It was chance, pure chance, that they had decided on a spontaneous camping trip, spending a night in the woods, in nature where they belonged. The Argents were good hunters, but the guys Kate had been working with hadn't bothered to stake out the house, hadn't seen that they weren't there. They'd smelled the burning and had arrived to see their house in flames, the hunters and Kate looking confused why there wasn't any visible or audible commotion coming from the house. Kate had looked disappointed.
It could have turned into a massacre, but the hunters hadn't thought they'd need guns, not when they'd spread wolfsbane in a circle around the house. They'd decided that it would look suspicious if bodies had bullet holes as a cause of death instead of burning. Werewolf strength would always overpower humans, even if they were hunters.
Instead, it turned into a huge deal with the hunters - and Kate - being arrested and the house surviving with only some fire damage. It could be fixed, rebuilt. They hadn't lost their home or their family. Their pack.
They hadn't - Derek thought he had. When Kate was being shoved into the back of a police car she'd called out to him. "Better luck next time, Derek!" She'd said with a cocky smile.
It made him sick. His family turned to face him because how could this hunter, this Argent, know him? Laura had caught her scent and she knew. Derek had come home smelling like Kate once or twice. It wasn't a big deal if he smelled of someone new. He was in high school, there were always new scents and he told Laura that it was some girl that he'd bumped into at school.
It wasn't a lie. He had met up with Kate at school. He just didn't mention that Kate didn't attend the school, she was too old. Had graduated already. It would set off red flags because a grown woman being interested in a geeky fifteen year old should set off some alarms.
But he was fifteen and she was his first girlfriend. She was a lot of his firsts. She was older and attractive and made herself into everything he wanted her to be. A good liar, even to werewolf senses.
She'd said all the right things, and dithered just enough that he was the one who had to convince her to date him even though it was illegal. Kate was smart and vicious. She'd given him the knife to stab into himself every time he thought about his family. Her plan was to set a date with him, the night she was going to kill his family. He would be the only survivor and he would know that it was his fault. He had asked her, had begged her.
She would revel in that little victory every time she thought about him. He'd asked to be involved with her, he'd given her everything. He'd be left on the other side of town when the house burned, waiting for her for a date that she'd never turn up for. He would have been the alpha, as the only wolf left from the Hale pack and she'd have hunted him down.
No doubt he would have lost his mind, his humanity. After such a loss he could only have shrugged into the wolf because then he wouldn't have to deal with it. He'd have been an alpha with no pack, bound to either start killing or turning people and that would give any hunter a reason to kill him.
Because some other hunters actually needed reasons other than their own sadistic joy in playing God and mind games with children.
Not Kate though. Kate enjoyed the hunt, found glee in the way that people begged and pleaded for their lives, for their family, for their pack. To her they weren't people; they were monsters that were just waiting for someone to come put them down.
It didn't matter that the worst thing any Hale in the last four generations had done to any human was bumping into them on the sidewalk and knocking them over. No blood spilled. Not even a bruise.
The aftermath of the fire was awful. They'd had to move into a hotel for a few weeks until they found somewhere more permanent to stay while the house was getting rebuilt. His Mom was so scared to have them all in one place, because what if someone came back for them? She was more scared to have them apart because what if someone targeted one group and they didn't know that their pack was in danger?
They were all terrified for months. Derek was still terrified, still woke up from nightmares where the fire had blazed and his family were screaming and he couldn't do anything. He'd wake up hearing Kate laughing in his ear and burning being all he could smell.
The pack as a whole moved on. They didn't quite all wake up one morning magically okay. The younger kids saw the whole thing as an adventure; they didn't understand the danger that they were in, they just thought it was so cool that they got to live in new places with new scents. The older kids were warier of everything and everyone. They weren't too young to understand that they'd nearly lost everything, but they were too young to see it as anything but Derek's fault because he led the hunter to the house. The Hale children had always been a solid group in school and that group only tightened together. They didn't have human friends anymore. They couldn't trust them, because they'd thought that Kate was Derek's human friend and what if their friends turned out to be hunters too?
It was a heartbreaking time for everyone. Grudges were held, with good reason. The family clung to each other, listened to each other's heartbeats and convinced themselves that they were all okay, all still here.
Derek couldn't do that.
The others all got closed, but Derek pulled away from them all. For years he spent as little time as possible in the house. He hated any celebration where the whole family was there. Refused to attend, but he'd sit on the roof and keep watch. It was dangerous for them all to be together and he wasn't going to let them get hurt.
They returned to their normal lives but so much of Derek's life before the fire had started to revolve around Kate. He didn't remember what it was like before Kate. He didn't have anything to return to, not anymore.
So he made a new life. He threw himself into school, got the best grades in class, did the extra reading, the extra homework. His teachers were impressed, his family were proud of him. He still felt lost. He helped rebuild the house. Built the furniture that they'd had for generations that had been burned beyond repair. He learnt a lot about carpentry and his parents glowed over the new pieces and the skill that had gone into making them and told him how proud they were of him. They said that he had a skill that he could make a career out of.
It was the kind of thing that they'd said before, that he used to love hearing. When they said it after all he could think was that he was fixing things he fucked up and that was not something he wanted to make a career of. Walking past the long dining room table that he'd painstakingly carved designs into made bile rise in his throat because he still couldn't bear the smell of meat cooking and he avoided barbeques like they were the plague.
When Cora was learning to cook she decided that she'd make a surprise meal for Peter and was trying to fry some steaks for the two of them. She set the fire alarm off and the smell and noise had sent Derek straight into the kitchen where he grabbed her and ran out of the house, leaving her on the lawn and running straight into the woods to have the worst panic attack of his life.
He'd got better since then. He'd had to because despite being mostly vegetarian, he still had to live with smelling smoke and meat cooking and it would never be something he enjoyed but something he had to deal with. His family were a little more understanding with it because werewolf healing could heal physical injuries but not mental trauma and it was more than obvious that Derek was suffering.
The pack grew up and the kids who had hated Derek for months and years after the fire began to realise that it wasn't really his fault and that he was as much a victim as anyone else, if not more so.
It was too late to really make up with him though. It wasn't just their fault - Derek had been steadily pulling away from the pack for years so they never really knew him. By the time some of them reached the conclusion that it was the hunter's fault, Derek had moved away for college.
His parents had worried when Laura had gone off to New York for college a year before Derek did, so they were beyond relieved when Derek had gotten into the same college and would be joining his sister in New York. It would be safer with the two of them together rather than they be separated from the pack and each other.
Derek found it to be an easy decision. Before he never could have imagined being so far away from his pack but after distancing himself emotionally for years, it seemed simple that the next step would be to distance himself physically. He felt so trapped in Beacon Hills, everywhere he turned his family were there, or there were memories of a date he went on with Kate or a place he hung out with Paige.
There was too much tragedy for him to stay there. He felt like he was drowning in his own mistakes and everywhere he looked was another reminder.
So he moved to New York and started college. He checked in with Laura every few days and they'd go to a cafe and grab a coffee and talk. She talked more at him than he contributed to the conversation but that was nothing new. He supposed he should have been looking out for her more but she was strong, stronger than he was. She was next in line to be alpha and everything he wasn't.
She was social and made loads of friends, always gossiping or going out with them. She'd had a few boyfriends and was outgoing and friendly and approachable.
Derek had not made any friends. He hated his roommate and put no effort into meeting new people or getting a girlfriend. Laura teased him and said that he always had such a frown on him, and if he just smiled a bit, he'd have no problem making friends.
He didn't want to make friends. The only thing Derek had time for was his studies and the part-time job he'd found himself. He told Laura that he was fine, he liked having some alone time; he always had.
She didn't believe him. They were only a year apart in age, so growing up, Laura had been Derek's best friend and she knew that he was unhappy. He had never coped well being alone and all he did at college was spend time alone, either in the library or his dorm room or at work. It wasn't healthy.
Wolves were social creatures and though they weren't actually wolves, they had a few lupine characteristics, one of which was the need for a pack. Derek had been pushing his away, and he was dangerously close to becoming an omega. The only reason that he hadn't yet was because his family, his pack, were holding on so tightly to him even though it felt like he had already let go of them. He couldn't go on like this.
No one had told Derek that, though. His mother had forbidden it, too scared that he would push himself further away to purposefully leave the pack. It was her greatest fear that he would leave. She didn't have a favourite child but Derek was the one she worried about most, the one who needed to be worried about more. She'd had countless sleepless nights, worrying and fretting about him. All the adults in the pack had. The way he pulled himself away from them was heartbreaking.
They could see him destroying himself, destroying the links to his pack, who he was supposed to turn to when he needed them. He had made a mistake, no one was denying that but they were all okay and they had all managed to move past it. They didn't think that Derek should be able to move past it easily; it was a traumatic event for him, it obviously haunted him. But they missed him.
Missed when he was younger and he'd come home from school, scowling about whatever had taken place that day, or when he used to follow Laura around because he was so in awe of his older sister. Missed his innocence when he felt comfortable playing and roughhousing in the woods with his family. It was hard for them because the children were such a central point of the family and it was like he didn't want them anymore.
As Derek pulled away from them, they missed events going on in his life. He wouldn't come home and sit at the dining room table and complain about how annoying Mr Myers voice was and how it was torture to have to listen to him. It wasn't just things that he used to tell them that they missed, either.
It was the little things, like how he was never in any family photos after the fire, or at any birthday or Christmas parties. He wouldn't even shift with them during the full moon, always secreting himself away.
He didn't tell them, but the pack used to be his anchor, and after Kate, he couldn't use them as an anchor anymore. He spent weeks trying to regain control, trying desperately to find something else. His family thought it was just the shock of what could have happened. Eventually, he found another anchor - his anger. It was a strong anchor and he didn't think he'd ever have another because how could he ever stop being angry at himself for what he almost caused?
It took him a few months to be able to regain full control over his abilities with his new anchor and that was why he started to pull away. If his parents saw that he was struggling to control himself then they'd take him out of school and he couldn't stand a minute more than he had to around them, not when his guilt was so fresh and suffocating. It would be torture, especially when time spent with them would be spent in whatever hotel room or rented house they were living in at the time acting as a constant reminder of what he had done.
At some point, Derek realised that he had been pulling away and becoming uninvolved with his family. He hadn't realised before then that some members had started to hate him. It was a shock - not because they hated him, but because it wasn't all of his family. He couldn't understand it, he had nearly gotten them killed and they didn't hate him for it? Didn't seem to blame him, even a little bit?
Derek certainly blamed himself enough for the whole pack, and then some. The blame and hatred he felt became part of him and settled into his bones. Maybe not always at the front of his mind but always lurking around.
He couldn't keep up with the friends he had at school. They'd given him some space after the fire, but even before then, he hadn't been really close with any of them. Not only was being a werewolf a big secret that he absolutely couldn't tell anyone or give any hints that he was anything other than an average human. He was barely allowed to play a sport and he knew that his parents attended every game to keep an eye on him and make sure he appeared human enough to not raise any suspicions. After the fire, he quit the team.
When he was dating Kate he pulled away from any close friends he had. Keeping it quiet was just another secret that he had and this was, at first, one that he was happy to keep. Of course, it all came out after the fire anyway and he avoided everyone. He didn't want to talk about the fire, which was sure to be the gossip winding its way around the school. He didn't want to talk about anything, to anyone.
He wanted to be left alone.
And he was. His pack members at the school didn't really sit with him in school. They all had their own friend groups to sit with: they'd all been encouraged by their parents to make new friends at school, not just to stick with family.
Derek ignored his friends and had very little contact with them after he quit basketball. He stopped eating in the cafeteria at lunch and instead moved to the library where he didn't eat lunch but did homework and extra credit work instead. Anything that would make him stop thinking about Kate and the fire and get him out of his own head for a while.