Title: the light that lit and shadowed the faces of history
Disclaimer: not my characters; title from Billy Collins
Warnings: future!fic; mentions of character death & violence
Pairings: implied Allison/Scott
Rating: PG
Wordcount:645
Point of view: third
Prompt: any, any, your past is trash, throw it out
Note: So, I haven't actually seen season 2 yet but I've read A LOT of fic.
He leaves Beacon Hills the day they bury his father and he never goes back.
.
Scott tries calling him. So do Allison, Isaac, Lydia, and Danny; even Jackson, a few times. They all leave voicemails.
Derek doesn't.
.
Honestly, a part of him had always known it would come to this.
.
He settles in Pittsburgh because it's where the engine falls out of his jeep. He applies to NSU and from there goes to Pitt, where he does a variety of things before settling on history.
Those who don't understand the past are doomed to repeat it.
.
One of his professors is a werewolf. Three of his peers are witches. Five of the people in his undergrad dorm were shifters of some kind.
All of them avoided him and would not have been able to articulate why, but he knew.
Blood leaves a stain and it never washes out.
.
In his dreams, wolves howl. oh, little red, they call, won't you come out tonight? it's such a brilliant moon.
Sparks cause fires. Fires burn.
Blood stains.
.
Pack is family. Family dies.
He studies and he learns and he ignores the moon.
.
He graduates in the spring and moves on.
A dozen people breathe easier and will never be able to explain why.
.
He sticks to the east coast for awhile, from Florida to Maine and back. He lives on the edge of society like a scavenger, and he ignores the moon and he ignores the spark, and while a few humans try messing with him, nothing else does.
Blood stains. So does the stench of fire.
.
The wind whispers, sometimes, about the Hale pack. It's growing. Stronger and steadier. Like it was before the fire. The wind whispers about the Argents, too, the greatest hunters and one of the oldest names in the world. The matriarch, they say, she's mated to a wolf. The matriarch, they say, is more dangerous than any hunter in two hundred years.
But the Hale pack, they say, is blessed. Nothing goes to Beacon Hills looking for trouble. Not anymore. Not since the blood, and not since the fire.
.
Once he's walked every inch of the Atlantic coast, he turns towards the Gulf. He stands in hurricanes but it doesn't wash away the blood.
.
Magic is in the blood, and so is lightning.
.
He doesn't set foot in California. The pack closest to the state line sniffs him out but doesn't approach. He skirts the line the whole way to Oregon and then trails the Pacific up through Washington and follows the Canadian border all the way back to Maine.
Then he starts over, this time crisscrossing the heart of the country.
.
This isn't the life he thought he'd have, all those years ago, when he dragged Scott into the woods.
This isn't the life he thought he'd have, all those years ago, when his father tried to help him and ended up dead in his place.
This isn't the life he wanted, but it is what he has.
.
The Hale pack, they say, can't be wounded.
The Argents, they say, have allied with the wolves.
little red, wolves howled once, come dance in moonlight with us.
Sheriff Stilinski died a hero saving his son's life. The son vanished; no one knows what happened to the boy, but it's such a shame, isn't it, that a hero died instead.
.
Blood stains until nothing else can show. Sparks burn until ashes remain.
He can't go home. He won't die.
Nothing touches him and he survives.
.
He leaves Beacon Hills the day they bury his father and he never goes back. Once he gets tired of the States, he goes north and then south, all the way to Cape Horn.
Then he goes east to Africa because he's got nothing but time.
