out!").

He even attempts to ignore the casual way they follow pack dynamics – Scott's the first one to take a bite of food, the younger ones look to Isaac for guidance if Scott's busy, the entire conversation seems to flow through Stiles – but it's too damn interesting not to watch. With his dad and mom as Alpha and Second growing up, it never really occurred to him to watch the power flow between them, because it was just normal family stuff. Here, though, with Scott and Isaac in those roles, it's somehow still just as easy, just as natural.

He's having some trouble reconciling Stiles with Cassidy, though.

Cassidy was his family's Emissary before the fire, and while she was perfectly nice – if you could ignore the occasional fortune-cookie, Yoda-esque advice – she was never this involved. Derek can't imagine an Emissary actually living with the pack she serves, or being this familiar with them.

"Derek? Derek!"

He blinks out of his train of thought to find everyone looking at him.

"You okay?" Danny asks. "Looks like you spaced out there for a second."

"I'm fine," Derek says. "Just a lot to take in. I'm still trying to figure out how I never noticed the eight of you on campus except for Stiles those couple of times."

"Do I look old enough for university?" Tink snarks, and he'd be offended by her tone but it's the first time she's spoken without being asked a direct question all night. "I'm in junior high."

"And I attend high school," Cole continues. "We both go to school in Stovington, so you wouldn't have seen or smelt us on campus."

"I'm human, but you wouldn't be able to smell me – or Ethan's scent on me – unless you're in the Computer Sciences buildings," Danny offers. "I don't often come out of the lab during daylight hours."

"Or nighttime hours," Ethan grumbles, and Derek gets the feeling that this is just a snippet of a long-running conversation. "But yeah, I'm 25, so I'm done with school. I'm a Stovington City cop. Not a lot of cause for me to be on campus."

"And you've seen me around," Stiles says. "So really it's just the three of them…" he gestures broadly to Scott, Isaac, and Bree, "that you missed."

That doesn't exactly make Derek feel better.

When the meal wraps up, Derek makes himself useful by volunteering to wash dishes, and Scott designates Isaac as the drier. They lapse into a companionable silence, and Derek thanks his lucky stars that not everyone in this pack feels the need for constant chatter, like one Stiles Stilinski.

Because yes, with the last name tagged to the nickname, it's Stiles Stilinski.

Derek watches the rest of the pack mill about in the living room. Scott's said that there's actual pack business to deal with, so they're killing time until kitchen clean-up is done. Bree, Cole, and Tink are trying to pick a movie to watch after the meeting wraps up; Scott and Stiles are laughing over some YouTube video; Ethan's reading a book on the couch while Danny leans against his legs and does some sort of work on a laptop that makes a sound like a jet engine when he fires it up.

"You okay, man?" Isaac asks after a few minutes, having caught Derek staring at the three youngest pack members for a beat too long. The question is casual, but Derek can feel tension rising in the other man, and he knows in an instant that his dish-cleaning partner wasn't assigned at random. They don't trust him yet, and Derek suspects he'll need to spend a lot of time with Scott, Isaac, and Stiles before that changes.

Does he want that to change? Does he want this pack to trust him?

"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine," he says quickly, shifting his gaze down to the bowl he's washing. "In some ways, this is so like my old pack, but in others…"

"They're Argents, but they're ours," Isaac says, echoing Stiles' earlier words.

"How? If you don't mind my asking."

Isaac thinks for a moment, apparently trying to figure out what details to divulge. "Hunter families have rites of initiation."

"The Argents here make a silver bullet," Derek offers.

"Or arrowhead. Yeah. For the Argents in Europe, hunters go on their first solo hunt when they turn 17. The situation's meant to be carefully controlled, but Cole somehow ended up facing an Alpha on his own. He was bitten, obviously, but still managed the kill – you know the cure, how if you kill the one that bit you, you can be cured of lycanthropy? Doesn't work so well when there's nowhere for the Alpha's power to go. So Cole, newly-made Alpha, freaks out and instead of going to the hunters' ceremonial grounds like he's supposed to, goes home for help."

Derek lets out some sort of muffled moan.

"Yeah, so you can see where this is going," Isaac says. "Tink, his 12-year-old sister, not being a full hunter, isn't at the ceremony. She opens the door, Cole can't control the shift, out of his mind with Alpha power, and bites her."

Derek gives a low whistle. "Isn't…" he glances up at the living room, making sure Cole and Tink aren't listening in. "Isn't it part of the Code that if that happens, they're supposed to, you know…"

"Yeah, and they nearly did." Isaac takes the last bowl from Derek and signals for him to drain the sink. "Cole and Tink's parents are real old-school types, and wanted to go through with what they saw as mercy killings. Luckily, one of our Argents, Allison, had made some progress with other cousins during a summer she spent in France and set up contacts with Jackson, a former packmate of ours living in London. The cousins got Cole and Tink to Jackson, and he got them to us."

"You guys done yet?" Scott calls.

"Just about!" Isaac returns, and the next second he's up in Derek's personal space, blue beta eyes flashing a warning. "I get that it's a long story, and that you've got trust shit to work through when it comes to the Argents. And you're not in this pack, so you don't have to like them or even interact with them – that's cool, whatever. But consider this your official warning, Hale. If you ever do a single thing to harm either of them, I will personally rip your limbs off and stuff each stump with wolfsbane before asking Stiles to set you on fire with this nifty little black flame curse he's got up his sleeve. They're important to me. We clear?"

Derek's got at least 20 pounds of muscle on Isaac, but the sheer, unadulterated fury in the younger wolf's eyes is enough to make him uncertain if he'd win in a fight, especially as an Omega, and that doubt seems to have paralyzed his vocal cords. He manages to nod, and Isaac backs off and moves to head to the living room.

Derek clears his throat. "Wait, Isaac. Where's Allison now? She's obviously not here, so is she still in France? Or in London, with the other one – Jackson?"

Isaac pauses, but doesn't look back. "Allison's one of the ones we lost," he says, so quietly that Derek can barely hear it, and then continues out into the living room where he scoops Tink up over a shoulder and ignores her squeals of protest. Derek follows more sedately, still processing, and settles into an armchair on the fringes of the group.

"All right, guys," Scott says, clapping his hands a few times after extricating himself from an impromptu wrestling match with Ethan. "I'm officially calling this meeting of the McCall pack – plus guest – to order." He turns to Derek. "Since you're not actually part of the pack, you can't really be here for official pack business stuff, sorry, dude."

"Right, sorry," Derek begins. "I'm new to this whole Omega thing."

"But you also can't go just yet," Scott continues, causing Derek to freeze halfway through the act of pushing himself out of the armchair. Does he know too much about Cole and Tink now, so they'll have to force him to join up or kill him? Are they actually going to kick him off claimed territory for not being buddy-buddy enough? Is Peter hiding in a corner somewhere, waiting to spring out and force him to swear eternal fealty or some equally arcane bullshit? Scott can apparently read the worry on Derek's face, because he says, "Aw, crap, sorry – I'm no good at this stuff, Stiles, could you maybe…?"

The Alpha turns a set of puppy dog eyes on Stiles, who groans and lifts his head from Bree's lap. "Seriously? Dude, being your Emissary is such a load of crap, you just use me when you don't feel like putting enough words together to make a sentence."

Derek manages not to react to that externally – yeah, Stiles is definitely not from the same school of Druidism as Cassidy – and focuses on Stiles turning to face him. The boy makes a few expansive gestures with his hands before saying, "Anyway! Derek. Yeah, the reason you can't leave is because we told your uncle we'd watch out for you if any hellish shit came your way, and we're reasonably certain that you've been marked for death."