AN: So another late update. I would apologize, but I'm sure you'd rather I just updated more often. The good news is that the next chapter is about 85% done, so it will be up by the end of next week, then I think if I post a triple next month that should catch me up, maybe? I don't know. My original posting schedule is kind of all over the place. I completely lost track. Hope you guys enjoy.
Leave thoughts. They make my day, and it's always good to hear what you guys are thinking. I'm going to try and catch up on responding to reviews this week as well as posting again.
I do not own Arrow/Flash/Teen Wolf.
Derek was getting impatient waiting outside of the Queen mansion. He'd called Oliver only to get his voicemail, then called John only to get his voicemail, next he'd called Sara who said Oliver was at the mansion and if it was an emergency to go there, so here he was, standing on the Queen's front stoop with three maps under one arm, ringing the doorbell repeatedly until someone answered the door to let him in.
He heard the sound of footsteps approaching and was about to rip into Oliver when he opened the door only to not get sound out of his mouth when he realized Oliver wasn't the person who opened the door.
"Young man, do you have any idea how incredibly rude you're being?" Moira Queen asked.
Derek's expression quickly went from angry to mortified. "I am so sorry Mrs. Queen. Oliver called me late last night claiming it was an emergency and when he didn't show up earlier this morning I assumed this was his poor attempt at a very cruel practical joke."
"Derek," Oliver said, quickly walking over to the front door from the other room. "Did something happen?"
"You could say that," Derek ground out.
"Come in. Mom, you remember Derek Hale," Oliver said while motioning for the other man to enter the house.
Moira Queen's eyes opened in surprise while she took a closer look at the dark haired man in front of her. "Of course. You've grown so much since your family's last visit I didn't recognize you. How are you and your siblings? We were so sorry to hear about Laura."
"We're adjusting," Derek replied. "Lis and I are doing what we can to keep the company going, Isaac is swamped with school work, and Cora is studying abroad in Buenos Aires."
"Isaac?" Moira questioned.
"Our adopted brother," Derek answered. "Mom started the paperwork shortly before she died, but with her death, we couldn't get everything finalized until recently. He's Cora's age."
"Well, hopefully, we can all get together sometime soon, catch up," Moira said.
"That sounds good." Derek nodded. "And I'm sorry about the doorbell."
"Don't worry about it. I'm just happy to see you two boys getting along finally." She smiled.
"We're going to be in the kitchen," Oliver told his mom. "Working breakfast."
Moira nodded in understanding. "Try not to cause too much damage to the appliances. I know how you two can get when you disagree."
"We'll try," Derek said.
They both waited for Moira to head back towards the stairs before moving towards the kitchen, and once there Oliver closed the doors and began clearing thing off the table. "I was in the shower when you called. John's talking to some military contacts seeing if they can locate Felicity through her phone's GPS."
"Tell him not to bother." Derek pulled Felicity's destroyed phone in small Ziploc out of his pocket placed it on the table. "She's had too much practice covering her tracks to make a rookie mistake like hanging onto something with GPS."
"Are you sure she's not staying with her uncle or one of her friends?" Oliver double checked. "It's not like her to just leave without a word."
"Lis didn't leave," Derek corrected. "She's running, and I don't mean running away. It's part of her process. She isolates herself and then pushes her past her limits to the point of physical exhaustion. Last time something like this happened she went on a week-long bender in New Orleans and nearly got herself killed; if Marcel hadn't been there she'd be dead." Derek left out the part where several witches had tried to kill her for unrelated reasons, but he was trying to point out how serious the situation was. "And if you think my sister has other friends she trusts enough to go to with this, clearly you don't know her as well as I thought. Honestly, she probably has more trust issues than you."
"Ok, so if she's not partying, what would she be doing to push herself?" Oliver asked.
"She'll head for heavily wooded areas," Derek answered. He spread out one of the maps on the table and revealed a large satellite picture of the state, with the borders marked in yellow. "Lis wouldn't leave the state, not by herself. Marcel told me she had called him but when he tried to get her to explain what happened she hung up. He said Thierry volunteered to check on her, but when I stopped by the house I didn't see a sign of either of them being there." Derek pulled a marker out of his jacket pocket and started circling some of the possibilities.
"Why wooded areas?" Oliver questioned.
"It's something we've done since we were kids," Derek answered. "Our mom always encouraged us to spend time outside whenever possible. The woods are where we feel comfortable, where we feel the safest. Whenever one of us would get upset, we'd find a spot without people nearby and just lose ourselves in nature. There was this creek by our aunt and uncle's house, that was Lis' favorite place. They could never clear the surrounding brush out to farm, because the ground wasn't stable enough so that's where she went to feel closer to us. As much as she is loath to admit it, she's had more survivalist training than me and my other siblings combined. She'd live on a deserted island if it had a decent internet connection and a shipping address."
"Are there any activities she would favor: climbing, biking, swimming?"
"She wouldn't bring much with her if anything really." Derek shook his head. "She hates climbing. She would need open access to water, though."
"These areas are parks." Oliver pointed to two places on the map. "They're popular with campers this time of year."
"No. She'd want something away from people and traffic." Derek pulled out a translucent road map, and placed it over the first one, using the new layout to narrow down the possibilities. "Too much traffic in those." He crossed off two areas. "That one is surrounded by highways."
"What about here?" Oliver pointed to a spot near the southern border.
"No that's too close to the state line." Derek left out the part where not even a mile away there was a known associate of the Calaveras who had not signed the peace treaty and would shoot any wolf on sight.
Derek heard the side door open and hurried booted steps approach. "Have you heard anything?" Oliver asked.
"None of my contacts were able to track Felicity's movements more recently than two days ago. Wherever she is, she's not using her computer." John told them.
"She destroyed her phone and flushed it for good measure," Derek replied, motioning to the destroyed electronic.
"Lyla couldn't find anything on her credit card statements either." John let out a heavy sigh. "But I called Lance to see if he could check out CCTV, he said there was a noise complaint at Felicity's house last night and when he got there to check it out she was drunk, her house was trashed, and there was a weird guy there who claimed to know Sara."
"Thierry." Derek groaned.
"Something you feel like sharing?" Oliver asked.
"He took her on a run. Which means we have about six hours to find where they went before there's a good chance Lis won't want to come back."
They were running through the woods, or rather, the more accurate description was Felicity was running while Thierry poked and prodded her with annoying objects when she slowed down, most of them sticks. Her friend was steadily going from one of her favorite people to one of her least. Why Thierry had the brilliant idea to go to some private heavily wooded area (despite being asleep for most of the travel time she knew what a no trespassing sign looked like) to run around for several hours and not stop short of fainting mid-step from exhaustion.
"This is the worst idea you've ever had!" Felicity hissed. "And that includes the time you wanted me to help you count cards so you could pay for that stupid boat ticket to replace a substitute trumpet player on a goddamned river cruise."
"It was a charity event," Thierry replied.
"You used it to get laid."
"Well the original intention was to go to college," He said.
"Except the woman you slept with was the scout's kid and you wound up getting blacklisted from every jazz music program south of the Mason-Dixon line," she argued. "Something no amount of compulsion or an army of vampires can fix."
"Is it really necessary to rub salt in that particular wound? I already apologized for using your genius for personal gain and Marcel made me drink straight vervain for a week when he found out I took you to a casino." Thierry shuddered at the memory.
"Yes, it really is. We are running in the woods on private property because, for some strange odd reason, you seem to think participating in our own private marathon is going to help me," Felicity snapped. "This is not helping."
"Less talking more running." Thierry smiled, prodding her in the back again with a pointed stick.
"I fucking hate you."
"As soon as the sun sets we can stop and make camp for the night," he told her. "Make a fire, scrounge up some rabbits, eat a nice filling dinner before we do what we came here to do."
"I'm too exhausted to keep going for another-" she looked down at her wrist at the barely used watch Thierry had forced her to wear. "Three hours!" She stopped in her astonishment.
"C'mon, no stopping." He poked her two times, but she wasn't moving. "You know it's worse if you stop."
"No."
"Lis, kiddo, I need you to trust me on this."
"No." She snapped. "What are we doing here?"
"Because the last time something like this happened you nearly died from alcohol poisoning," he pointed out. "You weren't even in town for two days before Marcel and I had to check you into the hospital, and you don't even remember us having to do it. What's worse is that while you were out of it, you were antagonizing the witches and the packs, because despite being your best friends, despite knowing you for almost a decade, you didn't trust us enough to let us help you."
"And trespassing on private property and running me ragged is helping?" Felicity scoffed.
"It's better than you getting completely plastered and jeopardizing your life. Something you were on the verge of doing when I got to your house last night." Thierry snapped. "You could've died last night, between the flying glass, trashing your computers, and getting drunk on whiskey, you're lucky your house didn't catch fire."
"I was fine!"
"Were you? Because from where I was standing you weren't." Thierry sighed and dropped the stick before leaning over for a few deep breaths of air.
"Look, I'm not good with all of this wolf stuff, ok," the vampire tried to explain. "I'm a book person, and wolves are not book people, they don't write their shit down. You either hear about it from other wolves or you don't, and until recently neither of us were in a position to really hear about this type of stuff, you know? But I know you. We've been friends for more than nine years and when you told me about getting your wolf back I was so happy for you, but now I'm afraid for you. I'm afraid because the one thing I do know about wolves is that when they don't deal with their emotions they lose control and black out only to wake up surrounded by bodies, and I don't want that to happen to you. So I thought if I brought you out here and I helped you through the only tradition I knew about then you wouldn't have to go through that."
Felicity nodded in understanding. "How about if you stop trying to run me to the point where I'm too tired to move and worrying so much, I'll stop acting like a petulant self-destructive teenager and let you help me through the rest of this tradition/ritual thing."
"I can work with that."
"How could you be so stupid?" Derek yelled into his phone.
"Hey, I'm not the one that sent her running in the first place," Marcel said. "She called me because she wanted my help, not yours."
"And breaking your mutual friend out of prison, the prison that you put him in might I add, and having him come up here to help with my emotionally overloaded sister who has a biological impulse to kill him three nights a month is your idea of helping?" Derek replied. "What the hell is wrong with you? What happens when they start talking and Lis realizes Thierry has been desiccating for the past three months? Or when she finds out that Katy, one of the few witches she actually considered a semi-decent human being, was killed by your crazy father figure trying to break Thierry out? Or when she finds out that you've been lying about said father figure's whereabouts for weeks?"
"Thierry won't tell her anything," Marcel replied. "Klaus isn't her problem to deal with, he's mine, and Thierry knows if he mentions the Mikaelson's being back in the quarter it's going to be a bloodbath. He wouldn't put Felicity in danger like that."
"That doesn't mean he won't accidentally let something slip. If Felicity finds out the original hybrid is in the quarter, she's going to go down there and try to do the responsible thing, and if Klaus finds out there's a different type of hybrid, one who isn't bound by the laws of the universe, he's going to turn her blood into a freaking commodity," Derek continued.
"I know." Marcel sighed. "I lived with the Mikaelson's for more than 100 years, you think I don't know how the man who raised me is going to respond to that type of challenge? Felicity being in the quarter right now is something neither of us want."
Derek covered the mouthpiece of his phone and let out a frustrated growl, before going back to the conversation. "You know Thierry the best. Where would he take her?"
"I told you, he'd take her somewhere isolated, somewhere she was comfortable, but wouldn't run the risk of anyone getting hurt if she lost control," Marcel said.
"But what would they be doing?" Derek pushed.
"How the hell am I supposed to know. Thierry is the one who knows all of the different traditions, not me. They could be holed up in his stupid cabin going on a peyote-fueled vision quest or halfway down to Mexico to turn themselves into the Calaveras. I don't know. What did you do when you had your first kill?"
"Those were entirely different circumstances," Derek said.
"I'm not saying they weren't, but you and your older sister are alike enough in personality to accurately guess what is probably going through her mind right now."
Derek sighed. "She's probably angry and ashamed. I mean, she just had her first kill, that's bound to trigger a lot of deeply buried emotional baggage."
"Trigger," Marcel said. "Thierry said when young wolves trigger their curse there's a pack bonfire where they do some sort of remembrance thing. What if they went to the cabin to do that? Felicity doesn't have any other wolves in her pack, so what if Thierry is trying to go through the motions with her hoping it's enough so she doesn't black out later?"
"Do you have an address?" Derek asked.
"I'll text it to you, just make sure they're both ok."
"Tell me there is a point to this," Felicity said as she poked the embers of their small campfire with a stick. "It's really disappointing to have a campfire and not be roasting marshmallows, so this tiny pit of heat-induced chemical reactions better have a point to it."
"You know, for someone very determined to learn about her culture, you don't tolerate much when it comes to the other type of werewolves," Thierry replied.
"I have my reasons," Felicity said. "And the only reason I'm so determined to learn is so I can change things. I don't want what happened to me to happen to anyone else."
"It won't." Thierry told her. "As far as anyone knows that spell has only been used twice in all of recorded history."
"And what about unrecorded history?" She asked.
"Lis-"
"And even if it only has been used twice, that's still two times too many." Felicity added. "No one should have their soul ripped in half like that for simply being born."
"What is this about?" Thierry asked. "Did something happen with one of the other packs?"
"The North East Atlantic pack contacted me," Felicity said. "They've put in a formal request for my assistance in training their heir when they come of age."
"The North East Atlantic pack doesn't have an heir," Thierry replied. "The North East Atlantic pack are nomads. They haven't had an heir for 1000 years."
"Trust me, I am very aware of the implications." Felicity sighed.
"Wait, if they contacted you, what does that mean?" Thierry asked. "Shouldn't they have contacted a closer alpha, an alpha from their own subspecies?"
"There are two reasons why they would contact me, if the heir was able to control the shift, or if they were a royal," Felicity said. "Considering the pack and who their current alpha is my money is on the first option."
"But it could be a royal." Thierry pointed out.
"If they had a fixed royal they would have shouted it from every rooftop in North America, and can you honestly believe, from the stories we've heard, that Klaus Mikaelson would give away his title?"
"I think Klaus Mikaelson giving away his title is more plausible than him having a kid. He's a vampire Felicity. We can't have kids. We're dead."
"I know. Ok, trust me I know." Felicity groaned. "I can't even believe this is the conversation I'm choosing to have with you right now. I mean, I just killed someone, and we're sitting here talking about politics, like this is normal, like I'm not precariously close to falling over the edge with my grief-induced self-destructive tendencies."
They both sat there in silence, gazing into the flames as if the answers to their problems would be magically provided to them.
"You didn't fall over the edge," Thierry said. "Yeah, you lashed out, but you also asked for help. So you yelled and threw things on the floor, who doesn't from time to time. Your pack will forgive you for that and so will Derek. The important thing is that you're safe, and when you're ready to talk about what happened you have people who will listen to you without judgment."
Felicity nodded in understanding. "So what exactly is the point of this?"
"We sit. We eat. We drink." He pointed to the dead rabbits and water bottles he had sitting next to his feet. "We remember." He pulled out a pair of fingerless gloves from his pocket. "I stole these from SCPD evidence lock up last night when you were sleeping. They were his." He handed the gloves to her.
"Why did you take them?"
"Some packs have memorials to remember their fallen, and others have memorials to remember the people who are responsible for terrible evils, but there's at least one pack I know of that keeps things that belonged to the people they've killed, not as trophies, but to remember that life is precious and to come to terms with what they'd done. I thought, if you wanted to, you could start a memorial like that out here," Thierry offered.
"I couldn't." She shook her head back and forth. "This place is your sanctuary. I couldn't take it away from you."
"You're not, I'm offering. I want you to do this. Besides, it's not like I'm going to be able to spend a lot of time here in the future anyways." He sighed. "If you had any idea how much crap I've had to put up with since the funeral." He paused trying to figure out how to explain everything without worrying his friend. "I just need a break for a little while, and as much as I love this place, hiding here would be like sticking a giant neon sign with an arrow visible from outer space announcing my location."
"You could stay with me," she suggested.
"That would be a slightly smaller neon sign and we both know it."
Felicity nodded. She stood up and placed the gloves near the trunk of a tree, far enough away from the cabin and the fire where they wouldn't be disturbed, but close enough they were visible and wouldn't be bothered by the local wildlife.
"You'd tell me, right? If you weren't ok?" She asked sitting back down on the log.
"Of course." He smiled. "This is just one of those situations where I have to bury myself in a hole somewhere and ride it out until everything blows over because there's nothing I can do to fix it and it's not my fight."
"Yeah, I am intimately familiar with that feeling." She chuckled. "So, rabbits. Do people still eat rabbits?"
"You've never eaten rabbit? Oh, Felicity Smoak, be prepared for the best rotisserie meat in your entire life." He joked.
"If you had any idea how hungry I was you wouldn't joke about this."
"Who said I was joking? I get to squeeze out the blood, you get the leftover meat. This right here is a match made in heaven."
She rolled her eyes. "Don't be such an ass."
"I can't believe we're doing this," Oliver said.
"Shh." Derek spun around and held one finger to his lips. "My sister is out here, either having some much-needed self-reflection time or turning into a hermit and building a yurt out of animal skins. Only one of those options is good for everyone's continued well-being because yurt building zombie Felicity scares the ever loving crap out of me, and if she finds out we're skulking through the woods to find her against her will, our chances of becoming zombie food increase significantly. So shut up, and skulk more quietly."
"So what do we do if we encounter zombie Felicity?" John asked.
"Pray to whatever god you believe in for a quick and relatively painless death," Derek replied.
"I can't tell if he's being serious," John whispered to Oliver.
Oliver shrugged in reply as they continued on their trek, having completely given up on trying to guess Derek's mood at any given point.
Suddenly the was a loud crack of a branch snapping and the three men started looking at each other accusingly.
"You guys have taken creepy to a whole new level," a new voice said.
The men all spun around and saw Thierry holding a dead deer over his shoulders and a look of amusement in his eyes.
"I hope you're hungry. I didn't kill this bad boy for nothing." He started heading in the direction they had been moving towards at a faster pace, and when he didn't hear anyone moving behind him, he turned around. "Seriously, do I need to mail you formal invitations?"
Oliver, John, and Derek hurried to bridge the gap and after a few minutes they saw Felicity tending a fire with four rabbits roasting on some type of spit, and a small cabin a little farther away.
"You'll never guess who I found," Thierry said as he threw the deer on the ground.
"I'm not sure if I'm surprised or relieved," Felicity told them after looking over their appearances.
"We were worried," Derek said.
"Obviously." She replied.
Felicity didn't move from her spot by the fire and the guys just stood where they were awkwardly, while Thierry was standing to the side and kept looking between the two groups, only for all four of their gazes to shift to him after a few minutes. "I'm going to clean the deer." He picked up the animal and put it back over his shoulders. "Behind the house, so you can talk."
"So," Derek began. "You look well."
"You saw the house," Felicity guessed.
"We're you hurt?" Oliver asked.
"No. I wasn't hurt." She answered. "I'm sorry I yelled at you guys. You didn't deserve that."
"So you're camping?" John guessed.
"Considering my previous history with self-destructive behaviors when dealing with personal tragedy, I felt it was necessary to seek assistance from friends who are more used to dealing with said self-destructive behaviors," Felicity said. "I didn't want to hurt you on accident."
"Felicity-" Oliver began.
"No." She interrupted. "It's happened before, and I'm not going to pretend that it could never happen again. I have a lot of stuff to work through, not just about what happened with the Count, but some personal things that I've been putting off way too long."
"This is helping?" Derek asked. "Being here is actually helping?"
"It is." Felicity nodded. "I know what my being here looked like to you, Derek, but oddly enough Thierry had the right idea."
The group was silent for a few minutes. "Do you want us to go?" Oliver asked.
"No. It's dark out, and Thierry already killed that deer, and if we don't eat it now it'll attract scavengers, not to mention I'd be worried about whether or not you guys made it back to civilization ok, not that you three couldn't, because you probably could, it's just that I wouldn't have any real way of knowing since I destroyed my phone, and Thierry left his back with the rental car, so if you did, I mean when you did you couldn't call and tell me, and maybe I should convince him of getting a landline out here in case of emergencies, because like what if there's a fire, or maybe a bear attacks the cabin or a wolf could wander here on a full moon and no one would have any way of knowing- and I'm going to top in 3, 2, 1."
"I can come back now, right?" Thierry yelled.
"Yes." They all replied in unison.
There was a scuffling noise and Thierry was holding up the skinned hind portion of the deer in front of him. "Can one of you put this on the spit and another person light the other pit, while I finish with the other half. There's more wood by the side of the cabin. If we try and cook the whole thing over one fire, it's going to take forever."
"Sure." John agreed. He headed over towards the wood pile while Derek took the uncooked meat out of the vampire's hands.
"How did you skin that so fast?" Oliver asked.
"Practice," Thierry replied. "Sometimes I feel like I've been doing this for fifty years, you know?" He quickly headed back the way he came.
Oliver tilted his head to the side while he mulled over the other man's words.
Felicity chuckled and shook her head at her friend's antics. "Don't over think it Oliver. The truth is literally so simple it would shock you."
Oliver just shook his head back and forth before sitting down next to Felicity to help with the rabbits.
AN 2: Next chapter is part one of the introduction/unofficial Flash crossover event, and we get to see more of the TW pack in Starling City.