Disclaimer: I own neither Harry Potter nor Teen Wolf and I don't earn any money with this story.
Author's note: Yep, this is the result of watching too much Teen Wolf. I'm always caught between feeling so, so sorry for Derek and shaking my head at all those bad decisions he makes. I'm totally disregarding season 3b by the way.
Rating: M
Warning: language, angst (Derek's involved, what do you expect?)
Derek knows something's wrong, when he starts feeling cold.
True, it happens to normal people all the time and for them it's usually barely worth mentioning, except when they're whiny idiots. He's not exactly normal, though. No, Derek's a werewolf, which means he's basically a durable, regenerating mass of heat. Additionally it's the middle of summer and as a whole too fucking hot, even at night. Except now it feels like he's in a fridge.
So, yes, there's definitely something weird going on.
Derek's frown gets deeper, but he decides to disregard the drop in temperature for the moment, because he can neither smell nor feel anything unusual. The loft is just around the corner anyway.
"I can't… I can't take it anymore…"
He stops in his tracks immediately and clenches his hands into fists. There may or may not be claws involved to stave off the hallucination. It has to be one, because Derek saw Paige die. He's the reason why she's dead and he can remember every gruesome second of the night his eyes turned blue. His guilt will never let him forget.
Derek slowly turns around and checks every nook and cranny of the dark alley he's in, but all he can see is graffitied, dirty brick and metal walls. Another sniff confirms the lack of living beings in his immediate proximity. That doesn't mean he's alone, though, because he can hear something. It reminds him of the rattling breathing of a person with respiratory problems. He's been in hospitals often enough - back when Peter was still comatose - to recognize the sound. It's also getting closer and Derek can't quite pinpoint the direction it's coming from.
By now the cold isn't just an annoyance. It's slowly seeping through his skin and settling heavily in his furiously beating heart. Derek is intimately acquainted with overwhelming despair and the crushing weight of guilt, but this is somehow worse. So much worse.
He can feel Boyd's hot, sticky blood on his fingers and his nose is being assaulted by the stench of burnt flesh. Human flesh. The bodies of his family members, who had died because of him.
Derek's hazy gaze flickers between the sight of Laura's mauled corpse and the alley. All of his senses are shot to hell, which is why he almost doesn't notice the creepy, dark creature that's floating in his direction.
Death? It certainly looks like some of the depictions he's seen. The only thing that's missing is a scythe. Whatever it is, it's probably the reason why five of Beacon Hill's residents have become nothing more than a barely functioning shell. No thoughts, no emotions, no anything. He's about to become the sixth.
There's no way Derek wants to end up as a vegetable in a hospital room, but his body isn't exactly cooperating. When he urges it to claw the creature into pieces, his legs fold like a house of cards just to spite him. The blackness creeping into his vision isn't particularly reassuring, either.
The last thing he takes note of before his brain shuts down are hands on his shoulders.
Derek regains consciousness to the sweet taste of melting chocolate on his tongue. He's still feeling chilled to the bones, but the all consuming hopelessness is again at its usual, mostly manageable level.
A steady heartbeat alarms him to the presence of another person, before his nose picks up the metallic scent of fresh blood. He quickly forces his lids to open and is promptly confronted with the greenest pair of eyes he's ever seen. The dark eyebrows above them, half hidden by black hair, are knitted in a way that may or may not be concern.
"Just take deep breaths, the chocolate should help with the after effects."
Derek would love to listen to that suggestion, really he would, because his body is still not up to speed, but he has no idea who this guy is. It could be an enemy for all he knows. There's also the small matter of the dark creature that's currently being circled by a huge, glowing stag. In fucking midair!
The glare comes naturally to him, as does the frowning.
"Who are you and what's that thing?"
The man has the gall to raise his eyebrows at him, but answers readily enough.
"My name's Harry Potter." He stops and stares at Derek as if he's waiting for a certain reaction. Is he supposed to know this guy or something? Well, he doesn't and therefore counters with an unimpressed glare of his own, which, for some reason, earns him a small smile. "'That thing' is a dementor. They drain the hope and happiness out of people and make them relieve their worst memories. If they come too close, they can suck out your soul."
So those creatures really are responsible for the incidents. Good to know.
Derek's about to question the man about the stag, when the scent of blood makes it back to the forefront of his mind. At first he's thought it's his own from when he's pierced his hands with his claws, but it's not. It's really not.
He stares, in what's probably wide eyed horror, at his fingers, which are clenched around the man's arm in a bruising grip. Red rivulets run over their skin from where his claws dig into the flesh.
Derek hasn't even noticed until now. Why hadn't he noticed?
His breath catches in his throat and his mind plunges right back to thoughts of Boyd, until a hand on his face forces his head back up.
"It's alright, calm down. It's going to heal." Harry isn't lying. There's not even the slightest skip in his heartbeat and Derek can't grasp why this doesn't seem to bother the man in the slightest.
"I know what an encounter with a dementor is like and this is really just a small flesh wound." Some, if not all of his disbelief is apparently blatantly displayed on his face, because Harry sighs and draws something out of his pocket that looks suspiciously like what he had imagined a wand to be like, when he was still a child. Derek hears a muttered 'episkey' and watches on as the flesh knits back together as his is wont to do. What remains is unblemished skin.
"See? It's gone." The man smiles at him reassuringly and Derek actually feels a bit bad about going back to wondering if he's an enemy or not. They don't exactly have a good track record when it comes to other supernatural beings, or hunters, or… he should really stop thinking about this.
The wand - he's sure of it now - is replaced with a mirror. A vibrating pocket mirror. Maybe he's still hallucinating…
"Hey Ron, I found the dementor. It was in the warehouse district. Prongs is keeping it busy for now, but the tether spell doesn't work."
Derek sees the face of the redhead on the other side of the mirror - definitely still hallucinating - darken further.
"I noticed."
The image in the mirror pans to the side and- oh. That was clearly the nemeton. And about a dozen dementors.
Fuck.