Kate Argent is featured in this kinda heavily but she never actually makes it on screen. It talks about her ignoring a safeword, twice, and how she murdered his family.

It also talks about bystanders, and people who allow crimes to be committed (like police officers, nudge nudge). This contains stuff about rape, statutory and in general, and there is a scene where Derek is beat up. Proceed with caution.

Sheriff Stilinski is basically Derek's new god at the end, and you'll see why.

The first time is in high school.

The police deputy that works there seems to think that Derek comes from a family of drug addicts and has him tested every week, like clockwork. Derek hates it, because drugs don't even work on him, and he wouldn't be interested in them even if they did, but he endures it to appease the man.

Derek thinks that he must like the teen a little bit, since he always makes conversation, no matter how stilted.

At the end of the session, Kate Argent picks him up, actually enters the man's office, and he lets her take him home, despite having drove himself, as the cop well knew. He doesn't think anything's wrong with a teenager going somewhere unnamed with an adult who isn't family. Maybe he doesn't care about Derek at all.

It's obvious, he thinks hysterically, it's obvious he does not belong with Kate Argent. The cop does nothing (and Derek never forgives him for it).

Later, Derek thinks about the cop. He thinks about the man because Kate has ignored him saying the safe word twice, now, and it hurts, and he doesn't want to enjoy this at all.

The second time is a few months later, actually, the same man, the same school, the same smells and sounds.

The same deputy looks him in the eye and says his house was burning down, and his family had been in the house, and that there were no survivors, except for Laura and Peter and himself.

"Your house is burning down," he says and Derek would punch his head right off his shoulders if he weren't weak and shaken from the loss of his family and pack.

He says it calmly, like he didn't just find Derek throwing up in the bathroom because he could feel his pack's death. Like it was something that Derek would either be over immediately, or never recover from.

Derek hates him. He hates him more than he hates witches and omegas and alphas who aren't as committed as his mother is. Was. She's dead.

He needs someone, he knows. But, god, who to go to? The endless line of people he has stashed away for times like this has gone missing.

Kate's nowhere to be found, and he doesn't want to go to her, but Laura cries her eyes out for hours, and his uncle is in surgery, and he has no one else to go to. He visits his home a week later - after the fire is put out and he's cried himself to sleep in a damn hotel room that smells like pot and sex and death - smells wolfsbane and monkshood and sees the mountain ash.

He throws up after he swings at the newly appointed sheriff.

The third time is after all of that, after he's left the west coast completely. He'll never be far enough, he thinks.

There are hunters in New York, and somehow, they're crueler than Kate ever seemed to be. (She was always nice, unless they were fucking. So nice, in fact, that if he hadn't smelled her all over the scene of his burnt down home, he wouldn't have ever believed she could've done something so evil.)

They find him in an alley, because his life is a cliche, they corner him (they circle around him and he could break through but he's so tired, he worked all day), they shoot him full of wolfsbane and aconite and beat him bloody. He's seventeen, and he's angry, and he's muscled, but they're twice his size, and there are ten of them. And he's so tired.

He has the hardest time sleeping ever. This used to be a leading-up-to-the full moon thing, getting a few forty-five minute naps in and saying that he'd gotten his eight hours. Now it's every night.

The cops come - he's not sure how, since he didn't hear anyone call, but it's not like his senses are oh so keen when hunters are beating him to death - and tell him he should've been inside that late at night, and no one gets arrested. The hunters had scattered at the sight of them, but one had fist-bumped the older officer, and said, "little asshole kid thought we wouldn't find him."

He feels like a rape victim. He's terrified that they'll come back and finish him off.

Last time he'd been that scared, he'd been running out of class and slamming his way into the bathroom, because his alpha was dead, his betas were dead, his family was dead. Last time, he'd been pinned down by Kate Argent, listening to her talk about how much she loved younger men.

Gaining his bearings is a task he can't handle when he can feel all of his blood leaking out of him, but he manages it, somehow. He gets to his feet, healing slower than usual, and limps his way out of the alley he will never return to if it kills him.

He walks home to his and Laura's shitty little closet, scares everyone away from his side of the sidewalk without ever looking up, and blames himself a little more.

He knows, somewhere inside himself, that it's not his fault that the goddamned hunters of the world couldn't stick to the effing code, like he and his family had for as long as is in record.

Was in record. They burned, because of him. His family burned, because of him.

Laura is horrified, and angry, and god, he doesn't know what to tell her.

He thinks she won't appreciate him saying that he deserved it for being an idiot and letting himself get seduced by the woman who would kill his family.

The fourth and fifth times happen in the same damn month and have to deal with family. He wishes Laura had never returned to Beacon Hills, because New York hadn't been fun, just them, alone, but she'd been alive. He hadn't been alone all by himself.

He's back in Beacon Shitshow Hills, because Laura is dead, and Peter is all he has left. A cationic fire-victim who's paralyzed in his mind and his body. That's all he has left. This is what's left of the legendary Hale Pack - a boy who can't stand himself for very reasonable reasons and a body that's unresponsive. They're pathetic.

But Derek used to be an optimist. God, when had that been? It felt like time, after the fire, had slowed down horribly. He could barely remember having hope.

Derek stares his uncle in the eye, some days, and waits. This is what he does when he wants to feel like that high schooler again.

Nothing happens, but deep down, he recognizes that Peter will be able to respond to his begging and pleading some day.

It's barely enough to tide him over. He feels his heart bleeding out, leaking, every day, and he doesn't do anything to stop it, but Peter slows the trickle. His emotions are insane, though, he feels like he's bipolar. There's no telling if he'll be blank or angry or grieving.

The new werewolf beta, Scott McCall, and his friend are suspicious, and he wakes up angry more often than not. He doesn't need or have the time for two teenagers messing with him. He's trying to avenge his dead sister, dammit.

But he gets blamed for Laura's death, and he's not sure he'll ever be that angry again. It's the anger of a cursed fate, it has to be, because last time he got so angry, he hit a policeman and then shoved his whole fist through a tree, before bursting into tears and tearing a deer limb from limb. He'd been surrounded by humans, but he hadn't cared. Who was going to reprimand him, Laura?

Thinking about her makes his leak feel like a dam that can't be stopped until it's empty. He already feels alone.

He gets cleared, because an animal did it and no one knows how truly feral he really is, but the damage is done. The entire department distrusts him.

So, when Peter goes missing, they find him. They accuse him, and he feels the anger simmer again. He doesn't think he'll ever catch a damn break.

"Do you really think I would do anything to my last living relative?" He hisses at them like it's an actual question, and like he's so far above them, he can't see them.

Peter is hiding in the shell of their old house, recuperating. Derek wants to rip him apart, bit by bit, for the death of Laura. He's going to, he soothes his wolf, he'll become alpha. He'll kill his uncle.

But the point is, he's hiding his uncle in the old place. (What's it called, reverse psychology? Why would he, he asks as he does. It's a little funny, but he wills himself not to laugh. He doesn't deserve it, not anymore.)

They back off, and he laughs himself silly when he kills Peter and becomes the alpha, because yeah, he would.

He would kill anyone who did the same to his last sibling. He would kill his own uncle for cutting his beloved sister in half at the waist, leaving him alone.

And he would always kill Peter, anyway, because he always tried to manipulate everyone, ever. He was doing the world a favor.

The first time is after the kanima and after Gerard Argent. (He can't stop thinking about Scott forcing him to bite the old man, he feels like he's been used, he feels disgusting, he feels angry.)

Sheriff Stilinski, who he swung at once and who clearly doesn't trust him, helps him deal with what happened to him despite it all. He gets Derek a therapist, who tells him things and tries to help him get past apparently being raped when he was younger. He'd thought safe words were just suggestions, and he was a werewolf, anyway, he could smell discontentment, so it shouldn't have mattered.

But the therapist is adamant, and has him realize some important things.

He lost his agency, and with it, his body. He lost his trust, and with it, his family. He lost his sanity, and with it, his sister. He lost his last chance at normal, and with it, his uncle.

It's a long road, since Derek still believes - he knows, okay, there is no just believing here - that he's to blame, and will always be to blame. He let Kate touch him. He let her go unnoticed. It's his fault, it's obvious.

He doesn't deserve help, he doesn't deserve anyone being there.

But the Sheriff is there, and so is his son, and Derek's new pack, and even Allison Argent.

He's still to blame, but at least everyone he surrounds himself with now can mostly fend for themselves, and he won't be making any dumbass mistakes like seeking sexual pleasure. They might live, and he won't have to have their deaths and his own grief on his back for them.

It makes going through everything a little easier. The local hunters aren't out to kill him, and he has capable people at his back, and he's getting himself better.

(He still hates that police officer, he still ignores the tree with a hole in it, but he's getting there. Maybe he'll be able to look at the hotel soon.)