Feels train hitting you this chapter!
Shout out to:
*Bre: Yes, they always do. I don't know why but I don't mind :)
*Serena Sterling: Exactly! Yes, he is a little hard on Derek but I've always imagined Scott to be as protective, or even more so, of Ash like she is to him because of what their family has been through. But he will get over it :) You're welcome and thanks!
*momentum123: Yay! I will!
*Maxine Hale: They're tough ones those two ;) And shit has not hit the fan yet, not just yet, but soon!
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"You'll heal soon." Scott tells Derek, even though he's unsure because it's a pretty bad wound.
He helps the alpha walk up the stairs, supporting his weight while Derek does the same for him as Scott's ankle is broken but starting to heal.
Scott takes Derek into his loft since it's gotten late and they can both hear the even breathing of the sleeping people in the Hale loft.
But, as expected, Ash anticipated this. So, she's still awake, barely, waiting up for them.
She's just finally drifting off when the loft door is pulled open, the two males limping in. She snaps awake when it's closed again with a loud click that cuts through the air, making her jump.
"Oh, my god." She says, losing all signs of sleepiness when she sees the state Scott and Derek are in. She shoots off the couch, racing over to them.
"Careful, Ash." Scott gives her a heads up as she helps him get Derek to the sofa.
She's about to ask once they have him sitting, but she spots the blood before she even opens her mouth. She gently moves the back of his shirt, seeing the long, deep set of claw marks teared from his shoulder to his spine.
"It only clipped me. I'm okay." Derek says, smelling the worry that starts to come off of her, and Scott as well as the beta peeks at the wound properly now too.
"Scott, get my first aid kit." Ash says to her little brother because that is not just getting clipped.
"Ash, no. I'm fine, I've had worse." Derek says, meeting her eyes, trying to remind her of the last time he was at her place and covered in his own blood.
"Scott, go." Ash tells him anyway, ignoring Derek because those were different circumstances compared to these ones. She needs to stitch him up to help him heal, because doing what they did last time isn't really an option right now.
Scott nods, hobbling over to the stairs and using the railing to keep himself steady.
Ash frowns, realising he's hurt too, he was just better at hiding it.
"What the hell happened?" Ash asks Derek as she finishes the shredding job on his shirt, gently peeling it off him so she can inspect the wound properly.
"Two of the Skinwalkers jumped us. They want me dead, Ash." Derek says. "And they're not gonna stop until I am."
Ash ignores the way he says that directly, like he's doubting his decision to not break things off in an effort to protect her.
And he is, just a little. But, once again, his desire to have her has clouded over the thought that maybe breaking things off will keep her safe. Because, in reality, she'll never be safe. As much as Derek hates to say it, he is right. Beacon Hills isn't safe, even without these Skinwalkers. The truth that they all know, about the supernatural, they know about the world. They can never be truely safe anywhere, but hell, they can definitely try to keep each other safe.
"If Scott wasn't there, I would have been dead this time." Derek says.
That makes Ash frown, concerned. She doesn't want him just taking off into the woods by himself like that. She's just glad they're okay, because Derek hasn't always been this lucky in the past. And next time, one of them might not make it back in one piece. And that would shatter Ash's heart.
Scott comes down the stairs, the first aid kit in his hands.
Ash shakes away those depressing thoughts and jumps up behind Derek, sitting on the top of the back of the sofa so she's higher up than him where she an access the top of his wound. She takes the kit from Scott's out-stretched hand, opening it and starting to dig through it for what she requires.
"What happened to you?" Ash asks Scott, worried, her eyes jumping between threading a needle and over to Scott.
"My ankle..I think it's broken." Scott says, cringing when he feels some pain as he settles down on the other sofa where he can rest it for a moment.
"What can I do?" Ash asks, tying the end of the thread off.
"It'll heal on it's own by morning, nothing we can do." Scott tells her.
Ash is still frowning though.
"It's okay, Ash, really. I'll be fine, it's him that needs the help." Scott says, gesturing to Derek.
That's when Scott notices the alpha is now shirtless. Scott can now see how bad the wound really is.
"Yeah, focus on him. He needs your help right now." Scott says, frowning as he sees how deep and long the claw marks are.
"I don't need..ah." Derek cringes as Ash pushes the needle through the skin on the top of his shoulder without warning.
"Sorry." Ash says, making sure she's gentler the next time she does it. She gives his bicep a soft squeeze in apology too. She tries to be subtle about it but Scott notices, but he doesn't comment on it.
They're quiet for a half hour. Ash is still stitching, Scott's still healing, and Derek's still sitting still.
But Scott can't stop the yawn that passes his lips.
"I might get in bed." He says, covering his mouth with his hand. He looks between the two adults, knowing they still have alot of stitching up to do but Scott can't stay up any longer, he's exhausted. "Help me home when you're done and lock up when you're back." Scott says, telling them both that they will sleep in their own bed tonight, seperately.
"Yes, sir." Ash says without sarcasm, not wanting to make things worse than the night's events have already made things.
Scott goes upstairs to his room, leaving the two adults downstairs by themselves.
Ash finishes his stitches in a comfortable silence.
When she's done, she can see the wound trying to close, the skin coming back together.
"It's healing." Ash says.
"Yeah, I can feel it." Derek nods.
Ash isn't exactly sure what compells her to do it, but her hands slip to his shoulders.
Derek's posture softens and the tension high in his neck and back fades away when Ash starts to rub his shoulders, being careful of his healing wound though.
His mouth opens a little because it feels really good. He shuts his eyes and leans forward so his elbows rest on his knees making his back cock out a little more so she has better access to it.
Ash smiles softly and moves a little closer to him, sitting down behind him on the sofa.
"Feels good to be the one being taken care of for once, right?" She asks him.
"Yeah." He nods. "Maybe I should let you take care of me more often." He mumbles, getting lost in how amazing something so simple can feel when you're as wound up as he is.
"Was that a sexual innuendo?" Ash asks, amused.
"No, you've got that part down pat." He says, amusement in his voice as well now.
Ash blushes and continues to rub the knots out of his shoulders and the back of his neck.
"Jesus, Derek. When was the last time someone did this to you?" She asks him because he's so buckled in his back.
Werewolf abilities may heal physical wounds, but they don't heal stress of emotionally inflicted scars. They don't heal the many years of self-depise, guilt and anger he's carried around with him either.
"When my Mom was alive." Derek answers her truthfully.
Ash's hands slow until they stop, resting on his back.
"Sorry." Ash says gently.
"Don't apologise." He says, glancing back at her. "I started learning to shift when I was 12. It hurt in the beginning, it took a long time for my body to get used to the shift. She used to do this to all of us to help us when we first started, our hands too." He says, flexing his fingers a little.
"Because of the claws, right?" Ash asks.
"Yeah." He nods.
"Will you.." Ash trails off, unsure if she should ask. But she's too curious not too ask. "Will you tell me about them, about your family?" She asks cautiously.
Derek stiffens and stands up.
Ash knows right then that she should have kept her mouth shut.
"Maybe another day, alright?" He says. He says too exhausted to go through all of that after what him and Scott just went through.
"Yeah." Ash nods, even though she's already made the decision to never poke around in his family's business again, for his sake as well as her's. "C'mon, I'll help you home." She says, thinking she's ruined thier 'moment'.
Ash stands up and brings his arm around her shoulders.
The two walk over to the Hale loft, finding it quiet and dark inside.
"Stiles must be here." Ash comments, spotting his Jeep keys on the coffee table.
"Yeah, upstairs." Derek says, glancing in the direction of Jessie's bedroom where he can hear the boy's erratic heartbeat alongside his little sister's one.
"You're okay with that?" Ash asks, referring to Stiles sleeping in Jessie's room with her, as she helps him to sit down on his bed.
"I'm trying to be." Derek says honestly.
Ash gives him a soft smile because she knows how hard it is for an older sibling to let a younger sibling go. Ash had the same problem when Scott started dating Allison. And she knows she's definitely going to have that same problem, if not worse, when Jade's old enough to date.
"Okay.. Well.. Goodnight." Ash says awkwardly.
Derek catches her hand as she tries to walk away from him.
"Wait." He says.
She stops, facing him again. She glances down at his hand wrapped around her's and then back up to his face again.
"Don't go. Stay." He says.
"What?" Ash asks.
"Stay here, with me." Derek says.
"I mean..are you sure?" Ash asks him. "I-I thought you'd be mad at me about before.." She says.
"No, I'm not mad at you. And yeah, I'm sure." He says.
She keeps looking at him, unsure.
"C'mon." He says, nodding to his bed.
Ash nods slowly. He gets into bed, guiding her in as well so she abides, following his lead. She doesn't lay as close to him as she usually would, and that makes the wolf frown.
Yes, he knows she thought she did something wrong by asking about his family, he knows that, he could tell by the look on her face. But it wasn't wrong, Derek's reaction just jumped out of him like some kind of instinct. An instinct to guard the part of him that's still just that same broken 16 year old boy who lost his family and his home 6 years ago.
So, Derek wraps his arm around her waist, pulling her closer to him.
Ash is relieved by his actions, because she really thought she'd messed up. And now that Ash has stopped and laid down, and she's got Derek right here so she knows she's safe, she can feel exactly how tired she is. In fact, it only takes a few minutes for her eyes to droop, for it to be difficult to open them again.
Ash yawns softly, curling a little closer to Derek and his warmth. She blinks, finally letting her eyes stay shut this time as it's too much of a chore to keep them open anymore, and nuzzles her face againist his chest to get comfortable.
Derek brushes her hair gently out of her face, tightening his arm around her waist so she's just a little more closer to him, until they're laying as they usually sleep.
Derek tries too, but he can't get to sleep. He can't relax. He can't even keep his eyes shut for more than a few seconds.
He's been pensive since that question slipped from Ash's lips.
Will you tell me about them, about your family?
His family. His Mom, Tahlia. His Dad, Brandon. His big sister, Laura. His youngest sister, Cora. And, the man Peter used to be as well. All of them that died in the fire.
"We used to train together in the woods every Sunday." The words slip from Derek's mouth before he can stop himself.
Ash is startled back to conciousness when she hears him speak, his chest rumbling under her cheek. Her eyes peel open again and she looks up at him.
"Wha'?" She asks sleepily.
"In the woods, noone was around on Sunday nights. No joggers, walkers, runners, whatever. People stayed home, stayed with their families. So my family went deep into woods where we could shift and fight and train without anyone stumbling across us." He tells her.
"That's a hell of a bonding session." Ash says, more awake now as she realises this is Derek opening up to her about his family.
"It was." He says. "My Mom was only just starting to teach my sister to lead us, so she could take Mom's place when she stepped down."
"Your sister is Laura, right?" Ash asks him.
"She was the oldest one, yes."
"Wait..what do you mean?" Ash asks, becoming even more awake now. "I thought you only had the one other sister?" She questions.
"No." Derek shakes his head. He frowns a little bit.
"You don't have to tell me." Ash assures him, putting her hand on his chest when she sees those memories coming back to haunt him.
"No, I do." He says, because he knows about her past, about her family. It's time he told her some of his as well.
He sits up and Ash sits up as well, looking at him.
"Her name was Cora." Derek says. He's never told anyone about Cora before, him and Jessie never talk about her, not since the fire. "She was 2 when the fire happened."
Ash fells her stomach drop and she understands why this Cora has never come up before. Because she wasn't just a child, she was a baby. She was about Jade's age. There's something so horrible about losing someone so young, someone who's barely gotten a chance at life. And maybe that's part of the reason why Derek's always been protective of Jade, even when he and Ash weren't getting along.
"Jessie came home early and.." Ash sees the alpha's guard drop completely, more like crumble to pieces. "She saw it happening. Those scars on her forearm? She tried to get Mom out of the basement..she couldn't."
Ash actually feels tears sting behind her eyes because that's horrible, Ash couldn't imagine a worse hell than having to watch your family die and not be able to do anything to stop it.
Ash gently rubs his shoulder, trying to help soothe his lengths of emotional pain.
"I smelt the smoke first, and then the..rest of it." He doesn't say what it was he really smelt but it isn't hard to guess. Burning flesh. "I was running home, as fast as I could and I just..all I could hear were my family screaming. But the worst part? I could hear Cora crying from her nursey. Then it just..stopped. All the noise stopped. All of it aside Jessie screaming for help. And by the time I actually got there, it was too late, I couldn't do anything. The only thing I could do was help Jessie. Mom cut her deep, she didn't mean too. We sat there, I took Jessie's pain, and we waited for help to come. Laura didn't know what happened until the police called her. She pretty much took us right away after that, we moved to South America, far from the life we knew before." He tells her.
The room falls quiet after that and Derek refuses to look at her. He feels like there's this weight off his shoulders after talking to Ash about it, definitely not all of it, but some of it is gone, a little bit of it. And that makes him feel the slightest bit better.
Ash has no idea what to say back to that. She can say comforting things, but she knows nothing she could do or say will ever erase those memories from him or Jessie. And Ash hates that she can't help them.
"I'm so sorry, Derek." Ash says. "I..I'm sorry." She doesn't know what else to say to him.
"Yeah, me too." He nods.
He doesn't tell her about Kate, he knows some of the pack have their suspicions after the things they saw back then, but he also knows none of them would directly ask him. And he doesn't need to relive that part of it, because it makes him hate himself even more.
"It's late, we should get some sleep." He says, not wanting to talk about the fire anymore.
But Ash has other plans.
Ash decides to let something spill over from deep inside her as well, hoping that her countering of her own secret will do more for him than telling him 'everything's okay' would do.
"My um..my Dad, when he left for good, he didn't just leave." Ash says.
Derek finally looks at her now.
For a split second, Ash swears she sees tears in the man's eyes but as quick as she saw them, they're gone.
"At our old place, there's this mark on the floor, at the bottom of the stairs." Ash continues. She bites at her bottom lip nervously, because she hasn't let herself think about this in a long time. Just like Derek hasn't let himself think of the day of the fire in a long time either.
"My Dad was drunk when he walked out. He..he got so mad and he snapped. I remember I didn't get to speak to Mom until the day after it happened. Things were getting crazy at college and I was a mess after Jacob-"
Derek insides twist a little at the thought of that guy trying to weasel his way back into Ash's life. But they haven't heard from him in awhile so Derek's counting that as a blessing. But he also hasn't come by to say goodbye to Ash either, as far as Derek knows, so he's unsure if the man has left town yet. Saying goodbye to Ash seems like something he'd definitely want to do.
"I was crying, and-and then she tells me that the night before, Rafael had packed his bags and left, for good this time." Ash goes on. "It felt like..I don't know. But when I got home later that day, it..it was so much worse than I thought." It's Ash's turn to frown at the mental picture, at the memory, of what she saw.
"You're safe with me, Ash. It's okay." Derek assures her, speaking up for the first time since he told her what happened to his family.
Ash nods, looking down into her lap, fidgetting. But she doesn't continue.
Derek reaches over and puts his hands over her's, stopping her fidgetting because she doesn't need to be nervous around him.
"Ash?" Derek says.
She looks up at him, tears in her eyes. But she quickly wipes them away.
Derek catches her hands, pulling them down to her lap.
"I feel like an idiot." She admits, looking down at their hands so she doesn't have to look at him.
"Why?" Derek asks her.
"You tell me that and you don't even bat an eye, and I can't even talk about-" She hiccups and frowns, embarassed.
"Don't compare our tragedies, Ash, they're different." Derek tells her. "We all deal with things differently, you know that." He says, knowing it's true as well.
He became cold after the fire, where Jessie was just a wreck. Laura held hersef together well, when the other two Hales were around that is, and she held them together too. That was her job as the big sister.
Ash didn't lose most of her family like he did, well, she did but not in the same way. Derek's family were stolen from him, Ash's father left. He left, by his own hand. He wasn't forced, he wasn't told to, he just woke up one morning and decided to walk away from his wife and children and unborn baby. Derek is right, their tragedies are not the same, but both hurt as much as each other.
"What happened when you came home?" Derek asks her.
"I.." Ash sighs, looking up at him again. "The house was just..a mess. There was broken glass, mostly beer bottles. He lost it, broke things, yelled, took things. But that wasn't the worst of it..not by a long shot. The uh..that mark in the floor? When Rafael was leaving, Scott tried to stop him, he-he just wanted his Dad to stay with him, he was too young to understand what was happening at the time, but.." She's surprising herself because she's actually finding it hard to keep it together right now.
There's something about the way Derek's striking green eyes are looking at her that makes it so hard for her to guard herself and hide behind her 'macho' attitude she usually has.
But Derek can see this isn't just about making him feel better about what he revealed anymore. He can see she needs to get this out as well, someone else needs to know what happened.
"Mom told me what happened. Scott tried to pull him back up the stairs, Rafael grabbed him to push him out of the way and-and Scott pulled back and.." Ash never saw it happen, she was only told about it, she never had to watch it happen like her mother did, but Ash can imagine it, and it makes her feel sick. "He f-fell down the stairs and cracked his head open on the floor." Ash says shakily.
"He doesn't remember, does he?" Derek asks her, realising this has been kept between Melissa and Ash only.
"No." Ash shakes her head. "Mom got him to the E.R and they fixed him up before he woke up. He..he didn't remember anything, he didn't even remember Rafael leaving, Mom had to tell him and it was horrible." Ash says. She exhales shakily, feeling more tears fill her eyes.
"I was so stupid. I-I lied to Scott about that, I lied about what Rafael did to me and you almost died because of it. More people could have gotten hurt because of me, Jade or Scott could have gotten hurt." She says, a tear slipping down her face as she looks at Derek. "I keep lying and-and people keep getting hurt and it's my fault-"
"Ash, none of what has happened to anyone is your fault. Not to me, not to Scott, not to your Mom." He says, knowing a huge part of Ash blames herself for what happened to Melissa. Derek feels a little guilt, because he told her at the hospital that if people got hurt because of her lies then it was her fault. He was just trying to get her to be honest, that's all.
Ash just shakes her head though, becoming increasingly upset.
"I'm s-sorry, I didn't mean for any of that to happen." She says, another few tears following that one. "I never wanted you to get hurt, I never wanted anyone to get hurt." It's like she's confessing her sins, trying to make up for the things she's done wrong, that she thinks she's done wrong.
"Hey, I'm here now, and I'm okay." He assures her, wiping the tears away with his thumb. "We're all okay, Ash."
But the tears are very quickly replaced with fresh ones as Ash starts to cry, unable to stop herself.
"C'mere." Derek says, guiding her closer to him.
Ash hugs into him, letting his arms envelope her and hold her close to his own body.
"He's gone now, you're okay." Derek tells her, brushing his hand down her hair as she clings to him, crying into his chest. "It's over, Ash, I promise."
"I just want my f-family b-back." She sobs, her heart aching as she thinks of the family she's lost along the way. Her Grandmother. Her Grandfather. Her Mom. And her father too, in a sense.
The alpha squeezes his eyes shut, feeling a dull ache in his chest and a watery stinging behind his own eyes. For two reasons, for his own loses and desire to have his family back as well, and because it's hurting him to see Ash so upset like this, kicking herself over something she shouldn't, just like when Ash sees Derek blame himself for things he shouldn't.
"Shhh, it's okay." He whispers, holding her close to him.
It takes awhile, but eventually, Ash's cries die down and her heart slows as her eyelids get too heavy to keep open again.
"Get some sleep, Ash." Derek says softly.
The girl drowsily chokes out another soft sob.
"Everything will be better when you wake up, okay?" He says to her.
Ash is too tired to speak so she just nods, hoping he's right.
Derek brings an arm around her waist and one around her shoulders, cradling her and warming her as she slowly drifts off to sleep.
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I told you there would be feels! And there's more next chapter too! Favourite, follow and review!