Hale the King

Hey all,

I know I haven’t been around here much lately, I’m sorry about that <3 I wasn’t planning on disappearing but my muse for Derek’s gone pretty quiet for now. If you want to stay in touch, thread with me, or just follow my writing, I’m spending a lot of time these days RPing as Daryl Dixon from The Walking Dead.

Come find me @boltsandashes!

“Look at you. You are so blinded that you can’t even entertain the thought that this is who I really am!”

Setting the bowl aside, Stiles stepped closer and narrowed his eyes.

“Because to you I’m just the human. The sidekick. Did you ever think I don’t want to be the sidekick? That I want to be powerful?”

His voice was a roar as he advanced toward Derek.

“I am powerful! Do you see all this? I did this! I did this magic, I DID THIS!”

He laughed and reached out, hand encircling Derek’s throat.

“And you brought me the final part of the spell. One werewolf heart.”

He gave what would have been a charming smile, if his eyes weren’t black and his skin covered in soot.

“So come here, little Derek. Let me have it. Let me have your heart.”

Have your heart.

Despite the blackness in his eyes, despite the threat, despite everything, somehow that’s what made Derek’s breath falter. He didn’t fight Stiles’ hand on his throat, swallowing roughly, eyes drifting pained and searching over Stiles’ face.

He knew that feeling, that need for power. The way the fear and the hurt built up and clawed through you until all you could think about was getting strong enough to beat down anything that might threaten you. He’d spent more than six years in that space. Constant fear, constant anger, constant need to be better, stronger, like that would help him heal.

How the hell had he missed Stiles sliding into that same place?

“Yeah. Yeah! Totally.” She said as she tried to pick herself up, not wanting to ask for help. In her eyes, she was already a pain in Derek’s side.

Of course, it didn’t really work. She winced when her body didn’t want to work with her, leaving her on the floor. Letting out a sigh, she looked up slowly at Derek before raising her hand up to him.

Stubborn.

He crossed toward her when she finally put out her hand, taking it and gently lifting her to her feet.

In the back of his mind Stiles knew fire was a low blow, but he couldn’t find it in himself to care. He was too busy regathering ingredients and trying to redo the spell. Derek was unimportant in that moment.

Dropping the ingredients into the bowl, Stiles started chanting the spell once more. The words were thick and heavy on his tongue and he struggled to keep focus. 

“What am I doing? What am I doing…”

A dark chuckle passed his lips as Stiles turned to face Derek. His eyes were still black, his hands clutching the bowl.

“I’m making sure that this side of me stays out. Forever. No more soft and fragile human. No more broken bones. No more plaid shirts and sneakers and crushes on stupid werewolves.”

He paused to glare at Derek.

“Just this…clear, unhindered, unaltered power.”

The mix inside the bowl went up in smoke and he laughed as he watched it.

The black of Stiles’ eyes made Derek’s heart clench, breath stuttering and hitching quicker. Everything about this moment was wrong. Stiles’ tone, his words, his tattoos shifting half-alive over his skin.

There were things in those words that sank in like barbs, hooking into Derek’s skin and tugging until he couldn’t even see the wounds under the mess of blood.

He shook his head, pulling in another acrid breath.

Stiles followed the other into the room, concern growing when he got a better look of Lydia. She was so pale and sweaty, the frown on her face signalling that she was in pain. It seemed like she was fighting, much like Stiles would expect from someone like Lydia. Frankly, even if her body had been to weak to accept the bite, he was quite sure she would have fought through that as well. There was nothing Lydia couldn’t do, not even in the uncharted territory of the supernatural world and it gave Stiles hope that he could figure it out too.

He still would have loved to sit down beside her bed and hold her hand until she woke up, just to make sure that she was alright and well to help her adjust to the new being she would soon turn into. Especially when Derek began to explain that her change was basically taking to long and despite him saying that she wasn’t dying, the teen could still sense a certain confusion coming from the other. Still, as long as he was sure that Lydia wasn’t dying, their mission had been a success and Stiles could rest peacefully.

“Good, that’s all we needed to know. Now let’s get out of here before a nurse comes to check on her”, Stiles said. “There’s nothing we can do until she wakes up anyway, right?”

Derek nodded reluctantly, letting his hand drop from the girl’s forehead and falling a step back. Part of him wanted to stay here, confirm what was happening with her. She felt off in a way that grated on his instincts and pulled at him at the same time.

But Stiles was right, waiting wouldn’t do anything at this point. She was going to turn on her own time, and staying here would only raise questions. And the kind of questions that a recent murder suspect would get from standing over an injured teenage girl’s bed? Were the last things Derek needed right now.

Lydia’s room wasn’t hard to find, at least not for Stiles who could probably navigate through those cursed halls with his eyes blindfolded. It was a little harder not to be seen, but by using the stairs Stiles managed to avoid the majority of the employee’s and made it to her room unrecognized. Once there, Stiles didn’t dare go in, instead looking at Lydia through the little window into the room. She looked pale, sickly so, and so strangely fragile. He’d never seen the girl look that vulnerable before and frankly, it scared the crap out of Stiles.

She had dark circles under her eyes and her strawberry blonde hair – the very one Stiles had admired a million times over – was full of dirt and glued to her face with sweat. Despite it all, she still managed to look beautiful and Stiles seriously began to wonder where his genetics had gone wrong and theirs (being Derek and Lydia, namely) had gone so very, very right. Luckily, Derek distracted him from said thoughts by appearing right behind him. “I see you freed yourself from the clutches of the cougar”, Stiles teased. “So…is she turning?”

Derek padded softly past Stiles, peering through the window into the room. The girl looked vaguely familiar, and it took a few seconds to click where he’d seen her –– in front of the movie rental store after the Alpha attack (Peter’s attack). She’d been shaken then but too smart for her own good, and Derek wondered if that had something to do with why Peter had targeted her now. The same way he’d spared Jackson that night.

Something else was still going on with Peter, some bigger play he couldn’t put his finger on yet, and that, like everything else these days it seemed like, made his gut twist sickly. This girl being attacked, that was his fault for letting Peter keep running unchecked. If she died here, that was on him too.

He shook his head.

“No way to know from out here.” And he pushed open the door and went in, not looking to see if Stiles followed. All his attention was fixated on this pale girl. Like another pale girl, seven years ago with knowing dark eyes and pained whimpers.

He swallowed, and forced himself to circle closer.

The room smelled of medicine and sweat, chemicals threatening to burn his nostrils on each inhale. But she didn’t smell like Paige had. There was no black blood choking up.

“She’s not dying.” He felt sure of that. With Paige, it’d been almost immediate, and Lydia had been bitten last night. If the bite were killing her, she’d be dead by now. Or close to it.

But she didn’t look like she was turning either.

Derek reached out and felt her forehead. Feverish, clammy. Her pulse thrummed quick and thready in her veins, and her body was definitely fighting something. Or fighting towards something, maybe.

“The change...” He faltered, brows pinching. “It takes longer with some people. Sixteen hours is longest I’ve ever heard of.” Most people were closer to four or five hours, but... “That must be what this is.”

He wished he could sound surer, but as much as he’d studied and knew the lore and grown up around werewolves, he’d only ever actually seen four people take the bite. An aunt when he was young, an outsider who’d petitioned his mom for the bite when he was in middle school, Paige, and now Stiles.