This is insane, Derek thinks to himself as he casually strolls up the pathway leading to the overly ostentatious house the Alpha Pack is apparently staying in. I'm going to get killed. Stiles is going to get killed. We're all going to get killed.
He'd heard of the Alpha Pack before, but always thought they were just another campfire ghost story. In the twenty-four hours since Stiles had been taken, however, he'd not only had their existence confirmed, but is now swimming in details of the McCall pack's two previous encounters with them. The Alphas spent much of their initial visits trying to convince Scott to kill the rest of his pack to become more powerful, ending in a massive blowout during the McCall pack's senior year of high school that resulted in a lot of death and triggering Stiles' magical side. Derek can tell that there's a lot more to the story than that, but everyone clams up when he tries to ask more questions – Scott flat-out tells him that it's Stiles' story to tell, no one else's.
What he does learn is that the Alphas are led by a seriously creepy but disarmingly charming wolf named Deucalion. He should expect to also find Mara, Deucalion's second-in-command. Mara and Deucalion are apparently the only two who survived whatever hellstorm Stiles unleashed on them last time.
The plan is simple. Derek will walk up to the Alphas' door (Scott received a taunting text with an address and picture of a thoroughly bloodied Stiles late last night), announce that he's Derek Hale, heir apparent to the Hale pack, and that he wants to kill Peter and Cora, take their power, and join up with the Alphas. While he's spinning the story, Scott, Isaac, and Ethan will break in the back of the house and rescue Stiles.
It's simple. Straightforward. And really fucking idiotic.
But they're in a hurry, since Deucalion has a history of killing people when he doesn't get the desired response right away. And Derek can still see Cole's face looking up at him right before they left, asking him to please, please bring Stiles back.
So Derek, being the overemotional sap of a pansy that he apparently is, knocks.
The door swings open almost immediately, and a tall, lithe woman of Latin descent pulls it open and drapes herself artfully against the doorway. She gives Derek a slow once-over, lingering on his crotch and chest. "We're not looking for any Girl Scout cookies, but I'm sure I can think of a few other badges to help you earn."
"Mara, who's at the door?" calls someone from deeper inside the house.
"Tall, dark, and broody," Mara returns, without breaking eye contact. "Can I keep him?"
A chuckle sounds from just behind her and an arm snakes around her waist possessively, venturing significantly lower than Derek deems appropriate for a semi-public setting. The werewolf attached to the arm materializes from the dimly-lit interior and presses himself up against her line for line, paying absolutely no attention to Derek. "What's the matter, babe? Kaelie and I not keeping you satisfied?"
As if summoned, another female appears and wraps herself against Mara's side. "She seemed awfully satisfied last night, wouldn't you say, Rome?"
Derek watches the three in front of him with a mix of confusion and revulsion, trying to ignore the blatant scent of arousal emanating from them. After a long moment, Mara lets her eyes flutter open, pupils blown wide, and extends a hand. "Care to earn your badge?"
Derek stares, mind completely blank. He was definitely not adequately prepared to handle this shit.
"Mara, Kaelie, Rome, don't scare the man away," a cultured voice interrupts, and the three part to allow an older, smartly dressed man wearing sunglasses through to the threshold. He sniffs the air and makes a satisfied noise in the back of his throat. "Derek? Derek Alexander Hale?"
To Derek's credit, he manages to keep most of the surprise off his face and get his head back in the game. "Yes. Yes, that's me."
The man glides – and that's really the only word for it – back into the house, beckoning Derek to follow him with the elegant wave of a hand. "I am Deucalion. But of course, you wouldn't remember me. You were just an infant when we last met."
"We've met?" Derek tries his level best not to shudder when Mara helps him out of his light jacket and trails her fingers unnecessarily down his spine.
"Once," the other wolf says, ushering Derek into a surprisingly modern living room and directing him to an armchair. "I attended the last Winter Solstice held on the Hale territory."
Derek squints a little. "I was…two?"
Mara slinks into the room. She hands Deucalion a glass of red wine, keeps a white for herself, and gives Derek a tumbler of whiskey. The two from before – Rome and Kaelie – are nowhere Derek can see or smell them.
"I know you prefer that local porter, but we didn't have any in stock," she says with a sly smile that makes Derek thinks the contents of his fridge aren't safe.
"Just shy of two," Deucalion confirms. "Laura was six. Such a tragedy, the fire, of course."
"Of course," Derek echoes softly. He swirls the drink in his hand, fairly certain he'll puke if he tries to put something into his stomach right now. Everything about this feels wrong.
"Yes, well, perhaps we should forego the niceties," Deucalion continues. "Why have you sought us out?"
Derek clears his throat, running the practiced lines in his head, silently thanking his upbringing for teaching him to keep a steady heartbeat in a room of werewolf lie detectors. "You may have heard that I recently parted ways with my old pack."
Deucalion swirls a sip of wine around in his mouth for a long moment before answering. "We were made aware."
Derek bristles inwardly. What the fuck business does this douche have knowing things about his family? "Yes, well, I moved here to get away from them. Then I learned about your pack's…sources of power, and realized that there may be a better use for the remnants of the Hale pack."
He fights down nausea over the words coming out of his mouth and tries to listen to Danny's voice in his head from their earlier rehearsal. You've got to sound more sinister, dude. Make it convincing.
Deucalion smiles, and it's thoroughly disconcerting. "You wish to join us."
It's a statement, not a question, but Derek swallows hard and nods anyway. In his periphery, he sees Mara extricate a cell phone from her ridiculously tight jeans and accept a call, walking out of the room. The low-level alarm that has been ringing in the back of Derek's mind since he knocked on the door ratchets up a notch.
"Interesting," Deucalion murmurs. "Is that why you reek of the McCall pack?"
Derek sets his jaw, inordinately thankful to Isaac for making him practice this one, and tries to shrug carelessly. "They attend Greymar, where I teach. They've tried to convince me to join their pack."
Mara prowls back into the room, grinning and twirling her phone between claws. "You'll never guess who I just got a call from, Duke."
"Do tell, my dear," Deucalion responds, taking another sip of his wine.
"Teddy just wanted to let us know that he and Cassie spotted three of our favorite McCall pack friends, including their dear Alpha, trying to break in through a window to the cellar."
"Fascinating," Deucalion says, appearing to mull this information over. "Where are they now?"
"Oh, Cassie trapped them," Mara says gleefully. "Mountain ash and wolfsbane cocktails for all. Rome and Teddy are tying them up now."
Despite all his years of fibbing to his parents, Derek can't help it – his heart stalls for just the briefest instant.
"Oh, don't be absurd, Derek," Deucalion says, as though Derek's heartbeat is a vocal admission of guilt. "Your story was never going to hold up, it was merely amusing to see what lengths you would go to. We've known of your association to the McCall pack for nearly as long as you have. Mara, have the boys bring our guests upstairs. All four guests."
Mara saunters from the room, leaving Derek to glower to Deucalion and wonder what he could use in the room to his advantage during a sneak attack.
"I wouldn't recommend it, Derek," Deucalion says, draining the last of his wine. "Don't let the sunglasses fool you. I'm older than you and more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
Derek's trying to think of something to say when multiple footsteps draw his attention. Mara strolls in, dragging Ethan by his hair. Kaelie, the small blonde from the doorway threesome, pulls Isaac behind her. The other member of the threesome, Rome, carries Scott over one shoulder. All three of the McCall pack seem to be sedated somehow – what did Mara say? Mountain ash and wolfsbane cocktail? – but no one's obviously injured other than that. Scott looks the most alert, and struggles feebly against Rome's hands.
"Well done, Cassidy," Deucalion praises, pulling Derek's attention away from situation assessment because there's absolutely no fucking way that –
"It wasn't particularly difficult," Cassidy says, brushing an invisible speck of dust from her sleeve.
"Cassidy?" Derek gapes, staring at the Hale pack's former Druid Emissary.
"She goes by Cassie now," Mara says, slinging a free arm around Cassidy's shoulders.
Cassidy, looking repulsed, immediately shrugs away. "No, I do not. Hello, Derek. It's good to see you."
"I can't say the same," Derek says, his shock starting to give way to anger. "What the hell are you doing here?"
She raises an eyebrow and tucks a strand of hair back into an already perfect bun. "I'm an Emissary, Derek. This is what I do."
"No, I – we thought you died. In the fire."
She makes a tiny sound of disapproval in the back of her throat that Derek remembers all too well from childhood. "Hardly. After the fire, I required a new position. Alpha Deucalion offered."
A dragging sound startles Derek out of reminiscing and he jerks his eyes to the door again, where yet another Alpha is towing Stiles, strapped to a wooden chair, into the room. The Alpha purposefully lets Stiles' knee and shoulder bang against the doorframe, eliciting a muffled groan, before depositing the chair in the middle of the room and taking a few steps back. As Derek appraises Stiles – black eye, bruised jaw, blood everywhere, guessing a few broken ribs from the way he's wincing when he breathes – he sees Stiles taking stock of the situation, and can only imagine the whirlwind of creative swear words probably running through his head.
"And such a blessing you've been to us," Deucalion praises. "Now then, to business. Derek, you came to us under the false pretense of wanting to rid yourself of dead weight, become powerful, and join our pack. While you may have intended deceit, I am delighted to offer you the opportunity to make good on your word."
Derek settles into a glare he'd perfected at the age of seven, when Laura started training as Alpha-to-be and lorded it over him for a few months.
Unperturbed by his audience's silence, Deucalion continues. He paces the room slowly as he speaks, making little circles that come ever closer to Scott or Stiles or Isaac or Ethan and every time he's within arm's reach, Derek's wolf snarls a bit louder. "The Hale pack is all but nonexistent anymore," he says. "Regrettable, perhaps, but truth nonetheless. The power you'd gain from the sacrifices of your uncle and sister would hardly be enough to raise you to the level my pack requires. The McCall pack, however," – and here he threads his fingers into Stiles' hair and jerks his head back roughly, exposing Stiles' fragile neck and causing him to shout something around the rough cloth gag – "is a veritable gold mine of untapped power."
He releases Stiles and walks to stand directly in front of Derek, carefully removing his sunglasses and folding them into a pocket. At the same time, the Alpha who dragged Stiles in kicks the back of Derek's knees sharply, and he collapses almost to the floor – as it is, his claws sink an inch into the hardwood.
"My proposal is simple," Deucalion continues. "If your former Emissary is to be believed, you should already be well on your way to integrating fully into the McCall pack." Uncomfortable with exposing the back of his neck to his enemy, Derek cranes his head around to raise his eyes - and the instant he does he is locked in to the Alpha's clouded, distant gaze. A logical piece of his brain registers that Deucalion is layering the Alpha tone on thick, and that it's like every Alpha Deucalion has ever slain is commanding him at once, but most of him doesn't care in the slightest. "Complete your transfer. Kill Scott. Become Alpha of the McCall pack. Kill the rest of the McCall pack. Join us. Revel in power beyond your wildest fantasies."
Derek's brain swims as the eye contact with Deucalion holds. He can practically feel his thoughts rearranging themselves to match the logic of the offer.
In his periphery, he sort of halfway notices Isaac and Ethan moving a little more, maybe roused back to consciousness by the impending threat to their Alpha. Small motions are coming from Stiles' general direction, too.
"I can see you're struggling with the decision," Deucalion says. "Very well. You continue to ponder my offer, and I shall play another card." He turns from Derek, and the instant the eye contact drops, Derek's brain unfogs.
He's hit with a wall of guilt that's nearly instantly transformed into unadulterated rage. He lets out a roar, pulls his claws from the floor, and is actually a few inches into his leap at Deucalion when the Alpha who kicked him takes quick, messy swipes at his brachial arteries. Derek collapses back to the floor in a growing pool of his own blood, already lightheaded, well-familiar with the depth of cuts meant to weaken, not kill.
"Thank you, Teddy," Deucalion says in an off-handed sort of way. "Now, Scott. Rome, would you help our good friend to his feet, please?"
Scott makes it mostly on his own, shrugging away from Rome's grasp so strongly that he nearly falls again. Derek watches the Alphas face one another through narrowed eyes, focusing his energy on forcing himself to heal faster.
"It doesn't work like that," Laura says, eyes huge and dark as she sits by his bed.
Derek, eleven years old, just winces and tries to visualize his bone knitting back together.
"Even if we could speed it up by wishing, an Alpha broke your leg, Derek," Laura presses. "Wounds from an Alpha don't heal as quickly."
"Go away, Laura," Derek says crossly.
"You shouldn't have been in Newman territory anyway," Laura continues, as if she hadn't heard him. "We didn't have permission, and their Alpha had every right to teach you a lesson."
"Stop talking to me like you're my Alpha!" Derek shouts, his face flushing with embarrassment. "You're not! You'll never be my Alpha!"
Derek jolts out of the memory in time to hear Scott say, "We've been through this. It's not going to happen."
"Don't you want to know, Scott?" Mara purrs, and she must have slunk up behind Stiles at some point when Derek wasn't paying attention because now she's running claws lightly over the boy's pulse points. Stiles' eyes are wide with alternating panic and anger and something that looks like nausea, little movements still quaking his body every few seconds. "What that sort of power feels like?"
Scott squares his shoulders, and Derek is once again struck by the younger wolf's presence and sheer…Alpha-ness. Alpha-ness? How much blood am I losing? "I wasn't interested in that type of power then, and I'm not interested in it now."
Seated on the couch once more, Deucalion shrugs carelessly. "Perhaps. But what you want right now doesn't matter nearly as much as what Felix wants."
And there it is. Derek's internal alarm shoots to Defcon 1. He doesn't know who the fuck Felix is, but adding a new element to the game at this stage? The way Deucalion let the words slip over his tongue, like a delicacy he was loathe to let go? And the way Stiles' eyes are huge in his head and he's gagging around the fabric in his mouth, trying desperately to get something out?
We're in trouble.
"Who's Felix?" Scott demands.
There's a nearly imperceptible motion in the corner of the room, but every eye in the room tracks to it immediately when a man a few years older than Derek steps out of the shadows. He makes fierce eye contact with Scott, who lets out a gurgled sort of choking noise. The power shift in the room is palpable.
"I'm Felix, pup," the newcomer says. "And I'm your Alpha."
Scott takes several deep breaths, and the bit of Derek's brain that's most addled from blood loss temporarily wonders if you can get startled back into human illnesses, like Scott's childhood asthma. "You may have made me," Scott says after a long minute, "but you are not my Alpha."
Derek, in that moment, is ridiculously and irrationally proud.
Felix looks over Scott's shoulder to where Stiles, red in the face from trying to shout warnings around his gag, is still bound to a chair. "Kill him."
Scott visibly shudders, but maintains his glare. "No."
Felix takes a step forward, sharing the same breathing room as Scott. They're both shining Alpha-red eyes, and there's absofuckinglutely no way that they're all getting out of this alive –
As it does in the impossible moment right before the shit truly hits the fan, Derek's world pauses. Instead of his life flashing before his eyes, though, he gets a detailed catalog of the scene in front of him:
Ethan, lurching to his knees as he fights off the sedative.
Deucalion, calmly finishing off the last of his wine.
Rome and Teddy, silently advancing on Scott from either side.
Isaac, eyes glinting gold as he repeatedly snaps a finger to trigger the healing process.
Mara, Cassidy, and Kaelie, leaning against a wall and watching the tension build with hungry looks painted all over their disturbingly beautiful features.
Stiles, who had been silently and frantically rubbing the ropes binding his ankles against the rough edges of the homemade chair for who knows how long, until they finally gave.
Stiles, finally not a focal point for any of the Alphas, tilting his chair-prison onto its back legs.
Stiles, who notices Derek watching him, gives a fucking wink, and throws his entire body weight forward while simultaneously pushing off with the balls of his feet.
The world snaps back to full speed as Derek watches Stiles force the chair into a complete somersault mid-air and crash into the ground, splintering the back and seat of the chair into dozens of pieces.
Stiles is on his feet almost immediately, discarding bits of rope and pulling the gag away from his head. He spits a mouthful of what looks like woodchips on the floor, coughs, and gives Deucalion an exasperated look when his hand comes away from his mouth bloody.
"Honestly, Duke," he croaks, "Points for creativity and being thorough and all that shit, but I'm going to be digging splinters out of my gums for a week."
"How?!" Mara shrieks, looking like she's seconds from jumping Stiles in a fit of rage. "The chair was Romanian Oak!"
"He didn't use magic to escape," Cassidy comments, her voice the steady neutral it always is. "Persistence and friction."
"Bingo, baby," Stiles says, pointing finger guns at her as he staggers a few steps toward Derek. "Also a quick lesson in Hunter initiation from my good friend Chris Argent." One of the other Alphas – Teddy or Rome, Derek's having trouble telling them apart – or staying awake – or breathing – moves to intercept him, but Deucalion barks out a quick order to stand down, watching Stiles move with something close to fear on his face.
Stiles drops to his knees at Derek's side, cackling a little. "That's right, Duke-y – remember what I did to your precious little pack of Alphas." Inexplicably, he chooses this moment to strip off his shirt, revealing a chest, back, and set of shoulders heavily marked in spiraling, interconnected black tattoos. "You knew about the ward, you knew to use Romanian Oak," he says, casually dipping two fingers into Derek's cooling blood and using it to paint new symbols onto his skin. "You know enough to be wary. But how much do you actually know, Deucalion? How much do you know about what I learned in the Azador Caves? What I saw in the Islwyn Mountains? What I did along the banks of the Čierny Váh?"
Stiles' voice is ramping up to madness, and no one answers. Derek finds his fingers ghosting along the black patterns adorning Stiles' spine.
"No? You sure?" Stiles prompts. He's again met with silence, and when he speaks next, all hilarity and light has gone out of his voice and his hands are finally still. His eyes, dark and piercing, seem to focus on everyone and no one at once.
"You have twenty-four hours. Actually, scratch that – twelve. Twelve hours to get out of this entire half of the goddamn country, or I am coming after you. And what I did before – torching a dozen of you in an instant of blind grief – will seem merciful in comparison to how I will slowly strip each of you of hope, soul, and flesh until the last sound you hear is yourself gurgling for breath through the blood pooling in your lungs. Do we have an understanding?"
There is an interminable moment of singular, deafening silence.
Then Stiles gives a little shiver against Derek's fingers on his back and looks down to him. "No flirting until we get home, Sourwolf."
With that, he cracks a bloody, lopsided grin, presses a bloody hand to his own bloody chest, and mutters something under his breath.
Bree plays her favorite screaming alt-rock Russian ska band particularly loudly on the drive to the hospital for two reasons:
One, because Stiles is bleeding out in the backseat of Isaac's ancient Chevy and Danny said to keep him awake as long as possible.
Two, to passive-aggressively reinforce that this is not her favorite part of being in the McCall pack. The people she cares about most on the brink of death, semi-frantic trips to the ER when it's one of the humans or too severe for werewolf healing to handle without a jumpstart from modern medicine, frantic group texts with the three nurses and two doctors they know at Stovington General to see who's on shift and can help them avoid tricky things like the paperwork incurred by injuries accrued during a midnight battle with a Wendigo.
Yeah. Not her favorite part.
To be fair, Bree muses, it's been relatively calm for the last year. Relatively for this pack, anyway.
If she's being entirely honest, she knew it wasn't going to last. She's a born werewolf, raised in a family-built pack that roamed the eastern side of the Rockies in what amounted to a biker gang, picking fights with rival packs and local law enforcement whenever there wasn't something more...unusual around to keep them busy. And there was almost always something unusual around. It just seemed to work that way – like attracts like, or some Zen crap like that.
Bree takes a corner at top speed, floors it on the straightaway.
The decision to leave her old pack hadn't been hard. She picked Greymar because it it's small and out of the way and offers great financial aid, and stumbled into the McCall pack during the first full moon of her new life. They're absolutely nothing like her old pack – except at times like this.
When Stiles gets kidnapped by the psycho Alphas. And Scott, Isaac, Ethan, and their mostly-adopted pseudo-Faculty Advisor Derek go off to save him, leaving Bree alone with a recuperating Danny, a guilt-stricken Cole, and a…well, a Tink.
And then Bree spends two hours obsessively cleaning the pack house because what the hell else is she supposed to do, her Cultural Anthropology reading?
And then all five of them are somehow magically transported directly into the living room, covered in blood and bruises and most of them clearly with some strain of wolfsbane in their systems and Scott all shaken and distraught and Derek starting to heal but basically looking like vampires got to him and Stiles taking care of everyone else and doing healing spells and refusing to even sit down until absolutely everyone else is stable and then nonchalantly announcing that he has a few broken ribs and a punctured lung and could Bree please take him to the hospital because his spells don't work on himself and UGH –
Bree turns the music up a little bit louder.
She knows it's different with this pack. Logically speaking, she knows that.
This moment always feels the same, though. That knot of cold and tension and uncertainty that somehow manages to clog up your stomach, your heart, and your throat all without leaving that nasty little spot just inside your right ear that whispers something is very, very wrong over and over when you're trying to sleep, when you're trying to keep it together, when you're trying to drive one of your very best friends to the hospital –
Bree's phone buzzes, and she kills the music just in time to hear her text-to-speech app haltingly announce, "Text from – Joe Dawson. I'm on to-night. Waiting for – you. Winter – is coming."
Despite everything, Bree lets out a short explosion of laughter and heaves a sigh of relief. Joe Dawson, their favorite ER nurse, must have paged Dr. Sarah Winters, who'd been a little bit in the loop ever since the pack saved her daughter from a wildfire (somewhat inadvertently, they'd been hunting a rouge Omega when the blaze started) last summer.
"You're going to be fine, Stiles," Bree says firmly, eyeing his pale form lying across the backseat. "You have one perfectly functioning lung. Asking for two is just greedy."
Stiles gives her a weak thumbs-up.
Bree turns the music back on.
Unbelievably, life pretty much goes back to normal on Monday.
Derek forces himself to wake up for his 5AM run, and he doesn't completely hate the (Scott-mandated) company provided by a silent-but-amicable Ethan. He teaches classes at 9 and 11AM, has lunch with Austin and a few of the TAs, and holds office hours until his last class at 3:30. His students, leading their blissfully-supernatural-free lives, grumble about it being Monday. He goes back to his apartment, does laundry, throws some of the "extra" hardware pieces at his fucking Ikea bookshelf in hopes that it will magically finish itself overnight, and goes to bed.
It's really fucking bizarre.
"Yeah?" Isaac calls in response to the light knock on the main Psych Lab door.
"Sorry – excuse me?" A lilting female voice echoes around the corners.
"Yeah, what is it?" Isaac calls back. He doesn't both putting book down or taking his feet off the desk yet. A1944K2 still has a ways to go.
"I'm here for the experiment? I'm in Psych 100?"
"Is that a question?" Isaac shouts.
"No, I – I am in Psych 100!"
"Good to know! What are you doing here?"
There's a brief pause in which Isaac tries to place her accent – Irish, maybe? - and when she speaks again, she's closer. By a little.
"I just transferred to Greymar, so I'm a little behind on coursework Dr. Roderick said that participating in one of the ongoing studies was an opportunity for extra credit."
Scottish? "Okay, good for you."
"Yes! How do I get in?
"Get in where?" Not for the first time, Isaac wishes they had cameras posted in the hallways. He's been working as a moderator for experiments the Psych grad students design for a over a year, and this is by far his favorite role – be as neutrally unhelpful as you possibly can. It's a fairly straightforward cost/benefit analysis, really: put the entry door and the sign-in desk on opposite sides of what amounts to a maze/obstacle course, provide no guidance, and see who actually makes it to the desk and receives their extra credit.
"Get in to the experiment!"
Isaac chuckles, mentally placing bets on what type she'll turn out to be. Some either start cursing at him or quit within minutes; some good-natured-ly wander the maze – which takes exactly 32 seconds to navigate if you know the path – for 15 minutes or so before either finding him or calling it quits in a swing of quiet frustration; a few particularly alert individuals make the deductive leap that finding the experiment is the experiment and either throw up their hands in disgust or work their way around corners while happily berating him for being useless.
All in all, it's a pretty good gig.
"Are you really not going to help?" The newcomer asks, and her voice is once again a bit closer.
"Help with what?"
"You're horrible," she replies, but Isaac can hear a smile in her voice. "This is the game, then, isn't it? You're timing how long it takes me to get there. Or waiting to see how long I'll try before giving up."
"You caught me," Isaac replies, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "I live to deceive."
"Oh, shut it," she says, definitely closer again. "For all I know, there's not even an exit to this and you're just watching from a remote control room."
Isaac raises an eyebrow, finally dropping his feet off the desk and pulling his observations notebook toward him. No one's thought of that particular scenario yet. He's just scratching in his initials and the time when her footsteps stop echoing as she enters the little control room where his desk resides. Without looking up, he holds out a small blue slip of paper, pauses the stopwatch, and starts to rattle off the spiel.
"Subject A1944K2, thank you for participating in this study and congratulations on completing your trial. Staple this piece of paper to any of Roderick's assignments for an extra 5 points. It's tied to your subject ID, so we'll know if you duplicate it or sell it or anything like that, okay, A1944K2?"
"Natalie," she interrupts him, and he finally looks up from his notes to see the unbelievably pretty girl standing just a few feet away from him.
"Natalie," he agrees.
Ten minutes later, Isaac Lahey has a date.
600 miles away, Lydia Martin waltzes through the door with a designer briefcase/handbag draped from one elbow and a reusable canvas bag containing Indian take-out from the other.
"Malia, darling," she calls, depositing her Coach in one chair and the food on a countertop. "Stop inadvertently causing the neighbors to suspect domestic abuse and come eat dinner."
The banshee's roommate appears on cue, trotting out of the spare bedroom that serves as a rough home gym and ripping boxing hand wraps from her wrists with blunt, human teeth. "That was one time. And it's not my fault that Palo Alto-ans are completely oblivious to the world of MMA." She quickly washes her hands in the sink before stuffing her head halfway inside the bag, breathing in so deeply it's like she thinks she can inhale sustenance. "Chicken pulao? You're amazing."
"I know," Lydia attests, lightly pushing Malia's face out of the way and proceeding to elegantly plate each dish. She might concede to eating in front of the TV instead of at the table (insisting that Malia sit on the floor so she doesn't sweat all over the faux-leather sofa, of course), but that doesn't mean they have to be barbarians.
Malia bounces to the floor and stuffs a whole piece of naan into her mouth, making orgasmic sounds as she chews with her eyes closed. "Amazing," she echoes faintly,
They trade daily updates over the food, CNN playing on mute in the background. It's quiet as often as it's conversational, but that's common for them. Even two years later, it's still strange to be so far from the rest of the pack, so they bask in these little moments when they tiny sub-pack is home, safe, together.
Lydia can't even imagine what it must be like for Kira.
As Lydia's brain is, you know, Lydia's brain, she needs at least four concurrent trains of thought to stay occupied, so in addition to the conversation with Malia, monitoring CNN, and the planning her Linear Algebra 3 assignment, she finds herself once again analyzing her best friend, pondering how strongly she reminds Lydia of Stiles. The two had dated during senior year until Alpha Pack: The Sequel, when the added stress of that situation had caused them to realize that they're basically the same somewhat immature, anxious, deeply damaged, incredibly dangerous person. They'd split up in a rather horrific public meltdown a week before everything fell apart, and when Stiles went AWOL, Lydia had expected Malia to entirely come undone – but she didn't. She'd gotten teary-eyed at a single pack meeting, when Stiles' customary beanbag chair was left unoccupied, and that was it. The next day, her game face was on and no one dared ask if she was okay again.
Malia reminds Lydia of Allison, sometimes, too.
"When's your last midterm?" Lydia asks suddenly, interrupting both her own perilous musings and Malia's ramblings about the girl in her Public Health class she had a crush on.
"Uh, couple weeks?" Malia guesses, completely not bothered by Lydia's interjection. She rolls onto her stomach and snags her backpack with one finger, digging through it to find her planner and nearly knocking a plate of Mattar Paneer onto the carpet with a stray limb in the process. "Yeah," she confirms after flipping a few pages, "October 26, PoliSci312. Why?"
"Good," Lydia says, crumbling a piece of naan into dust with her day-old manicure as she finally acknowledges what her supernatural Spidey senses – to use a trademark Stilinski phrase – have been bugging her about for days. "We're going to need to leave for Portland the next day."
"Portland?" Malia thinks for a second, then her face clears. "You mean Greymar, to see the pack? We got the all-clear yesterday, Lyds. Stiles is safe. Derek's safe. Everything's fine."
"For now," Lydia agrees, refusing to make eye contact. Malia knows better than to ask probing questions – Lydia will offer information freely when she's ready, when she knows more – but she gently stops Lydia's frantically moving fingers after another minute and crouches down, inserting herself directly into the other girl's line of sight.
"How worried should I be?" Malia asks softly.