Title: Live Hard
Summary: He may not even be considered much of a person anymore but the moon does things that bring out what he used to be, there's a reason the doctor has him on a sedative and there's one unlucky nurse's name on the bottom of the incident report following the bite.
Rating: M
Warnings: Language, violence
Spoilers: There are some but they are few and far between for the most part, this story works around the main storyline while incorporating it at key points.
Disclaimer: I don't own Teen Wolf
A/N: Sorry for the wait, I got a little busy with RL stuff. Derek returns this chapter. Timeline wise all this occurs during episode nine and the beginning of ten after the locker room event where there's a gap of empty time. The way I figure it episode ten takes place over at least 5-7 days because otherwise episode eleven would still take place in October based on the idea that the first episode starts in September and two full moons have gone by, and since they're having a winter formal in the season finale i.e. episodes eleven and twelve it must be November for the idea of a winter formal to be plausible, based on my own school experience that winter dances don't happen in December because of sport championships and the vacation time for the holidays. Also I've been making a consistent mistake, I keep referring to Beacon Hills as Beacon Heights, sorry about that.
Day 44:
The mirror reflected her sunken eyes and sallow complexion back at her lit by horrible bathroom fluorescents. The caked red line from the split in her lip was a sharp constant ache. The bulbous knob on her brow made her eyelid sag and was tender and hot to the touch.
It hurt, an aching swollen hurt that made her want to lance it right then and there.
A migraine was starting somewhere between her temples and ears, shrill and severe.
It was the dog barking that woke her at two o'clock in the afternoon; someone had been at her door.
The police uniform had her mind working overtime until he explained that it was the prearranged meeting she'd set up with the police desk clerk that he was calling on her for.
When he took in the sight of her and asked if it was a bad time she explained she wasn't feeling well but to come in and give her a second.
She tried to make herself presentable by washing her face, brushing her teeth, and putting her hair up but it didn't do much besides make her seem as if instead of waking up sick she'd become sick during the course of a long day in which she'd undergone a beatdown.
The police officer waited patiently as she jogged the short distance to her bedroom calling out that she just needed to change and put the dog away.
She asked if he wanted coffee, he told her only if she was going to have some. In the kitchen she felt the nervous tension as he watched her make coffee and stood awkwardly about as if not quite sure if she'd yell at him for taking a seat at her kitchen table, he eyed the chairs waiting to take her lead.
Making a vague gesture in the direction of the table he sat and she felt a little less out of place in her own home now that he wasn't standing around staring at her.
"Just give it a minute, okay, question away," she sat and smiled tiredly.
The officer stared at her face for much longer than a polite amount of time. "You lose a fight?"
"Yeah with a delirious patient and a heavy door," she joked half-heartedly spinning an ashtray left on the small table.
"You a doctor?"
She shook her head in the negative as he preoccupied himself with arranging folders on the table with the necessary police reports clipped inside.
"No, thank god. I'm a nurse," she told him while he looked down at the top file and flicked it open with a slap against the table top.
Looking up with an expression of hard seriousness he commented, "Hard job."
"Yeah but not as hard as your's I guess." She got up to take down mugs and pour coffee. "How exactly does this thing work?" She asked without looking behind her at the officer.
"Just tell me what you remember about the incident and go over it with me, mention anything that has come to mind since, things you may have forgotten about the first time around."
She nodded to herself as she brought over the mugs and set them down, seating herself once again.
"The guy in the woods right?"
"Yes ma'am, and also they said there was something else, let me just find the other report."
"The break-in at the nursing home with Derek Hale," she informed him after a sip.
"That would be it," he said more to his files than to her.
"Start with the woods though, right?"
"Start wherever you like."
He dragged over his coffee and fumbled for a pen.
"Coffee," she smiled taking another gulp. He seemed to fake amusement for her benefit at the dumb joke, "Alright."
"I was walking the dog, he brought back a shoe, and I called it in,"
"This is the first phone call of the two correct?"
"Yes. And then I went to see where it had come from and I found the body."
"Go on."
"So I called it in and I waited and then you guys got there."
"And you didn't see anyone?"
"No."
"Did your dog bark at all?"
"No."
"Do you remember anything else that you may have forgotten?"
"No."
He jotted things down and she settled back further into her chair pressing the warm mug to her split lip and sighing heavily, tired and sore.
"Walk me through what happened at the nursing home."
"Well, I went in to sit with Mr. Hale," she started before the officer interjected, "Peter Hale?"
"Yes," she nodded. "Peter Hale. I normally don't stay after my shift is over but I still had some paperwork and it was the kind of thing that has to get done before I go home so I decided to go and do what I usually do, which is a one-to-one with Mr. Hale while I wrote out my reports."
He made more notations on the report.
"One-to-one?"
"It's like a babysitter, it was in his file that the family had requested it months before I started working and no one had really gotten around to doing it so since I'm like a nurse manager and don't really have any patients I thought it'd be good to alleviate that tension," she explained.
"What do you mean?"
He was confused by the notion, she thought of how to explain it better.
"Well, families tend to get more edgy when they feel like they're being ignored, so you try to make everything easier on everyone if you can. That's what I guess I was trying to do. I didn't exactly know that he didn't have much family at the time."
His pen moved. "I see, so after you finished your reports you went to leave the room and go home for the night, is that correct?"
"Yes. But the door was shut and I thought one of the aides did it."
"We interviewed them and they said they didn't," he informed her of what she already had known.
"I know; he did, Derek Hale."
"Did you notice him come in?"
"No. I didn't even know he was sitting on the other side of the room until I smelt him."
"Smelt?" The officer's eyebrows shot up at the idea.
"I got a whiff of ashtray and I turned and he was there and then everything kind of went fast after that."
"It says in the report that he was injured and that you performed care of him."
"Yes, I left and got supplies and I just tried to act normal because he gave me this look like if I didn't do it that he would try something stupid."
"Like what?"
"Like hurt his uncle or me, I watch the news, he's made out to be a killer so I think my reaction is understandable."
"Perfectly," he sympathized. He took a small sip of coffee.
She took hers away from where she had pressed it to her mouth when the conversation paused, there was a wet red smudge on the rim of the cup.
"So then I told him he should really have a doctor look at the wound and gave him some antibiotics left over in the medicine cart."
"And it was at this point that he advanced forward towards you?"
"Yes, I guess and I just stabbed him with a syringe I had in my pocket for another patient and told him it was insulin and lied my ass off and then I followed him down the stairwell and pushed him out the door into the parking lot."
The officer seemed to wave off the things he already knew and had read about in the preliminary report. "Can you describe his wound?"
"Big," she nodded remembering before going on, "early signs of an infection setting in."
"Was it a bullet wound?"
"No, it was bigger than that, almost like he fell on something big and sharp, like a pipe or something."
"Did he say how he got in?"
"No. He said that he'd done it before, that he liked to visit his uncle at night sometimes."
"Did he say anything else?"
"Not that I can remember, he wasn't much of a conversationalist."
"Anything else you remember?"
"No, not off hand."
"Okay then. I'm going to leave you with my number and the number of the station, call if you remember anything else. Alright?"
He got up and put his papers and files and pen away. She watched only half aware that they were finished with the questioning.
"Yeah, no problem. Sorry about…forgetting that you were coming, it's been a busy few days."
"I know the feeling. Miss."
He gave her a curt nod and said he could find his way out.
Lucette sat for awhile, thinking about nothing and drinking her coffee, idly trying to find designs in the wood grain of her table.
After finishing her coffee she went back to the bathroom mirror.
Deciding that she wasn't going to spend the rest of the day with a squinted eye she went to find her travel sewing kit.
She boiled the biggest needle and pressed it into the swollen knob, her toes curling at the sensation of sharp pain as it passed through skin, she repeated the procedure until the plasma and lymph fluid oozed out, serosanguineous. She placed a hand towel over her eye and depressed the bulb with her fingertips.
It was a slow and sore process.
When it no longer drained any more fluid she gave the spot a quick deep jab and squeezed it as hard as she could.
Wiping the spot with an alcohol pad and putting a piece of gauze and a band-aid on the lump she grinned in grim satisfaction that it was less golf ball and more pebble in appearance.
She glanced at her right elbow and the bulk of the dressing preventing her from bending it into an acute angle. It was enforced well enough that it only throbbed softly with motion.
Picking at the edge of the tape she walked around her bathroom contemplating whether or not to change the bandaging.
Her first-aid kit was an assemblage of things she came home with in her pockets at the end of a shift for the past three years that took up space in her bedroom closet.
She pulled off the t-shirt she'd hastily thrown on and with the duffel bag of medical supplies under her arm watched herself light a cigarette in her vanity mirror the end exploding into orange lace as she inhaled fire.
Moving into the bathroom she exhaled twin smoke curls from her nostrils.
Sitting on the edge of the tub she unfolded the gauze and dressing pad from the crook of her arm, squinting from the smoke of her cigarette drifting towards the ceiling.
The smell made her lips close tight around the filter of her cigarette.
It was the sickly sweet onset of purulence and decaying proteins, pus and infection, white blood cells and waste products.
She lifted the toilet seat with her toes and dropped the cigarette into it as she let the bandaging fall completely onto the tile floor.
Red and swollen and leaking it was an ugly wound. The ring of discharge on the dressing was red and yellow.
They hadn't been able to stitch it up much further than the deepest tissue layer because the resulting scar would pucker in a way that would be uncomfortable to her nerves, in result it gapped open where they wanted tissue to granulate in and scab over.
It was like a bed sore, the depth and the color and the wetness of it.
She put wound gel on it and unwrapped a padded dressing to place on top, wrapping it in gauze she moved her fingers and made a fist. It was looser than the previous dressing but it would give it air flow.
Using the mirror to look at her shoulder and deltoid she was relieved to find the stitches free of the telltale signs of infection, she didn't redo their dressings; they would scab faster without them.
Swallowing two tablets of aspirin she willed her head to stop hurting and her complexion to return to normal and not grow any paler.
There were circles under her eyes and she felt the lagging fatigue that accompanied bodily aches, she climbed back into bed and slept with her dog at the foot of the bed.
She had vivid fever dreams that she only remembered as being brutal and unsettling, she wondered hazily is she was really dreaming at all or if she was in the state of being so tired she was just thinking and was imagining that she was dreaming.
The content of her thoughts, or her dreams were wildly feral and she wondered if they were the sort of things her dog dreamt about whenever she'd watched him kick out in a dream chase or whine or tense his muscles as if ready to pounce on dream prey.
In her dreams, or her thoughts, she wondered what it was that she was preying on, tensing her muscles for, and whining about, she wondered if she was going to catch it.
Day 45:
She made her shower icy to lull the fever to a less worrisome temperature. The scrambled eggs in her stomach and the oatmeal she forced down her throat roiled in her stomach, not wanted to stay in her body and digest.
It was awful to be sick, it was worse to be sick and have the phone start ringing accusingly at her as she dripped water across the wood floors of her living room.
Letting the answering machine catch the call she stood dazed and goose-bump ridden, naked and toweling her hair in front of the turned off television, her reflection had her entranced for several long moments.
A feminine but robotic voice informed her that all nurses currently employed by the Beacon Hills Long Term Care Facility were to report immediately as emergency support personnel for a mass causality event.
It took her a moment to realize that she had to get dressed and go into work.
The same type of thing had only ever happened to her once before when there had been a twenty-two car pile-up on a major interstate highway when she'd still been just a med nurse.
She pulled herself together and dressed in clothes she wouldn't mind having to throw out because of blood later and filled a tote bag with a box of gloves from her own supply and a medley of medical supplies she had extra stock of.
She had more in the cargo box of her truck that she'd grab before she went in.
Yanking her hair up into a tight bun as she went on a frantic search for sneakers she told her dog to, if need be, to urinate only on the kitchen floor because it was the easiest floor to clean.
Going thirty miles over the speed limit she made it there in less than ten minutes.
The parking lot was full of uniformed officers and flashing lights.
The sirens split her migraine into twin power drills digging into either side of her skull.
She parked and in a rush showed a multitude of officers her identification badge and was all but dragged inside, marched passed the usual unit she worked on and into the previously closed down geriatrics ward hall of the facility and pushed into the fray of noise and frantic panic without so much as an explanation or an apology.
"Jeez," she muttered to herself at the mob of nurses dressed like they had just rolled out of bed running up and down the aisle between the long rows of beds filled with patients hooked up to cardiac monitors.
Catching sight of a nurse's aide that worked the morning shift with her Lucette jogged over to grab the young woman's wrist and asked to be clued into what exactly was going on.
"You know Jennifer? The one that hit you with the door?"
The question surprised her and made her let go of the other woman's wrist at the girl's tone of voice.
"Yeah."
"Well she went nuts and killed the whole night shift…and most of the patients," the young aid explained sounding more than a little irritated and put out.
Lucette was at a loss for eloquent speech, "Holy shit. Really?"
"Yeah, she injected them with Haldol." The aide looked off down the row of beds, taking in the sight of so many patients.
She looked back at Lucette, "Almost everyone was dead when we got in this morning, just lying in a pile, all together. Dead. Jesus Christ."
Sam ran a hand over her hair, wisping out from her high ponytail. "Fuck. This is bad shit, Lucette."
After closing her eyes and taking a breath the young woman picked her head back up and pinned her with a stare.
"And your patient is missing; we have no idea where he is."
"Mr. Hale?" She was still trying to wade through the fact that about fifty people were dead and she was stuck working on the eighty bed ward understaffed with only twenty nurses running around yelling instructions.
The younger woman nodded.
"Did Jennifer take him or something?" The implication puzzled her.
The idea made her think about the way the redhead had been holding his hand; the innocent action suddenly seemed perverse and sinister.
"Jennifer's dead. Her head was bashed in. I found her. The cops think his nephew did it when he saw what had happened; they think he came back last night."
"How do they know Jennifer killed all the nurses?"
"She had all the syringes on her."
Lucette remembered that she wondered if Jennifer was hoarding Haldol, she knew now why someone would. She had known. She hadn't told anyone, her stomach bottom out. "Fuck!"
Sam didn't notice the way Lucette's face changed with the outburst.
"Like I said, this is bad shit."
She thought about who was in the pile of dead nurses, she measured all the nurses against each other and picked out to herself who was expendable, who she wouldn't have minded so much being dead, the people whose lives hadn't impacted her own. The exercise was involuntary.
"Oh my god, Trish! Is she okay?"
"Yeah, Trish is fine," the aide told her pointing down the aisle of beds to where the older nurse stood carrying supplies in one hand and wheeling a med cart with her other.
"Good," she let her shoulders sag for a moment in relaxation.
"Doctor Shrineburg's dead, though."
She straightened hard. It made her dizzy and hot all over, she was sweating. Sam noticed and reached out to grab her forearms as she swayed for a moment and moved a leg back to regain equilibrium.
"Lucette? Shit, sit down. You okay? Are you going to pass out on me?"
"I just saw him yesterday, he drove me home after I got my stitches and everything, walked my dog for me. He dropped off my truck afterwards, oh my god. It woke me up when he tried to back it in the driveway and I told him he was an asshole for waking me up, god I was such a brat. He's dead."
She looked up pleadingly, angry that Jennifer had killed someone she was sort of friends with and glad that the redheaded bitch was dead.
The aide put a hand on her shoulder and felt the heat of her skin despite the damp sweat. Sam took her hand away and pressed it to Lucette's cheek and nodded to herself. "Christ, Lucette you're hot. You've got a fever. Go home."
"I am not going home, Sam." She hissed loudly when the aide pushed her to get her to sit down on the open bed behind her piled high with boxes of gloves and briefs and other supplies.
"Fine, just, fuck. I can't deal with this. Hold on, don't you dare move I'm getting Trish, right now."
The aide came back with the older nurse scowling behind; Trish stood and stared down at her, sizing her up.
"You look like hell. You need another dose of antibiotics, now. Come on, I'll get an officer to take you down to the emergency department."
"No," Lucette knew she sounded petulant and bratty.
"You can't stay if you're just going to pass out and cause a fuss," the older woman's tone was condescending and made the aide look like she suddenly shouldn't be interrupting whatever it was the other two woman were about to have a pissing contest over.
"Get me a saline lock, I'll put it in my arm myself and I'll dose myself with as much antibiotic as you want."
She made her expression hard and tried not to smile when she realized she was about to get her way.
"…fine. Don't move from this spot while I get one. Sam will stay with you while you do rounds."
Trish threw her the package not long after and shooed away the nurse's aide.
The older nurse watched her set up the intravenous catheter and yank on sterile gloves, "You'd make a good field nurse."
"I'm too good-looking to dodge bullets," Lucette responded dryly. "Shit that kills," the pinch of puncture hurt, she feed the catheter up around the injected needle and winced as she got it in place. "Shrineburg really dead?"
"Yeah," Trish leaned across the bed and grabbed the garbage from the packaging. She handed Lucette the butterfly suture to stabilize the intravenous port.
"I feel like him and me could have been best friends, you know? Go to the casino together and talk smack about all the other nurses and doctors."
Lucette wrapped her arm around the port with sterile gauze and taped it.
"I know."
"You know anyone who died?"
"Friends, you mean?"
"Yeah." Lucette disposed of the needle for the IV insertion in a biohazard sharps container.
"Me and Angela, the nurse practitioner, went to nursing school together for the past eleven years and she's dead and I never really liked her too much but she was a good woman and all of this is so screwed up."
"Do they know why she did it?"
"No. Stay here for a few minutes."
Trish left her to sit and wait. Sam came to take her place.
"Did she tell you not to let me up for the next half an hour?"
"Fifteen minutes," the aide said giving a flippant gesture to the statement.
"Better than being sent home."
Sam raised a single eyebrow, "I'm not so sure about that."
"What needs to be done?"
"Symptom management and calling codes and resuscitating. I don't know how to intubate someone, Lucette, what if I fuck up and someone dies?"
"Just straighten their neck, open the mouth and jam the tube down, it's kind of hard to actually perforate the esophagus in a healthy person, if you do it won't matter until later."
"Okay."
"Can I get up now?"
Lucette eyed the cardiac strip of the patient in the bed closet to them.
"It's only been like three minutes."
The rhythm was weird.
"Fuck it, Mrs. Doyle is about to code, get me an AED!" She sprung from the bed and stopped her skid with a firm grip on the woman's bed.
"I need some help over here! Hypertensive emergency with V-Tach, I need lidocaine, now!" She yelled into the aisle, unable to do anything but shout orders for the moment, the med cart was too far away to run to.
She watched the cardiac monitor and spewed a line on profanity. "She's going to fibrillate. She's fibrillating!"
Lucette looked around for Sam, she was too far down the ward jogging with the AED box in hand. "Sam!"
"Thump her! Hard!" Trish yelled running down the aisle made between the long rows of beds.
Lucette did, it felt like she'd broken her hand after her fist made contact with the woman's sternum. The read-out was showing the same jagged little arcs, no change.
"She's flat! Epi!"
Trish ran and slammed into the bed frame with the pen in hand and pushed away Lucette's hands, driving the trigger syringe down hard into the woman's chest.
"Rhythm! Got it!" Trish shouted for a doctor. "She's coding again. Sam bag her."
Lucette started chest compressions.
"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty."
"Two pumps, Sam," Lucette commanded.
"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. Two pumps, again."
"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. Give her another shot of the epi."
Sweat rolled off her forehead and onto her knuckles, her hair was sticking to her face and mouth.
"Last one," Trish warned.
Lucette realized the woman was going to die. "Just do it, she's not coming back."
The shot of epinephrine put a blip on the monitor but only for a second.
"Asystole," she commented shaking her head.
The nurse's aide didn't get it, she kept trying to give rescue breaths even as the two other women and the just arriving doctor called it off.
"Sam," she didn't answer. "Sam!" She tried again; her strong tone didn't deter the younger woman.
"Just keep going. Move! I'll do it." The aide pushed her from the bed; Lucette stumbled and caught herself on the empty one behind her.
"Sam!" Trish yelled.
"What!" Sam yelled back.
"Come on," Lucette soothed.
"Lucette."
"Yeah," she nodded and took the aide by the arm and steered her away from the dead woman so the doctor could pronounce the time of death.
"Get her out of here," the resident doctor commanded.
Lucette nodded again, "Yeah."
The staff room was crowded and they had to settle with sitting on the floor.
"That was awful."
Nodding Lucette grabbed a soda from the food cart in the room and popped the tab, she handed it to Sam.
"Drink it."
"I don't want it."
"It'll take the edge off."
"I've never had someone die in front of me before."
"I know."
"I'm a fucking wreck. I'm sorry I pushed you."
The other woman looked sorry about it, Lucette shrugged. "You don't have to go back in there."
"I do." There was wry conviction lacing the statement.
"Okay."
"Go. I'll be there in a bit. I don't want you to watch me cry."
"Alright. Drink that. Get your nerves together. We need people in there right now."
Trish found her as she left the room and dragged her away from the swarming staff room entrance and into an empty supply closet.
"Hold out your arm." Lucette obeyed the command as the older nurse brandished a syringe.
"This will just about kill anything you got."
"What is it?"
"An aminoglycoside."
"Big guns."
Trish injected her, "In case of sepsis."
"I don't have sepsis. Not yet anyway."
"Well you won't be getting it, at all. Here, three more doses, you didn't get it from me. One every day, next three days, but dilute it please, don't burn out your vein." Trish extended the syringes. Lucette put them in the pocket of her zip-up.
"I've got a few bags of normal saline stashed away for rainy day occasion. They're still sterile, I think. I'll find out."
"Being a nurse is fun ain't it?"
Lucette grinned back with the image of being able to finagle an at home syringe set-up in her mind, but it didn't stick around, her mood grew dark when she remembered what it was like outside of the room, "Not today it isn't."
"Not today," the older woman confirmed her eyes sad and tired.
Day 46:
They'd kept her working until five when most of the patients were declared stable and only three had died. She went home and took a nap with her head feeling like it was being squeezed in a vice.
The feeling remained when she had woken up.
She had kicked her fleece pajama pants down to her ankles under the blankets at some point, her thighs and the backs of her knees felt hot and sweat slicked as they rubbed together when she shifted to sit up and yank them back up around her hips.
Her shoulders were cold without the blanket around them. She found her top on the floor where she had thrown it before curling up in bed.
Putting it on she made her way out of the sheets grimacing as her hips throbbed, it was from spending too much time on her feet she decided.
Brigadier trotted over and whined into her palm as she pet him, he needed to go outside.
He followed her to the kitchen and padded out the back door to do his business on the patio.
The coffee maker made clicking sounds in it's still on state; she poured a mug and sat down, putting her feet up onto a chair.
She was sweating inside the heavy fleece of her pajamas; begrudgingly she left the coffee and the kitchen to take her temperature pulling her collar away from the pool of sweat collecting between her collar bones.
The machine beeped with a reading of a hundred and two, she swayed and sat down heavily on the closed toilet lid, reaching down into the tub to pull the drain tab and turn the knob for cold water.
She was running too hot; she waited until the tub was full enough for an ice bath and stopped the water to bring in her dog.
In the kitchen she pulled the freezer open and grabbed the ice tub out of it, holding it on her palm as she went to open the door for her dog.
He barked loudly from somewhere off the porch at the back of the house.
She called and got no response, blaming his lack of obedience on a possum or, with a small grin, maybe a mountain lion that picked the wrong animal to mess with.
Closing the back door she picked up her mug from the table and adjusted her grip on the ice bucket, her hand going numb.
Her breath came out in a gasp and she dropped the ice bucket sending cubes across the floor in all direction at what was standing in her kitchen.
He wasn't dressed the way she'd seen him before, he looked like he just returning from a workout at the gym, as if he were a normal guy instead of an on the run for murder and kidnapping fugitive and just decided to drop by and say hello like they were buddies.
"Relax," Derek Hale held up his hands in a way that he probably meant to be soothing.
It did the opposite and only reminded her of how her father said in situations like this a person had to go straight to ten.
She flung the coffee mug at him, spilling most of it down her arm, burning the skin pink and discoloring the gauze around her intravenous port.
He swayed to the side and it shattered on the floor and into the hall instead of in his face.
"That was stupid. Your aim is horrible."
It was, her arm was smarting, she placed her hand over the raw skin and jumped when her dog rammed into the back door trying valiantly to get inside.
"Don't," he warned, his eyes staying on her instead of the door.
Her legs tensed wondering how fast she could unlock the door and open it for the large animal. "What do you want?"
"My uncle bit you."
"No harm no foul." She wondered if the flippancy would make him leave.
He looked at her bitten arm and the bulk of the dressing from where she'd rolled her sleeve up, "Looks like it's doing a lot of harm to me."
"What would you know about it?" It came out sounding like an accusation.
He stalked closer and she remained where she stood, not wanting to back herself into the kitchen table. She wanted as much to room as possible.
"Let me guess, ice for the fever, right?" He widened his eyes and pursed his lips, like he already knew, she realized why.
He said it because he did know what was happening. He toed ice cubes out of his path.
"Headache, you feeling nauseous? They give you meds for an infection? How are they working?" He narrowed his eyes and shook his head as if agreeing to something with himself and took another step towards her.
"What does your uncle have? Huh? What? Tell me!" Her voice boomed through the kitchen, she clenched her jaw and made a point not to look at the door where her dog growled louder as Derek Hale got closer.
"How have you been sleeping? Having weird dreams lately?"
He was taunting her.
"What the fuck does he have?"
Her voice was strained, fury coating everything in a fine glaze. His eyes moved to the door and she took it as a cue to throw herself in the opposite direction to reach into the sink.
She brandished a serrated steak knife. He looked at it with disgust and turned his body fully towards her. "Really? Are you serious?"
"Brigs!" She yelled hoping that if she was loud enough her dog would manage to break through the glass door panels, he didn't and she felt foolish.
"Could you stop yelling?"
"What do you want?"
"I came to see you."
"Why?"
"Because you've been bitten."
"Oh, thanks. You saw me. Get the fuck out of my house." She dodged out of reach when he stepped closer, lunging with the knife, she knew she was fucked when his fingers became a bracelet around her wrist.
He flung her into the hallway like she was weightless; she crashed on her bad shoulder and tripped on the rug at the bottom of the stairs as she ran. "Shit," she managed to breathe when her knee was stabbed by the edge of the coffee table.
"What are you doing?"
He asked calmly when she came out of her bedroom brandishing her handgun. "Better than a knife right?" She laughed, her lungs heaving and her head ready to burst. She white-knuckled the doorframe with her free hand and tried not to sway.
"You'll miss," he sounded like he was talking about her furniture choices, so casual.
She saw her hand twitch and tightened her fingers on the grip.
"You can't even stand up straight," he told her when her vision started to swim with black speaks, she fought the urge to shake her head to get rid of them.
"You think you can aim well enough to hit me? Fine, go ahead."
She slumped onto the doorframe and aimed feeling like she was about to throw up, her fever was too high. It was getting worse.
She fired and missed excepting the shot that grazed his bicep, he didn't even wince. It was pitiful.
Her thoughts were a mess of wondering if anyone had heard the gun shots, she had no neighbors and the park grounds were more ghost-town since the wild animal attacks had started.
"You finished?"
"Get out!" She yelled, she felt spit on her chin and wiped at it with the back of her hand, tripping forward and swinging wildly for balance.
"You're out of bullets."
He was in front of her face. She swayed out of the door and used their proximity to try to pistol whip him in the head.
She watched him roll his eyes and yank the gun from her, tossing it onto the couch. "Heh, yeah that won't work either. Calm down."
He dragged her stumbling body into the bathroom as her body tingled; she was on her last legs.
Hospitals and doctors and ice were what she needed, not a killer in her house in the middle of the night.
She fell on her knees and he wrapped a strong arm around her waist and dropped her over the edge of the tub, she laid down with the water rolling out of the tub from her splash into it.
Derek Hale, crazy psycho murderer, crouched next to the tub and put a hand on the top of her head and dunked it down.
It took her a moment to realize the gravity of the thought and for panic to settle in long after he placed a hand on her collarbone and held her body to the bottom of the tub and leaned all his weight into the arm pinning her.
The frigid water worked and brought her fever down but as the haze faded clarity came and she realized that he was drowning her.
She pursed her lips together hard to keep every bit of air inside her body, then she dug her nails into his arm and focused on trying to rip his skin off, then she thrashed as her lungs burned and cramped in the absence of oxygen, then she started kicking in the vain attempt to slosh enough water out of the tub, he pressed harder and she kicked at the tiled wall to try and get leverage, her hips raising to throw her body up until he put his hand on her closest thigh to ease her struggling.
Trying to work her heel up onto the small tub ledge under the soap dish she kept missing and kicked out until she felt the wet ridges and slip of soap under her toes, she hefted her body up with her foot and for a second she thought she had got the drop on the man holding her in the tub, until the soap dish dislodged and her legs crashed back into the water.
She kicked it out of the tub, it didn't even come close to hitting him and instead she figured she had probably broken the top of her foot and a few toes with the stunt.
Her vision went fuzzy and her mind muddled, bleary and weak she tried to not pass out as her mouth opened sucking in water in its vain attempt for air.
She was swallowing water and then she was breathing it, she thrashed again and grabbed at his arms, something snapped in his wrist and she clawed at him, enraged and pumping with adrenaline and panic.
Air felt sweet and she sucked it in, coughing and then pushing at the weight falling on her she threw herself through the water to the other side of the tub looking for an escape until her back was rammed into the tub spiquet.
The fact that his face wasn't his own didn't click; the fact that he had claws didn't either. She felt no fear, felt that there was no oddity in the fact that she bared her teeth and snapped at his jaw.
He growled loud and long in her face with a shove that hurt her spine as it pressed harder into the metal behind her. She pushed forward and growled back, an animal sound tearing itself from her throat and leaving it raw in its wake.
"Calm down!" He snarled, his features changing, becoming again a human mask.
It struck her then that faces shouldn't do that, couldn't do that. Her breathing evened and her mouth felt strange, her bottom lip tasted like blood and spit, it was cut. Her fingers rolled over it and found the hardness of teeth, too sharp and too long.
Her nails weren't nails, they were like what Peter Hale's had looked like when he'd bitten her. Talons, claws, dangerous, sharp, deadly.
She panicked and rolled out of the tub, tangling herself on the shower curtain and falling over the toilet bowl onto the floor.
Looking at her hand she found nothing the matter with it. Her mind was clearing, her mouth felt like her own and she spewed water from her lungs, chest heavy and shaking.
"What the fuck was that? What the fuck!" She breathed rolling over and watching him climb sloppily out of the tub and sat on the floor with his back to it.
He raised a brow, "What did it look like it was?"
"Like you're a badly mad-up extra on an episode of Buffy. What the fuck!" She punched the floor.
"Stop saying 'what the fuck,'" he commanded looking bored when she scowled and threw a glare at him.
"Get out of my house." Her voice was calm but her nerves were razor thin and her hands were hurting, like her mouth, her vision was sharpening, focused and mean.
His expression changed, he studied her. "Go look in the mirror."
"Shut up!"
Her nail beds felt like they were breaking apart, sliding and morphing into something, like they were growing something.
She clenched her eyes shut.
"Go look!"
"No."
"Stop being difficult! Look."
He wrenched her up from the floor and she felt the edge of the sink bang into her hips, she didn't look at the mirror, she struggled and jumped up to throw herself away, he cursed and wrapped an arm like branded steel across her waist and chest, she kicked and knocked hair products and make-up from the counter.
"Get off, ack-…" He put an arm across her throat and his muscles tightened, he made her look and if the lack of oxygen as he pressed down on her carotid arteries wasn't enough to make her pass out, what stared back fierce and angry in the mirror would have.
She was on the floor, coming to with the thought that she hadn't been out long since she was still sopping wet, the fleece tight and uncomfortable around her limbs.
Her hand reached out and slapped something warm and bony, a calf. She kept slapping at it so the owner would know she was awake.
"Stop that," he mumbled.
She kept slapping his leg.
"I. Said. Stop," he snarled at her, she rolled her head on the tile floor and saw the broken shards of the soap dish lying in the connecting doorway of her bedroom. Risking a glance at his face she saw that he didn't even have his eyes open.
She lifted a broken shard of the handle piece and gripped it close to her palm.
Turning she stabbed him in the thigh with it, triumph evident in her face as she yanked it out and stabbed again going for the femoral artery.
He reached down and plucked the deadly instrument from her like she'd been offering it to him like a flower or a pencil.
Looking down at her he seemed to find the whole scenario only marginally irritating as his blood pooled out from his body onto the bathroom floor.
Numbly she watched the skin knit together with a sucking squelch of flesh binding and healing. Her hair and pajamas dripped into a puddle that blood rolled through like smoke.
Her chest was cold, her sternum felt iced over and suddenly she realized that if he even glanced at her casually that he'd be looking at her torso in its entirety from the way the fleece hung and sagged from being weighted with water.
She clutched her top closed at the collar and made sure nothing was visible.
His hand grabbed for her hand and yanked it straight.
"What the fuck?" She yelled as he pulled the gauze around her intravenous port off.
"Do you listen to anything?"
He seemed ticked off by the fact that she had stabbed him, in retrospect she decided maybe she shouldn't have done it because his fingers dug into her arm and when he had enough of a grip her yanked the port out of her arm.
"Hey, shit!"
He dropped the IV catheter on the floor, droplets of blood running out of the tubing and the hole in her arm trickling weakly. "Relax, it'll heal."
It did. She ripped off her other bandage and stared hard at the unblemish skin of her elbow. "Where is it?"
"Where's what?"
"The bite!" Her voice was loud in the small bathroom.
"It healed."
"How?"
"You changed. In the tub, when you were drowning your body stopped fighting it."
"What 'it?'"
"The change."
"What. Fucking. Change," she annunciated hard so he would understand the gravity of the question and stop being nonchalant.
"The change that makes you one of us."
"One of us what?"
"What did it look like to you?"
"…" She didn't answer because she had been hallucinating, residual effects of the fever and loss of oxygen.
"Werewolf." The word hung between them the moment his mouth let it go, she gaped and he stared.
"You are fucking nuts," she confirmed rising from the floor and placing a bloody hand against the wall for support.
He rose from the floor and towered over her.
"Really?" He asked, as if the whole thing was amusing.
"Yes, fucking really," she sneered backing up a step.
His face changed, his nails lengthened and then in a flash the façade of a human face returned. "Not nuts now."
"I'm hallucinating," she rubbed at her eye sockets and realized that her brow line wasn't swollen anymore. Her fingers went to her mouth and found that the split in it was gone.
It wasn't in the mirror when she turned to look at herself.
"Convenient explanation, you're not though. Sorry."
"This can't be happening right now, it's crazy."
Her eyes caught his in the mirror.
"It's true."
"Werewolves aren't real."
She leaned back against the wall and slid down until her butt hit the wet floor.
"They are," he insisted.
"Bullshit, she mumbled into her knees.
"If you say so. What would I know?"
"Don't patronize me." She looked up at him with clenched teeth.
"Don't say things that are stupid," he countered.
"It's not stupid, werewolves aren't real. Where are you going?"
He walked around her and out of the bathroom, yanking a towel off the rack as he went it slapped her in the face, not turning when he placed a hand on the frame and tilted his head to the side to say, "When you're done having an identity crisis come find me in the kitchen."
It took her awhile to pull herself together.
Lucette got up and got changed leaving the bedroom floor a working study of mess, her night-stand drawer lay shattered from where she yanked it out in the rush for her gun, the extra box of bullets had exploded everywhere, wet clothes were dropped and left in a tangled mass.
She tread careful into the bathroom, avoiding the best she could the puddles of water and congealing blood and broken pieces of the soap dish and her cosmetic collection, she noticed with absolute disdain that her toothbrush sat in the wastebasket on top of used toilet paper.
Using the rest of the toilet roll to mop up blood and flushing the globbed up sheets away and mopping up the water with her remaining color coordinated towel she tidied up.
Broken pressed powders went into the garbage, her toothbrush stayed where she found it; she pulled the plug up in the bathtub and watched the water swirl away and scowled at the broken tiles on the shower wall that she'd have to replace.
He was sitting at her kitchen table glaring at her dog through the pane glass of the back door; Brigadier did not seem at all pleased by the arrangement.
"I'm letting him in." She received no response and opened the door. Catching the canine's collar before he got close enough to the man at her table she yanked and gave a hushed command, "Gloss."
The large animal looked up at her, sullen it seemed to be told to leave the intruder be.
"Scratch."
Her tone was firm and the animal whined as if afraid, as if she'd yelled and had smacked him in the head, but it left the room all the same, but not before looking at her and flinching when she let go of his collar.
Derek Hale said nothing.
Lucette sat down across from him and grabbed her pack of cigarettes, she lit one and tossed the lighter down.
He looked at her Zippo and after a moment took a cigarette for himself.
She blew out lazily into his face; he turned and regarded her with a scowl. "If we heal how come you needed me to help you that night?"
She took a drag and waited.
"Bigger wounds take longer to heal, so do deeper ones, you heal the most vital things first like organs before muscle and skin."
"Can we heal anything?"
He exhaled and eyed her carefully, "Is this a specific question?"
"No. Just like can we grow things back, like if you had a kidney removed or severed a limb?"
"No," he answered taking a drag and dropping ashes onto her table. "Limbs don't regenerate, we can bring back tissue that hasn't been dead for long, like frost-bite but we can't heal tissue that isn't there."
She pondered the idea and looked out the window to her right in the small breakfast nook, the sky was lightening. The florescent green numbers on her stove said it was a quarter to six.
"At what point is the damage so bad you can't heal it? Like if you shredded a lung does it just heal what it can and slough off what is already too dead?"
She asked suddenly so tired.
"If it's going to cause the whole thing to die, than yes. That's how it works." There were signs of fatigue in the way he sat across the table, slumped the tiniest of bits, his eyes heavy.
"What if you already have like half a liver, will it grow back the other half, since there's still other liver cells?"
"No."
"Okay." She was relieved and ran a palm across her denim covered hip on instinct. He stared at her and flicked ash.
"That was a specific line of questioning, do you only have one kidney or half a liver?"
"Something like that," she answered quickly with a billow of blue smoke tumbling over her teeth.
"What?"
She didn't feel like answering his questions.
"I don't have a pancreas," she joked.
"…okay." He paused and looked out the window not knowing she was making a stab at humor.
"You're dumb." His head swiveled and he stabbed out his cigarette on the table in an act of petty anger, "…"
"You can't survive without a pancreas." She stared at the burned table top and wondered how she was going to fix it.
"Are you done?"
"With that," she smiled grimly at him taking a final drag.
"Any more questions?" He spoke to her back when she threw her cigarette into the sink and ran water over it.
"Yes."
"Then ask." He was waspish.
"I'm thinking."
"…"
She leaned into the counter and crossed her arms, looking down at her toes. "Why is my dog acting weird, do I smell different or something?"
"Sort of."
"'Sort of' yes or 'sort of' no?" She met his eyes for a moment before he looked back out the window at the sunrise.
"Animals can sense when they're prey."
"So my dog thinks I'm going to hunt it down."
"No. He's probably confused as to why you suddenly just…," he paused and waved a hand looking for a suitable term.
"Upgraded?" She supplied with a mumble.
"Whatever."
"So what I'm like an even bigger alpha dog than I was in relation to before with my dog?"
"You're not an alpha."
"I meant in this comparison."
"Simply put, I guess. You're just a different creature now to the dog."
Her coffee pot was still on; she poured what was left in a dirty mug and let it burn the inside of her throat. "What rank am I in werewolf, what are you?"
"I'm a beta."
"So what does that make me, an omega?"
"You're probably a low ranking beta, if you were an omega you wouldn't have growled at me."
"Comforting." It wasn't, not really, cold comfort at most not like the real soothing kind she wanted.
"Anything else?"
She eyed the shattered mug on the other side of the kitchen from before. "If you're a higher rank than me shouldn't my dog act the same around you? Is this some Freudian odiepedal thing where I'm the mom and he's the son and you're the dad and it's competitionary?"
He looked at her like she was insane, he hadn't gotten the question.
"Can you speak understandably? You're dog is deferring to you, as a pack member would. I'm an outsider so he regards me with suspicion and aggression."
"Thank god."
She decided that if her dog was trying to fight over her with Derek Hale she might as well jump off her roof. Silence came up between them, like a wall.
"Questions?"
"Yeah, I'm thinking again."
"I don't have all night," he told her tapping his fingers on the table.
"It's not night anymore anyway, shut up I'm trying to process things."
"By all means take your time," he put on airs when he said it.
"Thanks."
"…" He ignored her sarcasm.
"So anything I should know?"
"Like what?"
"Well, what's the full moon do?"
"You'll be more aggressive. The shift will be harder to control. Things like that."
She wondered what the 'things like that,' meant. A thought hit her unbidden and unwanted and altogether embarrassing, she asked anyway, bumbling over her words. "What about…hmmm, do werewolves go into heat like real wolves."
"All female mammals go into some form of heat." He seemed to spit out the answer, trying to finish the line of questioning fast.
"So it will be like normal then. Like libido going up during a woman's normal reproductive cycle."
"No."
Lucette threw up her hands and made a sound in her throat that she hoped belayed frustration. "Then what?"
"Do I look like a female to you?"
She made a point not to shoot back something sarcastic or crude.
"No, but don't you know any female werewolves?"
"My sister, my mother, and a cousin were the only ones I've met and I didn't exactly broach the subject of their libidos with them."
"Well what happened when it did happen to them."
No, Derek Hale seemed not to like these types of questions at all. Probably because it made him uncomfortable, she figured that it wasn't exactly a feeling he felt a lot. Good, she thought. She relished his discomfort.
"Aggression, irritability, things you learn to ignore."
"Like what?" She pressed gripping the edge of the sink behind her and staring forward at the wall not wanting to look at him while talking about were-libido.
"Smells."
Her face scrunched up at the one word answer, "Am I going to be able to smell other people's sex drives?"
She was thoroughly disgusted by the idea, she didn't want to go through life blushing every time she walked by a guy knowing he had just jerked off.
"You're going to smell everything from now on, you live with it. It's not as hard as you think. How long have you smoked?"
"Years."
"You're going to be coughing up tar for the next few days; it'll stick to your teeth unless you put something on them."
"Thanks for the tip. Anything else along those lines worth mentioning?"
She sat back down at the table and put her head on her arms in front of her, weary from the events that had taken place.
"You're going to be able to smell better and see better and take more damage, you'll be stronger. There's not much else."
"What about medications, do they work on us?"
"Not unless we need the boast to heal," he explained reaching for her cigarettes; she scooped them up and warned him not to put it out on the table again.
"Just healing?"
She lit another for herself and took lazy drags.
"And other things, you probably can't get drunk anymore unless you have a whole bottle."
"That's unfortunate."
"Female werewolves don't have litters," he rattled off looking like he was just trying to find facts to throw at her and keep her from asking anymore uncomfortable questions.
"Wasn't planning on popping out any babies."
"Birth control has less effectiveness, but there's no real need for it, you're body will know when it can get pregnant."
"Not on it."
"I know." The admission made her cough on smoke, she thumped her chest and stared at him with wide eyes, "You know?"
He turned to look across the kitchen.
"You can smell it. Hormones have their own presence not a smell or a taste but you know when they're there and when they're not and what's not normal."
"That'd be cooler to think about if I wasn't so skeeved out by it," she mused.
"Why?"
"The thought of someone smelling my hormones is going to take some getting used to."
"Your's aren't normal," he told her. She knew.
"Thanks."
"You're deficient."
She pointed her cigarette at him, "You're lacking tact."
Derek Hale just shrugged and looked completely nonplussed buy the accusation. "Most women your age have higher levels of female hormones."
"Birth control is extra estrogen, it tricks your body into thinking you're pregnant so you don't ovulate. I know, I have a whole textbook I had to read about it most woman have higher levels because their on it at this age."
"You don't have enough, in either case."
"What's it like to smell things like that?" She hoped the question would bring him off the topic of her smelling weird.
"It's an awareness of how another animal will predictably behave."
"That's not as skeevy of a reason as what I thought you might say."
He looked like he was suddenly trying to puzzle something out, "Or you're testosterone is higher than normal."
"It's not, it's a comparative increase." She explained hoping the answer and the way she said it would bring the issue to a close.
"…"
The silence felt suffocating. She huffed and sighed propping her chin on her fist and closing her eyes as she supplied him with a breakdown of the subject.
"Before kids hit puberty their level of male and female hormones are about level regardless of gender. Once puberty hits they increase, respectively. Testosterone doesn't spike like that in girls, in a lab report on me the level would be in normal range with estrogen being below where it should be or at best a low normal."
"How come?"
"Don't know," she shrugged. "Everyone has different body chemistry."
"You're lying."
She rolled her eyes and lied again. "Okay I'm an effeminate man."
"…"
"I have a chromosomal defect." Lie.
"Better, your heartbeat didn't skip, it just increased that time."
"My lack of female hormones is none of your business, were not pals, hun. You don't get rights to my life history," she said pointedly, pointing again with her cigarette and taking a long drag after finishing the motion.
"Fine. I have to go. I'll be back tomorrow. Some time, I don't know specifically. 'Hun,'" He mocked.
He got up and walked to the back door.
"I'll be here." She didn't look behind her at him.
"Good."
Another question came to mind as he turned the handle; she leaned back in her chair and tilted her head back.
"What's up with the gym wear?"
It looked wrong on him, too big almost, the ragged holes his arms came out of were too long and showed too much skin, too much muscle, she stared for a moment and put herself in check and ended the thought angry that at some point she'd been staring close enough to notice.
"Didn't want to have my scent tracked."
"By who."
"My uncle."
She turns around in her chair surprised by the answer, "He's not dead?"
"No."
"Is he a werewolf too?"
"Are you seriously asking me that question?" He looks incredulous, like she's the dumbest person he's ever met in his life.
"Okay, that's a yes. Why don't you want him tracking you?"
"Because if he did and found you he'd kill you or make you kill everyone you have a connection with in order to get you on his side."
"…," there are no words to describe the way panic feels then when she's feeling things so much more fully, so sharply. She knows then that her body is different, she had changed in some horrible way that she wants nothing to do with. Her fear is primal.
"What?" It's like he's noticed her fear.
"Why?" Her voice is strained.
"I'll tell you tomorrow, don't leave the house."
"What about my job?"
"Quit. He thinks you're dead, if he goes back to the hospital and sees you there's nothing I'd be able to do. It's better that he thinks you're dead."
"Why does he think I'm dead?"
"He thought you were a night nurse."
"Oh. So-…"
"I have to go. I've stayed too long. I'll be back tomorrow."
"Okay. Go before you give away my super secret location," she commanded wryly and without humor in her tone, knowing that the joke was stupid but trying anyway to lighten the mood.
The door clicked shut in response.
A/N: On the topic of how Jennifer killed the nurses, it's not canon but what actually happened before Derek and Stiles got to the nursing home isn't really touched upon. Haldol can cause a severe drop in blood pressure and cardiac arrhythmias which can lead to death; an AED is an portable shock device to stabilize a heart rhythm.
Ventricular tachycardia is when the ventricles of the heart, the parts that shuttle blood out of the heart contract too fast and not enough blood is going out because the chambers aren't being allowed to fill up sufficiently, Ventricular fibrillation is similar but more serious, it's when the ventricles "shiver" and blood doesn't pump out at all.
The "thump" mentioned is a Precordial Thump which can be done once if an AED is not on hand in an effort to jump start the heart, it usually is ineffective but it's better than nothing. Epinephrine can jumpstart the heart from a flat line state aka asystole, but most facilities have a limit on how many doses you can give that's why the nurse tells Lucette 'last one,' in reference to the second shot.
An AMBU bag is used for resuscitation it pump air into the body. CPR guidelines are currently thirty chest compressions and two rescue breaths in a cycle, and it's hard to do for a long period of time, nurses usually have to switch with someone because it's very tiring. A saline lock is an IV line that looks like a knob outside of the skin that you inject medication into. Intravenous lines are inserted with a needle to puncture the vein and a small tube, a catheter, is threaded into the vein, the needle is then removed and the tube remains in the vein.
The discussion on hormones was pretty self-explanatory besides the lack of an answer to why Lucette has an imbalance. Props if someone makes the connection, it's not hard to make if you've been paying attention to the story thus far, go ahead jump to your conclusion.
Long side note. My apologies.