Title: on my knees and out of luck (i look up)
Author: emptyword
Fandom: Teen Wolf
Pairing: Sheriff Stilinski/Derek Hale
Warning: BDSM, dominance/submission, non-sexual kink, character death (Peter Hale)
Summary: It doesn't start the way you'd expect, with whips and paddles and clamps, but you end up on your knees anyway. It has nothing to do with pain, very little to do with punishment, and everything to do with healing.
A/N: Title is a loving (& teary) nod to Mumford & Sons. Also, I should mention it's likely this has been influenced by Morgan Leigh's "this boy, half-destroyed," a lyrical, insightful, stunningly beautiful piece of writing that has inevitably crept into my headcanon for Derek's background. Thanks so much to Nahsiah for a detailed read-through, despite knowing very little of the canon. 3
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You were the youngest in your family, and you scared easily, which your siblings and cousins took great delight in. Samuel used to hide snakes and lizards in your slippers, and Laura liked to leap out dark corners. Lily and Sal invented wild improbable dares, and you always acquiesced after the one time you refused to stink bomb the local sheriff's station and ended up handcuffed on the roof of the sheriff's house. Charlie pulled elaborate pranks, luring you alone into the woods before screaming bloody murder and showing up soaked in blood.
But even terrified out of your wits, you never backed down. If anything, you thrived under the terror. You never felt fully alive until your pulse roared in your ears and an adrenaline-laced chill coated your skin. You shuddered in the aftermath of your siblings' antics, hyper-aware of yourself and your surroundings. Ironically, it steadied you.
Back then, before the wicked smile and lush blonde curls and fingers that pressed to your core, before the naked horror and shattering grief and thick muggy despair that clogged your senses, before you knew the exact texture and weight and tenor of guilt – your anchor had been fear.
Now, of course, it is anger that steadies you.
.
The first time it happens, it's a Tuesday at the Laundromat on Winston Street, and he reeks of barely controlled rage.
He is kind, well-liked, probably the most upstanding citizen in your godforsaken hometown, and you lead his son into danger every other week. He is also nothing like you imagined when the anger burns out and the fierce protectiveness peels away to the desperation that drives him, and you understand where Stiles gets his need to be needed. The desire to do good runs thick in the Stilinski blood.
You lose track of time, mind swirling away even as all your senses sharpen in contradiction, and it's a long while after he leaves that you realize you're still pressed against a whirring washing machine, that though you would have let him hurt you, not for a second did you believe he would.
.
The second time, it's outdoors in the crisp November air that reminds you of Charlie's pranks, and the Alphas were a hairsbreadth from taking your entire pack not even three hours before, leaving in their wake the threat of another attack.
Isaac, Scott, and Stiles are asleep at the abandoned railcar a mile away, and there's no one else any closer than that. You're oscillating violently between relief and panic, half out of your mind from the tension, and you can't hold onto your silence. You crack beneath his relentless pursuit for answers.
"Figures you can't even do the one thing I trusted you to do," Stiles snarls at you later, eyes rimmed red with exhaustion, but it's nothing, barely a blip, compared to the disbelief-fury-horror that had been in his father's eyes when you'd laid your secrets before him.
Afterward, you spend four nights alone in the woods, shuddering as you replay that look of castigation over and over again.
.
The day Laura would have turned 29, hunters not named Argent arrive, and when your uncle attempts to parlay, they kill him. Your charming, silver-tongued uncle who could talk his way out of anything, hacked to pieces and sent to you in a packaged box.
You're still burying the parts of him that are left, dried blood and dirt caking your arms, when the sheriff shows up. Your vision is too blurred to see him clearly, but you hear the shocked blip of his heart and then you smell his anger. You wait for him to ask about Stiles. You wait for him to demand an explanation. You wait for him to haul you to the station.
He drags you to his house and scrubs you down in his shower and puts a mug of hot chocolate in your hands. He says he needs a statement from you, so you talk. Maybe it's the heat from the mug seeping into your clenched fingers or the scent of childhood sweetness and comfort wafting to your nose; maybe it's the steady sure pump of his heart or the slow even breaths he takes; maybe it's the traitorous part of you that has always been a glutton for punishment – whatever the reason, you talk more than you intended, more than you have since Laura left.
You talk about Laura and your mother, your childhood fears and your failures as an Alpha. You talk about failing Erica and Boyd and not being enough for Isaac. You talk about Scott's contempt and Deaton's disapproval. You talk about Stiles, the strength of his personality, the miles of love and loyalty you glimpse beneath the hyperactivity, the roiling darkness you recognize in him, the certainty and purpose he channels and how you envy it. How you will never live up to any of it.
You talk in circles and end up, somehow, on Peter. You'd liked Peter once, when you were still young, when he'd told you stories about the moon and pulled ribbons out your ears. But you'd never really known him, not the way your mother did, and now you never will.
A firm hand grips your wrist, and you start. You look down to see your hands shaking around the mug, the cooled liquid nearly sloshing out.
Your eyes are drawn to his, like your blood to the call of the moon, and you see yourself suddenly as he must see you: foolish, desperate, alone.
.
You neither expect nor want the Argents to help, but he makes it a condition. And it does make more sense to team up. Peter would be delighted. Peter did not think any more highly of the Argents than you did, but he did always have a fine appreciation for irony.
Chris has the resources to track the wayward hunters. Allison is surprisingly determined, despite her resentment for your family.
As the sheriff, he cannot get directly involved himself (though you understand the risk he runs of willful ignorance for your sake), but you see him before and after the fact. "I'm trusting you to know the difference between justice and vengeance," he tells you before you leave, and the words loop in your head when your claws hover over the throat of the hunters responsible for Peter's death.
When you return, ringed with the members of your pack, with the former enemies of your family, with humans you never expected any loyalty from, he's waiting with a squad car to secure the two unconscious (and alive) hunters.
He nods at you before he drives off, and something in you that's been tightening for weeks, for months, for years, loosens at last.
.
The third time he sends you spiraling is the first time it's deliberate.
No one is in any immediate danger, but Scott has been at the Argent house six nights in a row, and the interminable worry has you in Stiles' room, trying to wheedle him into giving up information, when the sheriff walks in.
"Cut that out," he says, and your words dry on your tongue. "Let my son get back to his computer game, which I'm going to pretend is his English assignment."
"I don't have English homework!" Stiles yells after you as you follow his father out the door.
At the kitchen table, he sits across from you, adopting his parenting face.
"You were not the adult; you were not responsible. It was not your fault."
Your heart sinks. It's the first time he disappoints you. There is very little you hate more than psychobabble. Laura used to borrow these self-help books from the New York Public Library and copy down quotes to pin up on your wall. Peter once told you that less than half your fuck ups were your own fault. You know you were mostly a kid back then, and you were allowed to make mistakes. It doesn't change the reality that you destroyed everything you loved.
"Do you hear me?" he presses, and you want to protest, you want to shake your head, you want to look away, but his eyes are boring clean tunnels into you.
"For fuck's sake, Derek," he grits, "you turned three kids."
His eyes are suddenly dark with threat, the scent of rage spiking the air, and again you see, clear as day, the vulnerability that drives him. "If you had – if you had bit my son – Jesus Christ, if you ever bite him – "
"No," you say quickly, desperate for him to know, desperate to ease the turmoil that simmers beneath his control. Stiles has never asked, and even if he did, you won't now – you can't – without his father's permission. "Not – not unless you allow it."
"No caveats," he snaps out, voice like a lash. "Never. Do you understand?"
Something small and hidden shivers through you, beneath the years and years of carefully constructed anger.
If he had only let you blunder on to make your own mistakes, if he had restricted his demands to simply the sphere of his son, if his eyes weren't flinty with censure and his voice weren't bearing down on you like a palpable weight, all the energy and strength and purpose coiled up beneath a sheriff's uniform focused solely on you, stripping you of every ounce of control –
You never stood a chance.
"Yes, sir," you say, and it comes out more like a vow than mere acquiescence.
He nods, control snapping back into place, and continues like he never stopped, "You have a group of teenagers relying on you. You don't have the luxury to wallow in self-pity."
The weight of his disapproval is too much for you to take.
"Sir – I – please," the words bubble over your tongue, and you're helpless to scoop them back.
He frowns in confusion, the lines around his eyes and his mouth pulling downward, and a fierce want sears through you, your fingers jerking with the desire to press against him, to smooth the deepening lines. You fist your hands to keep from reaching for him. You aren't allowed.
He blinks at you, considering, and a horrible shame crawls across your skin because he knows. He reads people for a living, he has Stiles for a son, and you've never been particularly good at hiding. You feel the frame of the door behind you like it's tattooed against your back, and you would flee if you could.
– it's nothing, it's meaningless, it's all in your head, your twisted fucked up head, but you can't help cleaving to the light you see in him, and his presence alone holds you in place –
After an eternity of humiliation, he finally closes his eyes in decision - releasing you - and he sighs, a soft resigned gust that thunders in your ears.
A bright, wild heat crashes through you, stealing the air from your lungs, and you think you know its name, you think you felt it before, in the shape of your mother's smile, in the aftermath of your siblings' pranks, sizzling in the air after a storm: Hope.
When he looks at you again, there's that familiar intensity in his eyes, that certainty and purpose and steel, as if he's acknowledging you, this.
– you don't mean to, you don't plan to –
You drop like a stone, the thud of your knees hitting the floor as natural a sound as a sigh of relief.
.
It's not easy to explain. It's not pain. You've had a lifetime's worth of that, and the one time he asks you, talks awkwardly about the whips sold at Mindy's Hardware, you shake your head and murmur something about Kate. The topic is dropped, the way you knew it would. Kate's name is anathema.
(He's asked you to talk about Kate once before. And never again.)
It's him. It's the lucidity his presence gives you, the weight in his eyes, the steadiness of his heart. It's the relief and the freedom that you find at his feet, the clarity and the calm that sharpens your focus when you think of him.
He is your lodestone, your balance, the star by which you navigate. And it is too much to put words to, too much to voice.
.
There comes a day in June, with the summer sun high in the sky, that you take him to the house, to the scene of ashes and terror and betrayal, to the point of your origin.
"Derek," he says, and you turn, you turn, you turn.
Afternoon light streaks through the broken rafters to set aglow the space between you.
"Breathe," he tells you, so you do.
.
Fin