Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“I used to know this bartender. Carl. His name was Carl, with a C, not a K. He used to tell me that I liked the idea of bad more than the actual being bad. Which is really ironic, considering he was pouring shots of Jack for a seventeen-year-old.”

“And did you?”

“Did I what?” Each syllable is slowly and carefully enunciated in a way that Agent Hale finds disturbingly familiar.

They were right. He can feel it in the way this kid arranges himself, the way he takes all of the nervous energy of his ADHD and pours it into careful postures. What might ordinarily be a vicious penchant for sarcasm and talking in circles has turned into a habit of deceptively playful questions and answers.

He can almost feel the deep purr in the back of his mind, Use your words, Derek. Be specific.

It’s an unfortunate reflection. He would never have wished his uncle on anyone, and it seems he’s left traces all over this boy.

“Did you like the idea of bad more than being bad?” His answer is just as slow, adapting a similar, cloying tone.

The kid beams, his mouth spreading into such a wide expression of manic pleasure that Agent Hale wonders if his split lip will open up again. Even bruised and swollen, the kid has a face more pretty than it is handsome. Big brown eyes, a delicate, upturned nose, scattered moles, and plump lips meant for—

Well, apparently for smiling like a lunatic.

Agent Hale knows better than to wander down the path his more primitive instincts seem to be pulling him towards. Still, he can’t help but wonder how many times this kid has been stripped bare, slick and open, body bowed under and curved against the hard lines of Peter’s.

He’s having trouble focusing.

“You tell me. Carl won’t.”

“Carl is dead.”

“Now, I didn’t say that, did I?”

“Cute.” Agent Hale drones, and the kid reaches one hand across the metal table to pat his own consolingly.

Something he shouldn’t be able to do, his hands being cuffed, and all. Suddenly, Agent Hale smells a faint hint of the sharp emptiness of ash and a sickly swell of something floral.

Shit.

“You shouldn’t pout like that, baby. Not when we planned you such a big surprise.”

The overhead lights flicker as the kid gets up and saunters around the table, easy as you please. He makes it halfway before they go out completely, and Derek can see the shape of him slinking forward in the dark.

He doesn’t move.

“Whatever Peter’s put into your head—”

And the kid laughs—actually throws his head back and laughs, but then he’s moving forward again, crawling into Agent Hale’s lap.

“My ass, you mean? I know you’re more concerned with what he’s been sticking in my ass.” The kid grinds down against him, and Hale can’t help but whine and roll his hips in answer. Something is very, very wrong here.

He feels a growl, choking and trapped in the hollow cavity of his chest, where everything is dull—has been for a while, now. He can hear a muffled howling in the distance, and he shivers.

 The kid holds him through it, breathes filthy somethings into his ear, and laughs like the crazy little bastard he is.

“Stilinski—”

“Stiles.” He corrects before running his tongue across rough stubble.

“Whatever it is you’re planning, it won’t work.”

Stiles laughs again, pulls back to look him in the eye. “It already has. Or can’t you smell it on me?”

Silence, silence, and for the first time in who knows how long, Stiles actually looks disturbed. It’s funny that ripping people to pieces and setting things on fire register lower than Derek Hale’s dulled senses on the Stilinski Scale of Shock.

“How many fucking suppressants do these sad fucks have you on, Derek?” Stiles speaks as if he knows him, as if he has known him.

He opens his mouth to retort, but then suddenly Stiles’ tongue is where his words should be. The kiss is sloppy, filling the room with the most obscene noises. Derek’s fingers twitch.

It feels better than it should.

The sounds beyond the door are too much to ignore, now—the wet sounds of ripping meat, the sharp cracks of gunpowder, of swearing, of grown men pissing themselves in fear.

Derek  remembers how all of these things smell, but he got out. He’s been good.

“I’m yours, babe. Don’t worry. Peter and me, we’ll make you all better. You’ll see.”

Stiles drags him in for another wet, open kiss, and Derek wonders if this counts as a good or bad day at work.

He may not be able to smell it, but his body still won’t allow him to lift a hand to move the young psychopath who is, apparently, his mate.

The primal inside of him is humming, pleased at the notion that Peter has found a person just for him. He supposes this means that Peter is sorry.

Because half of family is effort, Derek.

But the niggling human bits are protesting that he really did like his coworkers and not being shot at as much.

He can hear the others—the people who had nearly been trained to spot his frequent bad moods and stay the hell away rather than antagonize him the way Peter did, the way he always has—being slaughtered much more clearly when the door swings open.

Stiles parts from him, just barely, to wiggle his fingers in a child-like wave. “Hey, Carl. Look who I found.”

The man’s eyes glow a dull gold as he glances at Derek, and his own eyes ache to shine red in the darkness.

“Great,” Carl says, “Can you maybe hurry up? Got a bullet in my ass, and Lahey’s smilin’ like a shit.”

“Charming.” Stiles drawls, then, turning to Derek, “We’re gonna be a family.”

If he hadn’t been a good boy and taken too much medicine, he might have howled. But he will in time, it looks like. And in time, Stiles will swallow it down, swallow him down, and keep smiling like a lunatic.

 

 

 

Chapter Text

They don’t have much time, not really, until someone notices the giant shit storm that just hit the station, and while the urge to stay still and allow his newfound mate to rub his scent all over him is strong, it’s an urge that the pills, fortunately, still allow him to suppress.

Stiles pouts.

Derek guesses that that’s a thing for him, so it seems enough to smack his ass and tug him out the interrogation room door, where Carl so recently made his grievances known.

He wonders, absently, who Lahey is, and how exactly he had gone about ‘smilin’ like a shit’, but it is likely a trait that he and Stiles have in common.

The lights are down, the emergency lights dim and ineffective in the suddenly iron-rich atmosphere. It’s like a blanket of sickly sweet gagging on his dimmed senses, a too-hot haze itching at his skin.

It’s still hard to reconcile his drugged humanity with the instincts he’s been reared to understand.

 

Stiles lets out a playful-sounding ‘eww’ when Derek’s shined-up work shoe comes down on a limp hand, earning an unpleasant crunching noise. He winces, stepping back and looking down at the now-permanently shocked expression etched in Detective Lindsay Grabel’s penciled-on eyebrows.

It was a shame.

She told funny jokes. Derek didn’t laugh at them—his sense of humor was one of those things that didn’t really translate through the apathetic haze of his medication—but he’d understood, somewhere in the back of his mind, that she’d been funny.

 

And her family probably isn’t going to like the horrific little portmanteau they are going to have to pluck her out of.

Stiles’ thumb presses the fleshy inside of his palm, impatient without seeming too impatient, and Derek leads him through the corpse-strewn squad room of the borrowed station, ignoring the low snarls

and growls of straggling pack me—mates, they were pack mates now—on his way to the exit.

 

It’s almost like a Disney movie, leading the boy around scattered puddles of drying blood, thinking of laying his jacket down out of some macabre sense of irony, but really, it won’t be of much use. His beaten converse are already a sticky shade of pink-red-brown where the whites should be.

 

And they aren’t exactly riding off into the sunset.

 

It’s a full moon out there—a bright and perfect circle, ready to be washed with red. Derek can feel himself being pulled slowly down.

Like drowning.

 

Like stars.

 

 

x

 

“Look,” Peter says, “Look what your family’s done just for you.” He reaches up to smear a fresh swath of blood over Derek’s lower lip, rubbing it in with an attentive stare. It’s only a matter of time before it’s thoroughly removed, Derek knows.

       

            He knows Peter. Intimately.

       

            Biblically.

       

            It had been enough to drive him away before, but now he knows the wrongness of the other side. The itching and screaming and beating inside of his veins, the papery sourness of his own skin. The weight of playing human on his guts and greater instinct is intolerable under the moonlight. It feels like sick and ending.

       

            So Peter smiles at him, and teases him—plays at a proper introduction to his new mate. “Stiles Stilinski,” It pours off his tongue like oil in the dim, “I found him just after you left, Derek. And Isaac Lahey, of course.”

       

            Stiles’ arms snake around him, lustful yet restraining, as if he might run back to the station to see if Sarah’s head could be reattached to what remained of her neck, or if Luke’s small intestines might be wound back in some semblance of order.

       

            As it is, he’s too busy studying the suspicious boy approaching him. If he weren’t so carefully medicated, he might have growled, but he is, and he won’t. Like the kid needs anything more to worry about.   

       

            Lahey.

       

            Isaac Lahey, the one with the wild, quick eyes and careful step—the one that laughed at Carl for his careless stupidity. He isn’t laughing anymore. In fact, he seems as if he’s already running away, even as he steps toward them.

 

It doesn’t stop Peter from planting a hand on his back, urging him closer.

       

            “Don’t be shy, Isaac. Derek here will be your new Alpha.”

       

            He looks uncertain, unaware of how Derek expects him to react, and half-way to a coronary trying to anticipate it. Derek doesn’t need to hear to understand. The boy’s face is expressive, less carefully guarded than his friend’s—

 

Were they friends, or did Peter just happen to collect teenagers too pretty for their own good these days?

           

It wouldn’t surprise him.

           

“He’s an Alpha, too?”

           

“He will be. Once he’s all better.”

           

“Is he sick?”

           

Peter grinned, “Oh, terribly. But we’re going to make him feel all right.”

           

Peter knows all about sickness.

           

Peter is a virus.

           

His hands are clean and almost cool when they pull Derek’s shirt from the waistband of his work slacks, thumbing at his hip bones with old certainty. Not at all sticky. He must have washed them.

 

Derek imagines, though he knows it’s not yet possible, that he smells the scent of cheap industrial soap from the precinct washroom. Peter’s hands trace the skin underneath before withdrawing and falling to his belt buckle.

           

Stiles presses hot, lazy kisses to the back of his neck as Peter slides his belt from the loops. His stillness is momentary, and he soon takes it upon himself to pitch in and drag Derek’s jacket from his broad shoulders.

           Peter draws away as the cloth shifts over his shirt sleeves and falls to the ground, and Derek realizes with a hard feeling in his stomach that Peter is looking over at Isaac, whose eyes are wide and very frightened.

           

So he hasn’t been with Peter.

           

Hasn’t been with anyone, from the looks of it.

           

Stiles nips at the tender flesh at the nape of his neck, and Derek can’t hold back a low groan. It’s good. It has always been good, even when it made him feel like the world’s sickest fuck, but the warm press of his mate between his shoulder blades is something new and comforting.

           

Even if said mate is a self-professed nutcase with a thing for offing law enforcement to get to the gooey Hale center.

           

Stiles is eager. Isaac, on the other hand, is clearly not.

 

“Don’t.” Derek says, and Peter pauses, looking back at him.

           

“You don’t want him to play?”

           

The weight of it is thick and heavy in Derek’s throat, and he realizes, despite the teasing in his uncle’s voice, that the man is actually listening. It’s a strange feeling, but Derek is prepared to run with it.

           

“No, Peter. He’s scared out of his mind.”

           

“He just tore apart at least three police officers. And a detective.” He added that last as if it were a matter of bonus points. As if this were all part of some stupid video game he’d played with Derek and Marcus back when there was still a Hale house, and a Hale pack to fill it.

           

“It’s a full moon. He’s new.” Derek paused, reaching to still Stiles’ wandering hands, “And I’m sure you had nothing to do with it.”

           

Peter’s smile is approving, with a generous dose of lewdness. “All right. You heard the Alpha, Isaac. Back to the den.”

           

Isaac doesn’t hesitate to turn tail and run.

           

For a second, Derek feels proud of himself, but then Peter is pressed against him once more, ripping his shirt open and biting angry marks against the skin of his chest.

           

They don’t fade.

           

Peter hums, and Stiles’ hand wraps around his cock.

           

They bring him off fast, a quick and forceful half-clothed fuck in the woods, rubbing against him with a fierce determination to make him right again, even if the medicine will put that off for quite some time, still.

           

Their instincts are untouched, and Derek needs to smell like pack. Later, Peter promises. There will be time for romance.

           

Derek would scoff if his mouth hadn’t been so very well-occupied with Stiles’ tongue, his fingers, his dick. It’s a sweet sort of sensation that blocks out the memory, the instinctive feeling that, even in coming home, he has lost.

           

x 

 

They’re scenting him, bringing him back into the fold, but Derek knows that things cannot be the same. Peter can’t be in control.

           

He will be the Alpha—the only one in command.

           

Because he had eyes like Isaac’s once.

           

Because Peter is sick, and Derek won’t be for long.

           

Derek is getting better.

.