dieu de terroir

Of course, Jackson remembers the night well. Head dazed by one too many vodka sodas and a heavy heart from yet another failed conversation with his ex. It was times like that he was glad to have a friend like Derek, he was someone he could speak to without fear of judgement, even when his rantings were beginning to make him sound like a teenager. “You know what?” Jackson challenged, if the topic were now open for discussion he may as well get it off his chest, “Did I touch your ass? Sure. Was it an accident? Absolutely. Did I leave it there a little longer than I should have, possibly? I didn’t know it was a crime, ok, for a straight dude to tell him best pal that he’s got a nice ass.”

Admittedly, it was nice that Neve’s name could be spoken without opening up a therapy session which would both emotionally exhaust him and the poor person who had to listen. It’s not something you want to unpack again when you’re confined in an old chevy on a 20-hour drive down to Miami. Perhaps that’s where all the negativity should stay, up in Chicago and finally lay to rest. That used to be the beauty of moving around state to state in his early twenties, so many fresh starts that he hardly ever felt begrudged with his past.

“Maybe I would have chosen you if you hadn’t been so quick to say you’d kill me,” the retaliation was stated as a matter of fact. If it really came down to it, and he absolutely had to pick to sleep with any male, the probability of that person being Derek was far more likely than Gerard, Jackson just didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

Jackson screws up his face at the idea of sleeping with Isaac, “I mean… all that sugar in his system, the kid’s stamina has gotta be off the charts.” Jackson signals to pull off the road and onto another, finally, the fields of infinite corn had come to an end, replaced with blue skies and fluffy clouds. “Kill Benjamin,” because if you’re going to kill anyone it may as well be the guy that caused your break up, “Marry Teirney and fuck myself. I don’t think I could marry me, I’m really messy and annoying and I’m definitely a blanket hog.” He clears his throat, cracking open the window a little so that Bella would hopefully stop excitedly panting as she chews on his lucky dice, “Alright, last one, Alma, Damien and Benjamin,”

The corn ends and is replaced by a typical small Midwestern town. Strip malls, dingy drug stores, chain restaurants and a cement-gray middle school, generic as Wonderbread and nearly as bland. It’s the epitome of generic, a carbon copy of a carbon copy. It shouldn’t strike any chords. And yet.

Derek knows this kind of town like the back of his own hand. This, not the bustle of Chicago– this is the kind of country he was raised in, the place where his life started. Where every new day felt like an ending, every shift of his powers, from a tiny spark to the roaring fire that burnt down his family home. Where his dreams of a normal life burnt down with it.

He doesn’t know how long it’s been since he left the safety of Chicago, it’s constant noise and movement and keep-it-moving energy. Out here, it’s like time has slowed down, compressed into nothing. The decade he’s spent avoiding towns like this turned to less than the blink of an eye, and suddenly he’s a scared teen again, his own fate out of his hands. It makes the whole shitshow of the last few weeks even worse to deal with, all the progress he’s made– joining the Jems, building a life for himself– undone by one impulsive decision, and he’s just as powerless as he was at 16, body and brain on fire.

Derek sinks a bit lower in his chair, trying to keep his eyes on nothing but the road ahead. His left leg starts to bounce, a nervous tic he hasn’t seen in a while; he crosses his arms over his chest, and tries to ignore everything.

“Yeah, it is a pretty great ass,” he says. It comes out flatter than he intended, and he ducks his head to look at his phone so he doesn’t have to face Jackson. He scrolls through messages without reading a word. “And you’re right about being a blanket hog. You sleep like a big, swaddled baby.”

Derek doesn’t want to think about Damien right now. Sure, he’d brought him up first, at the very beginning of the damn game. But that was before his mood took a turn. “Uh,” he mumbles, “Marry Alma, because I have standards. I don’t think I could handle Benjy in the sack, but I’m not into the whole office romance thing either, so…” He makes a face. “Can I pass? Or kill them both?”

Jackson pouted, eyes off the road and head tilting towards his friend with some questionable attempt of puppy dog eyes, “you’d kill me? Here I was thinking you were my ride or die, bud.” The false act soon substitutes with sinless pride, concentration back on his driving as a grin from ear to ear dictates his features. Cheating wasn’t an insult to Jackson, in fact, the acknowledgement of his foul play only further validated his efforts, “you should know better, I always cheat.” His mood subdues with one name, Neve Kaplan- honestly, he wasn’t positive if he would marry, fuck or just wish that her existence hadn’t shown to only live remotely inside of his head. “Uhhhh,” well you couldn’t kill her, he notes, hardly able to make any ill wish towards her, “Guess I’d marry Neve, not that she’d turn up to the alter anyway.” He huffs as if his own villainy hadn’t warranted for an ex to be thrown into the mix. Still, not much was lost for dignity, Derek had been there to witness most of Jackson’s drunk dials and voice messages to Neve for the past few months and so hearing he’d willingly marry her was nothing new. “Fuck Gerrard and kill you as vengeance for my own death, a life for a life.” A beaming grin returns, payback time, “Isabel, Isaac and Jack- hey my dice” he’s immediately distracted, reaching to open the glove box again and pulling the red fluffy dice out to hang back on his rearview mirror, a few keychains and crumpled up maps falling onto Derek in the process, “I thought I’d lost those. Nice.”

“Hey, don’t doubt my abilities. I can repress the fuck out of shit.” He says, not caring if he makes any sense. Jackson always gets it. Their brains are on the same dumbass wavelength like that. “Interesting of you to bring up our last cuddle, though. I thought we weren’t talking about that one.” He arches an eyebrow, and says in a too-high voice, nothing like Jackson’s, “Ohhhh, my hands got lost looking for my phooone, Derek, like I haven’t heard that one before, Jackson ‘wandering hands’ Raemers.”

Derek’s always viewed Jackson’s heterosexuality like the universe’s biggest practical joke. Sure, he believes it’s there, but its existence still catches him off-guard sometimes. ‘Sometimes’ especially being when it’s 4AM and Jackson’s drunk hand is on his ass just a bit too long.

Derek looks out the window to hide his eyeroll when Jackson mutters something about Neve abandoning him at the altar. He asked for it, bringing her up, but Jackson was the one to make it sound so melodramatic. That, and the fact that being exasperated at Jackson’s angsting over Neve, teasing him about it all, makes it much easier to forget how utterly shit the whole situation had been. That breakup hadn’t been an easy thing to watch happen to his best friend, to see how low Jackson could truly get. Being able to roll his eyes at him now, joke about it all, feels like being able to breathe again. 

“I don’t know about fucking Gerard, dude, he’s probably into kinkier shit than you could handle. Like, cutting off your dick or something. Should’ve picked me-- I know you need a gentle lover.” He takes the moment of distraction to steal the dice from Jackson’s hands, twisting in his seat to wag the dice in front of Bella’s face. In a moment, they’re snatched up. Success. Derek was not going to spend the rest of the trip with those bouncing around in his eyeline, and any chance to bond with one future roommate while getting a leg up on the other is a success in his books. Jackson has the advantage on the wooing-Bella front, anyway, he’s the one who feeds her everyday.

 “Kill Jack, Marry Isabel, and-- well, shit. I don’t trust Isaac any more than Gerard. The kid probably bleeds Mountain Dew. But I’d take one for the team.” Derek finally finds a knife under the seat. It’s dull, but better than nothing. He looks for something to carve, then eyes the plastic of the car door with a gleam of inspiration. “Benjamin, Tierney, your own clone-- go.”

“Chance, Damien and Cain,” he echoed the names mindfully, tongue sucking against his teeth in careful contemplation before reporting his decisions back to Derek. “I suppose I’d marry Cain, I feel like he’d look after me and I get a kick out of annoying that guy and that’s basically what marriage is, huh?” His hand brushes over his beard, a subtle frown gracing his features for what seemed to be a tough choice between Damien and Chance. “I’d fuck Damien, I guess and looks like Chance would have to die but I’d do it nicely, you know, nothing too brutal cus he’s only a kid. He can’t help that his old man’s got more sex appeal.”

“Your turn, Shae, Luca and me, go,” a slight snicker follows his words, was it against the rules to put yourself in the mix? Not that he’d considered it, rules were made to be broken.

Derek cringes at the thought of Cain taking care of Jackson, but the expression is quickly replaced by one of indignation. “Hey, you’re not supposed to say yourself.” Derek reaches out with a foot and kicks Jackson in the side, nearly hitting the gearshift in the process. Just another day of living on the wild side. “What if I’ve been repressing my deep-seated homoerotic feelings for you? Do you really want to be stuck with me in a car full of all our shit and a 70 pound doberman for, what, 20 hours, knowing that?”

Derek settles back in his seat with a huff, looking more like a put-out teenager who’s just witnessed someone cheat at Scrabble than a dangerous hitman. “You know what? I’m killing you, marrying Luca, and fucking Shae.” He raises an eyebrow in Jackson’s direction, daring him to say something. “Because I’m not going after someone who is basically my sister, and you’re dead to me, because you’re a cheater. So hopefully Shae would be down. Anyway,” He digs in his pocket for something to fiddle with, maybe a knife to threateningly flip open and closed a few times, but he comes up empty. He moves onto more dangerous pastures, exploring the dangerous unknown of Jackson’s glove compartment, which practically explodes open with shit when he presses the button. It’s all a bit much, like Jackson himself. Derek raises his eyebrows, and tries to force the thing shut. “--Anyway, now that you’ve fucked up the rules, your turn: Me...” It occurs to him that their gang is pretty small, so there’s really nothing left to do but go for the gut-punch. “Gerrard, and, uh.... Neve.”

“Say what you want Park,” Cain drawls, pulling him back up for air once he’s certain that the other man has finally gotten the message that this isn’t their usual fucking shtick This is serious. “But the fact of the fucking matter is that Damien trusts me and after the shit you just pulled behind his back he’s never going to trust you again. In fact, I’d be pretty surprised if he still wanted you around, even with that power of yours.” He jabs hard at Park’s chest with the hand that’s not holding his head in place. He’d forgotten a little of his anger while he’d puttered around Park’s apartment petting his cat and eating his food but it’s back now in full force.

Damien took this shady little piece of shit in on good faith Park repaid him by laying warehouse fire at his feet, along with all the anti-mutant outcry that’s bound to follow it. “I know some no name stray like you wouldn’t understand this Park but you don’t get to pick and choose when you’re part of a family. You fucked up. Now Damien and the rest of us are going to be stuck cleaning up after you. So if you’re done waving your nasty little dick around you’re gonna tell me what the fuck happened.”

Derek had guessed he’d eventually die by drowning. It made the most sense; underwater was one of the only places he couldn’t use his powers, and it was unlikely anyone with dangerous intentions would be getting close enough to take him out otherwise. The bathtub part is a surprise, though.

He gives up after a moment, the familiar strength of Cain’s hand on his throat more than he knows he can fight against. He’d be wasting precious oxygen struggling, when he knows the only way to make it out of this is to wait for the guy to come to his senses, and remember that inter-gang homicide is generally frowned upon by their boss. When he eventually lets up, Derek comes up gasping, scrabbling against the tile with all the desperation he’d pent-up trying to stay calm. He heaves his body half up and over the edge of the tub, spitting up water onto the floor. When he’s done, he glowers up at Cain from his crouch.

Cain’s words hurt worse than any punch he could throw at Derek. He grits his teeth, feeling the first of his resolve start to waver, the sore spots on his body beginning to command attention. Of course he’d known he fucked up, but how it was going to be taken by the rest of the gang, well-- he’d hoped they’d have understood. That he was doing it for them, and the rest had been a big mistake.

“Miami Derek better not, because I swear that if Miami Derek starts doing boring things, I will have to interfere. Miami Luca is way more dangerous than Chicago Luca. The salty air brings out my rosy complexion,” she said without actually knowing what she was saying. She had been on a run so often that nothing felt like home. Not even Chicago, where she had spend the most of her years on the run. Any place where neither Maddie nor Thomas was, was never going to be home. And that was the truth. She could pretend it was, but it would never be fact.

“I think boring Miami Derek needs to swim with the Miami fishes,” she said with a grin, before pushing and pulling him towards the sea.

Judging by the way Luca is talking, Derek doesn’t think she actually needs the caffeine. Her body seems to generate enough of the stuff naturally to power a medium-sized women’s soccer team, and with enough espresso added to the mix on top of that, well... The results can be frightening. But he knows she will defend her love of big-chain coffee to the grave, so he lets the topic drop before she goes off on a tangent about strawberry frappucinos or whatever and they’re stuck here all day.

A few moments of silent elapse before Jackson’s boredom ranks up again, if Derek hadn’t realised he’d be moving in with an overgrown man child before, surely he would by the end of their road trip together. “Ok, come on, let’s play a game,” anything to engross his mind and keep it away from lusting over food again. A low hum vibrates from his chest as he racks through his brain for time wasting games that would at least burn through the next half hour, “Would you rather? Truth or dare?… Fuck, Marry, Kill?”

“Suit yourself,” Derek shrugs. It’s not like Jackson’s bad taste is anything new. He hears the motor’s hum get louder as Jackson puts pedal to metal, and half-smiles to himself, knowing exactly what has his friend suddenly speeding down the Interstate. Jackson wouldn’t risk it all for a good sub, but he knows from experience he can get pretty close. Anyway, Derek knows he’d never do anything too risky with the children in the backseat. 

“Stupid question. I don’t need a game to get you to do dumb shit. So-- fuck, marry, kill...” He drums his finger on his leg, trying to gauge how cruel he wants to get in just the first round, then deals the killing blow: “Chance, Damien... Cain.”

She inflated again, still with a smile on her face. “Oh, you’re no fun. Who fucking cares. We’re in a new city, it’s going to take them at least… a month… before they’re aware that we’re no good and know our faces,” she commented. She wasn’t sure about that, but Luca liked to make fact out of opinion. She grabbed his arm and pulled him into the sand. Walking on flipflops in the sand was terrible, she would not let anything ruin her good mood.

“Sort of the fucking idea of a public place, Derek. Where has all your love for adventure gone? Don’t tell me you left it in Chicago, I will slap you,” she said, putting her hands on her sides. She loved Derek, a whole lot. As a friend of course, and secretly as a reminder of Maddie, but she had never told Derek that. She might, one day, share, that was. She was still debating how and when a conversation about her past was appropriate.

Derek gives Luca a look of betrayal. “Starbucks, Luca? You used to be punk rock.” Her good energy is starting to rub off on him, though. He stretches in the sun, trying to not expose any more skin as he does so, and shoves away the Midwestern urge to scowl directly at the sun until he goes blind.

People might not recognize them yet, but he doubts it’ll take a whole month before their reputation gets around. For one thing, he knows all he has to do is take off his shirt to expose himself to scrutiny and more than a few stares-- because of the scars, reminders of every interrogation that’s ever gone sideways on him, the fights from when he was too young to know better. It’s harder to run from your history when it’s written on your body.

The asshole doesn’t even say thank you before he’s spitting some drivel in Cain’s face about letting his cat out like Cain is some kind of fucking amateur. Cain, to his credit, keeps his cool. He does what he’s been planning to do since he got to Park’s house and bit into his first slice of stuffed crust.

He’s going to beat the shit out of Derek Park in his own home. Cain grabs the other man by the throat and pushes him back down into the tub, with his free hand he reaches for the faucet, turning it so that cold water streams down over them both. Good luck to Park igniting a spark when they’re both soaking wet.

“Park,” he says, voice oddly even given how giddy he feels to finally have an excuse to do this. “Why’d ya try to set half the neighborhood on fire?” It is awkward to beat a man in a wet bathtub. It’s cramped and slippery. Cain maybe should have thought about moving all of Park’s hair product out of the way before getting to it. He’ll make do though. He draws his fist back to strike Derek across the face. “I don’t remember Damien giving you the okay to wave your dick around Park so why’d you whip it out huh? Think you’re too good to follow the chain of command now Derek?”

Well, shit. Derek is sore, and tired, and now he’s soaking wet, and maybe about to be strangled to death in his own bathtub. It’s hard to speak with a hand on his throat, but that’s not going to stop him from cursing out Cain, especially if it might be his last chance. “Let go of me you dickhead or I’ll-- steam you alive like-- asparagus.” He gasps, spluttering as water gets in his eyes and mouth. It’s not the most menacing threat, but it gets his point across. Turning water into steam when he’s already soaking wet isn’t something he’s been able to pull off before, but he thinks for Cain he could figure something out. Get a mutant resentful enough and they can move mountains, right?

Derek writhes like an eel, and manages to get one arm under his own back for leverage, elbow knocking painfully into the side of the bathtub. He tries to push himself up and nearly knocks himself out on the faucet instead, but he thinks one of his flailing legs might have hit something in the process (hopefully not more bathtub.) Cain is stronger than him by a mile and heavier too, but Derek knows he can be damn slippery when he wants to be. Not to mention he’s resilient, like one of those old, skulking strays that just won’t die no matter how many times they get hit by a car. If it comes down to literally rolling with the punches until Cain gets bored, well, he’s had worse nights.

It’s easy to make it around the police barricade. The fire started so suddenly that every fireman and police officer in Chicago is scrambling just to keep up. Then it’s just a matter of finding the right building. The locked door Park was so concerned about is a old as fuck and practically mildewed through. It crumples like tissue paper when Cain kicks it.

And then there’s Park, limp and pale in his own blood, a hole the size of Cain’s fist in his side. Serves the moron right.

A cooler guy might have stood over Park’s dying body and lit a cigarette. There’s something poetic about that whole image, a tiny column of smoke and fire held aloft over the fading resident pyro. But Cain’s not really into poetics and he’s never concerned himself with trying to be cool. He vapes fat puffs of 90% THC Watermelon Chronic as he goes to town on Park’s side.

Being wrenched back from the brink of death isn’t an easy thing. When a dying nerve suddenly revives it doesn’t send the brain anything nice to feel. It’s all just burning and electricity and pain. Cain would know. He’s had to do it for himself countless times now. He doesn’t envy Park and he doesn’t bother trying to make the transition from dying to stable and nearly dead any easier for the other man. As far as Cain is concerned, Park deserves every last ache.

It takes a while. There’s no healing a hole in someone without having to make more of them to fill it up. and Cain can feel himself growing tired and hungry as the minutes tick by. Once he’s sure Park isn’t about to go quietly into that good night before Cain can personally beat him to death, he lifts the other man up and shakes as much blood as he can off of him, and carts him back to his apartment.

He dumps Park in his bathtub and digs through his pockets until he finds his wallet. It’s sticky with blood but Cain can wash that off of Derek’s credit card just fine. If he’s gonna go through the trouble of saving this fucker’s life, the very least Park owes Cain is a free meal, or two, or three. Okay, so Cain ends up ordering about a hundred dollars worth of Dominos on Derek’s dime but that hardly matters in the grand scheme of things. He’s a growing boy and he’s gonna need a lot of food if he’s gonna have the energy to heal up Park and then beat him half to death and heal him again.

Derek wakes up in fits and starts, impressions of pain and strange lights. Hallucinations, mostly starring Cain-- Cain walking around the ceiling above him, scowling; Cain chewing on his arm like a chicken wing, a spark of sharp pain traveling up his elbow to his neck; Cain standing above him, looking very stern for someone chomping on garlic bread. Derek wonders why he can’t have more pleasant visions, Isabel or, hell, even Luca talking him down, coaxing him back from the abyss. But that’s just his luck, isn’t it?

Between visions he has fitful dreams, dark nightmares and unfriendly fires.

He wakes up with a jolt that sends his head into the tile wall behind him with a thud, the pain almost sending him back into unconsciousness. When he’s settled again, the first thing he notes is that, fuck, he’s ruined more towels. The shower curtain, too, is dark with blood and ashes. Shit. He hates having to go to Bed, Bath and Beyond. Then he notices Cain. 

Derek scrabbles back in the bathtub even as his body protests any movement. Intruder. Cornered. Then he registers the smell of pizza and butter, remembers the interrogation and the crumbling ceiling, why everything hurts so goddamn much. His eyes go wide.

“Did you let Dora out?” He scrambles to get up, which would be hard enough in a bathtub without his injuries. Derek almost pulls the shower curtain down on top of himself, falling back in a pile of towels and shampoo bottles. “You idiot. She’s got a bad leg, she’d get torn apart out there.”

He knows Cain just saved his life, probably, but Derek’ll kill him if he’s lost his cat.

The thing about being an interrogator is that Derek knows how much a body can take, can read the signs of when to press and when there’s nothing left but to pull back. It’s a skill he’s honed through years of work and more than a few close calls, all of which means he now knows the exact moment when he’s officially, completely fucked. 

It’s something to do with his pulse, how it shudders and slows, temperature dropping so fast it takes all his resolve not to black out, and he knows he’s got moments, not minutes. There is a hole in the side of his body, deep enough he can see something shiny and white that might be bone, even amongst all the dark black wet of the blood. He’d been impervious to the fire raging around him, the stupidity of his own temper out of control– burn the whole fucking thing down, god he’d messed up– but his powers could do nothing against the rubble of an entire building collapsing around him at speed, a dying animal enacting its final revenge. In the chaos, part of the ceiling’s wooden support had made a serious attempt at boring its way towards his heart via his ribcage and for a while there he’d looked like a cheap TV vampire, in leather with a big wooden stake sticking out of his chest and, okay, oh, oh-- he’s dying.

Except that as an interrogator he also knows that dying is a process, not a moment, so he’s still moving, stumbling down hallways that didn’t seem nearly as long on the way in and up an agonizing set of stairs, and then he’s out, looking for alternate shelter, following that old animal need for privacy and darkness to lick his wounds, reassess. His instincts take him to another abandoned building half a block down, not far enough but it’s the best he can do, as his legs finally give out on him a few stumbled feet into the lobby. Derek can feel cold, dirty floor against his skin where his jacket’s torn off him, hear the sirens coming down the street, and he’d always expected to die alone but it still comes as a disappointment to realize this is how it happens.

Worst of all, it’s his fault. He hadn’t even told Luca to wait up for him, hadn’t wanted her involved an inch more than she had to, and now no one’s coming for him. That’s the thing about working behind people’s backs— it makes it harder for them to save your ass when you make amateur mistakes in the heat of the moment, when you let emotions overtake your judgment. Years of experience and practice, and he’s going to be taken down by the same shitty, impulsive decision-making that had gotten him in trouble as a cocky, self-destructive 20 year old, thinking he could handle anything, and all by himself.

… Except he’s not that 20-something anymore, with no one and nothing to lose, so he’s just going to have to figure something the fuck out, isn’t he. Christ. What a pain in the ass it is, having people to care about, people he’d really fucking miss if he were dead. Derek can’t feel his hands, but he’s got to get his phone open. He’s got to get to his speed dial, hit the first number in the list. He can’t do it, but he has too so he does.

Someone picks up and Derek’s mouth is moving, and he really hopes that means he’s rattling off the address of this particular middle-of-nowhere building, but for all he knows he could be reciting a cake recipe. It’s taking most of his focus to keep the cheap flip phone from slipping out of his blood-slick fingers. “—third door from the left, it’s going to be locked but— fuck, figure it out, get here fast and don’t tell anyone.”

His next words take her of guard and she takes a step back, very slight but enough to prepare her if she does have to take off. Ciara takes a good look at his face for a few seconds, seeing if she can place him somewhere. Did he work at a coffee shop she frequented? No. No that wasn’t it. But she could feel it like an itch in the back of her brain. She had seen his face before, but where? It didn’t take long before the answer came to her. The itch she was feeling in her brain had traveled to her forearms and she found herself scratching at burns that were no longer there. But the invisible memory was still there, of flames licking at her skin. Her hands froze and then dropped back to her side.

It felt like it had taken minutes for her brain to process it. Everything seemed to move like molasses. Though it couldn’t have been more than five seconds before an answer came to her mouth. “No. No not- not exactly.” Though the surprise also sets in that someone recognized her. That usually didn’t happen. With no one else to rely on she chose what she hoped was a relatively safe answer that no one who didn’t know wouldn’t listen to closely too. “I think we were at a party together though. Maybe that’s why?”

On another day, the woman’s gesture-- hands up, palms flat-- might have irked Derek, the kind of gesture you’d use on a scared horse. He scowls but he’s already distracted by her next words, almost confessional and definitely more personal than he’s comfortable with coming from a stranger. He’s never been good at this kind of stuff, left half wondering if he’s supposed to say something-- comforting-- and half irritated at being put in the situation at all, so he just ignores the moment, looking at her blankly until it passes.

“I don’t go to parties,” Derek says, not caring how it sounds. Not that he never goes out, but-- not in the way he thinks she means, and even if he did, well. For some reason he doubts they run in the same social circles. In fact, the last thing he’d been to in months that could be classified as a ‘party’-- as in, not fucking around on someone’s fire escape with a few of the Jems, probably Luca and Jackson, chainsmoking and considering everything else the night had to offer-- well, it was that clusterfuck thrown by the Kings.

But pain is something that Cain is pretty fucking used to. He’s learned how to endure it and how to ignore it. He’s learned how to turn it into fuel. Pain’s just a sign that there’s someone or something that Cain should be pissed off at after all.

“Not very fucking obvious when you’re tryna burn my fucking hands off Park,” he spits, all venom as his eyes dart over Park’s face looking for a crack in the mask of shock and rage and…hurt that’s become his face.

He hadn’t expected that Park would feel hurt by that question. It only makes sense. Cain has never been private about how little he likes Park and how little he trusts him. Apparently, that hasn’t made a difference. Somehow Park was attatched to the idea that Cain trusted him as a part of the Family.

And now there’s something uncomfortably like guilt settling in the pit of his stomach. That, nonsensically, makes him mad as well. Park ruins everything. He even ruins hating him.Asshole.

Cain grunts. He wants to hold on longer just to prove that he can but there’s larger, more pressing shit afoot than proving to Park that his little firework powers don’t mean shit to Cain. He’s got Family in here. He needs to get them out.

“Prove it,” he challenges, shoving Park away from him. “Cuz you know I don’t fucking believe you. Find Mendoza. She’s gonna need someone with a power she can rely on. Protect our fucking Family. Kings are open season but don’t fuck with the Blackburns unless they fuck with you first. If we’re gonna get dragged into a three-way fucking gang war it’s gonna be on our own fucking terms, not Benjamin Granger’s.”

“Don’t tell me what to fucking do,” Derek says, even as he’s filing the orders away in his mind, scanning the room for Luca’s form. Go figure Cain would be the guy to insult him one second and then try and boss him around the next. Not to mention that ‘prove it.’ It shouldn’t feel like a slap in the face, it shouldn’t be a surprise, Christ’s sake. But of course it does.

Luckily they don’t have time to unpack his hurt feelings. Derek needs to find the other Jems and put himself to use before one of their own gets seriously hurt.

(Not that he’s going to forget about Cain’s suspicions anytime soon either.)

“Right. I’ll go get Luca and create a distraction. If we’re lucky Granger will get caught in the crossfire.” Derek smiles despite himself at the thought of Granger’s smirk faltering at the sight of smoke. He wonders how smug he’ll look about his little trick when his precious greenhouse is in flames.