
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/517741.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Major_Character_Death, Rape/Non-Con,
      Underage
  Category:
      Gen
  Fandom:
      Teen_Wolf_(TV)
  Character:
      Laura_Hale, Derek_Hale, Peter_Hale
  Additional Tags:
      Minor_Character_Death, Grief, Trauma, PTSD, Angst, Masturbation
  Series:
      Part 2 of nothing_but_the_bones
  Stats:
      Published: 2012-09-21 Words: 5818
****** Accidental Self-Inflicted Gunshot Wounds ******
by Tyleet
Summary
     It's nine o'clock at night when Laura gets back to her dorm room, and
     two cops are waiting at her door.
     They ask her if it's okay to come inside. They have bad news.
Notes
     Oh, god. This is an angst fest, from beginning to end. Trigger
     warnings for everything (at least it feels like everything.) Implied
     underage Derek/Kate, sex-related ptsd, for grief, for victim blaming,
     for serious violence. There's a lot of messed up stuff in Derek's
     past, and I tried to draw all of it out in this fic. Or at least a
     lot of it. Unbeta'd, so all mistakes are mine. I have no idea how
     hospitals/insurance/comas work in real life, so if I've got any of
     that wrong, I apologize.
     The title is from A Softer World. It's set in the same world as
     "Smile (everything will be fine)", so I decided to put them in a
     series, but really they both stand alone.
See the end of the work for more notes

It's nine o'clock at night when Laura gets back to her dorm room, and two cops
are waiting at her door.

Something's wrong, she thinks, fingers tightening on her book bag. She thinks,
strangely, that maybe someone's figured her out and called the police, that
maybe they're hunters in uniform, and she freezes at the top of the stairs.

"Laura Hale?" one calls out to her. She doesn't sound like a hunter. She sounds
sympathetic. Laura's heart starts pounding so hard that she's distantly amazed
they can't hear it.

"Yes," she manages.

They ask her if it's okay to come inside. They have bad news.

*

She doesn't remember much about the two hour drive, but later she will be
amazed that she didn't kill herself on the freeway. She remembers feeling very,
very cold, and whenever she let herself think about anything besides get home,
home, you need to get home, she wouldn't be able to breathe, and the shakes
would come back.

The next thing she remembers with any clarity is getting to the hospital.
There's a deputy waiting for her in the ER, and she can't hear a thing he's
saying because she can smell Emily and Derek, Mom, Uncle Peter, and she doesn't
let herself think about Dad or Jeremy or all the other heartbeats still missing
because her pack is close and she needs to be with them.

She pushes past the deputy without speaking to him, ignores the shouting,
ignores the hands that reach out to restrain her, ignores everyone who gets in
her way and follows the sound of her little sister's heartbeat past two sets of
double doors into a room with two beds and too many people in white coats
swarming between them.

There's more shouting, more hands. Laura doesn't move, not caring that she's
pretending to be a frail eighteen-year old human, because her senses are
telling her that's her little sister lying on the bed but it can't be true.

*

She doesn't let herself remember what she sees in that room.

Emily is six. Emily has freckles. Emily has hazel eyes and wispy hair and loves
Peter Pan, and that's how Laura has to remember her.

She's not strong enough for the rest. She's not.

*

Laura is sitting in a hospital waiting room with a woman's arms around her
shoulders, the woman speaking in a calm, soothing voice. She's saying "You
don't have to be strong enough, honey. Nobody's strong enough for something
like this." It doesn't sound like the first time she's said it, and that's when
Laura realizes she's speaking, too, words pulsing through her like blood. I'm
not strong enough, not strong enough, not strong enough.

"Nobody's strong enough," the woman says patiently. She's wearing cheap
lavender clothes. Scrubs. She's a nurse, and she's been sitting with Laura even
though she undoubtedly has other things to do.

Laura shakes her head, but stops talking, struggling to get her breathing under
control.

After a while the nurse asks her if she wants to see her brother.

Laura shakes her head violently, terrified at the thought of seeing Derek
hooked up to machines and barely breathing, but the nurse seems to understand
immediately and starts apologizing.

"No, no, I'm so sorry, your brother's fine," she says, one hand still warm on
Laura's back. "He's absolutely fine. He's with a deputy. I thought you'd want a
chance to calm down first."

*

Derek doesn't want her to touch him, and he won't talk, and he's white and
trembling but all in one piece. She could cry, she's so grateful.

*
They sit up in the hospital waiting room for a long time.

Derek still won't let her get too close, but he lets her grab onto his wrist,
her fingers probably bruising him, even though he's sitting as far away from
her as he can be while still sitting next to her.

The rest of it passes by in a blur of paperwork and questions and people in
various uniforms, all of it hard to hang on to except for her brother, like
Derek is the only solid thing, her grip on his wrist the only thing keeping her
human.

The doctors come out after a while and tell them that Emily is dead. That it
was a miracle she held on this long, honestly. They give Laura more paperwork,
and she has to fill it out one-handed because she won't let go of Derek.

The sheriff sits down next to Derek and asks them both in a gentle voice if
they know of anybody who might want to hurt their family, and of course they
can't answer. After a while, he leaves.

Laura can't remember her mom's social security number. She probably never knew
it in the first place. Her mom's social security card would be in her desk. She
leaves far too many boxes blank.

The nurse who told her Derek was alive stops by and asks them if they've eaten
anything. Derek doesn't answer, and Laura blinks and asks what? The nurse sighs
and comes back ten minutes later with pop tarts and apple juice from a vending
machine.

Derek won't eat. He won't even look at the food until she lets herself shift,
just a little, just her eyes, just to pull rank for a second. It's a low blow,
especially now, but if she has to force him to take care of himself then
shewill. As soon as she does, Derek jerks back like she's hit him, eyes wide,
and she is about to ask him why when it hits her--power hot and fierce and
raging in her belly like a fire, so strong that she's almost dizzy with it.

I'm the alpha, she realizes distantly, and her eyes must be flashing red
because she wants to kill something--really, viscerally, she wants to feel
flesh ripping under her claws, blood hot and vicious and good in her mouth.

"Laura," Derek says in a small, cracked voice, the first thing he's actually
said to her, and she breathes in and hangs onto her shape.

The doctors come out to tell them a little while later that their mom is dead,
which is pointless, because Laura is the alpha so of course she is.

"Drink the juice," she tells Derek eventually, voice hoarse.

He does.

*

The doctors tell them that Uncle Peter is in surgery, but they're not holding
out much hope.

They sleep in the waiting room.

When they wake up nothing has changed.

*

They're told they need to go home. Laura and Derek stare at the doctor blankly.

They're told they should check into a hotel.

They leave the hospital and park Laura's car outside a hotel, and then they go
home, running all the way. Their house is still standing, but only barely.
There's yellow crime scene tape around the ruins.

Laura changes for the first time, and it hurts, her body strange and unfamiliar
and strong, but what's worse is the rage flooding into her, this hard hot need
to feel something bleeding out into her mouth, rage because as a wolf all she
can smell is ash and family, smoke and bone.

Then Derek changes, and suddenly he's the most important thing in the entire
world, Derek-pack-baby-brother-beta-her beta, and the rage is fueled by this
rush of protectiveness, and she rushes at him, snarling and strong, and nothing
feels at all right until he bares his throat and whines.

Mine, she tells him, and he agrees, and she lets the new protective feeling
rise up in her chest, and she and her beta run from the house in the woods on
bloody bare feet.

*

They go back to the hospital. They're told Uncle Peter is still in the ICU, and
they can't see him yet. The "yet" almost gives Laura hope, but then the doctor
starts asking her about how long they want to extend his life. "As long as
possible," she says, because the longer they can give his body to heal, the
likelier it is that she can get one tiny piece of her family back.

They're told they need to talk to the funeral home.

Laura checks the boxes for cremation. Derek doesn't argue, even though she
expects him to--this isn't how they do things. But the funeral home won't give
them the bodies to bury, and she doesn't want to see anything but ash if she
doesn't have to. Let ashes be ashes, she thinks distantly.

The sheriff tells them they have conclusive evidence that the fire was arson.
Are they sure they can't think of anyone who might have wanted to do this?

"No," Laura tells him, "nobody."

Derek doesn't speak at all.

*

Uncle Peter doesn't die.

Laura starts making plans for how to break him out if his healing starts to
kick in. All the plans she can think of are reckless and hopeless and will most
likely end with all three of them getting arrested, or killed by hunters.

Uncle Peter doesn't wake up.

She's torn between relief and sorrow, and finally settles on anger. It feels
good, hot and raging in her core, like fire.

*

"Who did it," Laura asks Derek in the woods. They've just killed a deer,
because Laura needed to kill something, and when Derek shifts back he's
shirtless and covered in blood. Laura cansmell that none of it is his but a
part of her wants to check him for injuries just in case.

"I don't know," Derek says, and she knows by his heartbeat that he's lying.

"You know," she snarls, and her voice is inhuman even though she's shifted
back, too, and she pulls out every gun in her arsenal without thinking about
reaching for them, her eyes burning hot and red, her hands suddenly claws in
the dirt, fangs lengthening in her mouth. "Tell me," she says, because if Derek
knows that means she can kill them, kill them like they killed the deer, put
all this new alpha strength to good use and snap their spines and get their
blood under her fingernails and make them hurt for hurting her, kill them dead
enough that no one will touch Laura or her pack ever again, kill them and fix
what went wrong.

"I don't know," Derek repeats on a whisper, and god help them but her brother
has never been able to lie to anyone.

"I'll kill them, Derek," she tells him mindlessly, almost soothing, "just tell
me and I'll kill them, I promise I'll kill them for you."

"Hunters," he says, and his voice cracks again, and suddenly she's reminded
that he's sixteen, that he just turned sixteen a month ago, that she shouldn't
be making him deal with this, that nobody should have to deal with this.
"Hunters. It has to be hunters. I don't--I don't know," he tells her, and she
lets the change slide off her until she's just his sister.

It occurs to her again that someone murdered her family, that they did it on
purpose, and that they must know she and Derek are still alive.

You need to do better than this, she tells herself. This is your job, now. You
need to do better.

*

They do not hold a funeral. Laura empties practically her entire bank account
into the funeral home until they agree to bury all fourteen urns in a vault at
Greendale cemetery, without Derek and Laura's presence.

She visits Uncle Peter. Derek won't. She sits next to the bed, and holds his
bandaged hand, and tells him that she's sorry, but she needs to take care of
Derek, now. She breathes carefully through her mouth.

"We'll come back," she tells him. "If you wake up, we'll be back for you in a
second." She whispers her new phone number in his ear, and her new email, just
in case.

She spends three hours at the bank and six hours on the phone to the insurance
company. She gets access to her mom's accounts, and she tells herself it should
make her feel better, because this means they can leave.

She tells the sheriff's department that they'll be happy to answer any further
questions, but she and her brother are leaving town. She privately thanks god
that her dad had paperwork drawn up years ago stating that if anything happened
to any of them, custody of any children would fall to any of the remaining Hale
adults. That was after the challenge from the Sacramento pack, when they'd been
afraid of dissolution, of losing their alpha, of CPS descending and taking new,
barely-controlled werewolves and leaving them with humans. At the time it had
been the worst thing Laura could imagine.

They spend far too much time sitting in the sheriff's department, filling out
forms and dodging sympathetic questions before they're finally allowed to
leave.

She pushes Derek into the passenger seat of her car, and refuses to think about
why Derek hasn't once expressed an opinion on what he thinks they should do,
just moved where she told him and signed anything she put in front of him.

Derek stares out the window the entire drive, and doesn't speak.

It takes about two hours to pack two suitcases and a carryon from the stuff in
her room. She leaves her roommate a note saying she can have whatever she wants
from the remainder, and throw the rest out.

She gets back in the car, and drives them to the airport.

Derek doesn't ask her where they're going until they're actually on the plane.

"Somewhere we won't be easy to find," she tells him.

He shrugs, and looks out the window.

*

For the first couple months, all they do is hide in their apartment, living off
their mom's money. They eat a lot of takeout, watch a lot of mind-numbing tv.
Laura finds it hard to let Derek out of her sight for more than fifteen minutes
at a time at first, but that's fine because almost the only time Derek leaves
the house is to get books from the library. He sits in his room with the door
firmly shut and reads, and Laura sits on the couch and listens to his
heartbeat.

Derek does his level best to avoid being touched. Laura does her level best to
avoid getting angry. Whenever she fails, and finds herself screaming at her
baby brother like any of this is his fault, she goes out, and Manhattan
welcomes her, anonymous and violent and beautiful. She walks alone in Central
Park at night with her eyes shining red and and her lips painted redder and
thinksI dare you.

*
She almost kills an Omega, about a month after they get there.

She's been taught to despise Omegas--not part of apack, either kicked out
because they did wrong, because they killed humans, because they challenged and
lost, or because their pack was gone, and they were the last loose end in a
hunter's notebook. Marked for death, either way.

The Omega is in his thirties. He has dark brown eyes, and a great smile, and
Laura can smell his desperation from a mile away. He's tending bar at the tiny
hole in the wall she walks into, and they both freeze as soon as they scent
each other.

Laura lets herself smile, just a little, feeling the ugly heat rise up in her
chest, and the Omega bolts, dropping the glass he was cleaning and running
through the kitchen for the back door.

He makes it to the alleyway, but Laura is there, and with two quick strikes and
a wild grin with a mouth full of fangs, the Omega falls back against the alley
wall, throat bared.

"Alpha," he says, almost moaning with fear.

Laura lets herself grow claws, and traces one underneath the Omega's chin,
tilting it up. "Were you banished, or did they die?" she asks, and she can
barely recognize her own voice, it's so thick with fury.

"Hunters," the Omega sobs. "Hunters, please. They didn't know about me, I was
away, they didn't know. I'll submit," he says suddenly, his hands reaching out,
wrist-side up, and he almost touches her before she flinches back. "I'll be
yours," he promises, squeezing his eyes shut. "Anything."

For a second she considers it. Considers pushing up his shirt and sinking her
claim into his skin, until he feels like hers. Soothing the desperation from
his face. Taking him back to the apartment, pushing him down into her bed until
he smells like pack, like something new to love and protect, something to fill
up the gaping hole in her life. She imagines telling Derek that she's building
a new pack, that they need to keep living. She imagines coming home to the
apartment on fire, the hunters that killed the Omega's pack waiting for her
with cruel smiles. Derek's scent and no heartbeat.

Without consciously willing it, her hand is tight on the Omega's neck, claws
digging into his skin, his pulse hammering wildly under her fingers.

"Get out," she snarls, and draws back her hand. "I don't mean out of the city.
Get out of the state. You never saw me."

As soon as she finishes speaking, he's gone.

*

Six months after arriving in New York, Laura tells Derek he's going back to
school.

"No," he says, glaring. He's been holed up in his room for almost a week, with
only a stack of books for company.

"You're already enrolled," she says briskly. "You start Monday. Might want to
shower first."

"I'm not. Going," he says, sarcastic in the way only sixteen year olds are.

"It's cute that you think that," she says flatly. She eyes his shirt, gray with
age and old sweat. "You need to go back to school shopping, or something?"

"Laura," he growls, suddenly on his feet and towering over her, "I am not going
back."

"Watch it," she says dangerously, letting her eyes flash.

Derek backs up immediately, although he still looks mutinous.

She waits for a moment, letting the tension build, and then sighs. "We'll talk
about it tomorrow, okay?"

Derek slams his door shut behind her.

*

He doesn't like school. He takes a great deal of relish in telling her exactly
how much he hates it. She's honestly glad to see him get this worked up over
something.

He doesn't really seem to make friends. A girl comes over to study, once, and
afterward Laura gently teases him about having a girlfriend.

He flinches back like she hit him.

"Derek--" she starts out, worried, but he's already reaching for his jacket,
headed out the door.

"Hey!" she says, following him into the hallway even as he storms out. "Are you
gonna tell me what's going on with you? You have to talk to me when something's
wrong, or--"

"She's not my girlfriend," her brother snarls. "And you're not Mom." He winces
even as he says it, but he doesn't take it back.

She lets him go, because if she doesn't, she's afraid she'll hurt him.

*

Her mom was a great alpha. Her mom had this steel in her voice, so even if she
was speaking quietly, you heard her. Her mom never lost her temper. She was
warm and strong and Laura could never measure up, not in a million years, but--

--What kind of alpha is constantly on the edge of hurting her own brother, just
to have someone to hurt? What kind of alpha can barely hang onto her anchor,
even outside of the full moon?

Her anchor was always her family, but now that's just a messed up sixteen year
old, and he's notenough.

What kind of sister thinks that about her brother?

*

She hears Derek jerking off in his room, about eight months in.

It's close to four in the morning, and the sound of his uneven breathing wakes
her up. She panics for a second, thinking that he's hurt, or having nightmares,
but then the slick repetitive sound catches up to her, and she gets it.

She gets up as silently as she can to leave--when you've got super-hearing,
privacy becomes more of a distance issue than anything else--but realizes with
a weird jolt that Derek isn't just spending some quality time with his hand.
He's crying.

Her baby brother's in the other room trying to sob as quietly as he can, and
she hasn't seen him cry once since the fire, and she's his alpha. Everything in
her needs to hug him tight like she did when he was little, tell him he'll be
okay. But she can't, even though it sounds like his heart is breaking, because
he's also about to come, so she sits motionless on her bed and cries silently
with him.

*

It won't occur to her until much later that she never caught him masturbating
before, not in eight months of claustrophobia. Never so much as smelled arousal
on him, or in the apartment after she'd been gone. Much later, she will learn
about a pretty blond woman with a hunter's necklace that people remember seeing
hanging around her brother, before the fire. The implication will make her
actually throw up.

*

After Derek's been in school for a while, Laura thinks about getting a job,
just to have something to do.  

She lasts two weeks as a waitress before she breaks three plates and a
customer's hand when it winds up on her ass.

She tells Derek after school, rolling her eyes and secretly hoping he'll smile.

"You should have broken more than his hand," Derek says without a trace of
humor. "I'm serious. I," his lips thin, "I would have."

"Next time," she replies, unsettled.

She gets a job as a barista. She lasts three hours before accidentally breaking
the espresso machine, deals with another twenty minutes of her boss yelling
about italian-made copper tubing and thousands of dollars coming out of all her
future paychecks, and then she grabs a latte out of a customer's hand and
throws it in his face.

Derek smiles, faintly, and tells her to get over herself and go back to school.

She tells him that's sweet, but not happening.

"You made me go back to school," he says, annoyed.

"Because I wasn't going to let you be a dropout," she says automatically.

He raises his eyebrows.

She doesn't tell him that she needs to feel like an adult right now, and
starting her freshman year over won't help with that, or that even though
there's a lot of money when you pool nine people's resources with the insurance
checks, college costs a lot, because he smiled at her tonight, and she doesn't
want to ruin it.

"I'll think about it," she tells him.

*

They don't go back to Beacon Hills on the anniversary of the fire, but Laura
calls the long-term care facility in the morning and talks to Peter's nurse.
There's no change.

It's also the day that the insurance money finally comes through.

After fielding that phone call, Laura celebrates by finding the cheapest dive
bar she can and drinking as much as they'll sell her, before moving on to the
second cheapest. Eventually the world starts getting fuzzier, and her head
stops hurting so much, and she finds the prettiest boy in the bar and fucks him
in the bathroom.

He asks her for her number, after, and she tells himno, sweetheart, it's not
like that, my family's dead.

It isn't until she gets home around three in the morning, unsteady and trying
to be quiet as she unlocks the door, that she realizes she left Derek alone all
day.

*

She was never really interested in cooking, and after the fire she was even
less interested in learning how, so she and Derek eat out of a lot of delivery
boxes.

But one morning she decides she wants an omelet, and in a fit of determination
she walks down to the store and picks up eggs, cheese, and avocado.

She pulls out the frying pan she bought when they first moved in, and has been
used maybe once or twice since, drops a slice of butter in the middle, and
turns the flame on high.

She whisks the eggs and hums a little bit, and then pours them into the pan
with an angry sizzle.

It's not until after she's sliced the cheese and getting ready to drop it into
the pan that she really starts to pay attention to the way the eggs are
cooking. There's a crack, and the yellow circle blisters, bubbles, hissing
against the hot pan. The longer she leaves it, the more noises it makes--
there's a high pitched squeaking noise, and the pneumonic hum of the fire.
Flesh protests at being burned, she thinks. Even without mouths, or vocal
chords. The bodies themselves.

She throws the eggs out.

When Derek asks her why she's only eating a salad for dinner, she tells him
she's been feeling sick.

*

She signs up at Hunter College because Derek won't let it go, and she can't
come up with a good reason not to.

She picks classes that all vaguely resemble the ones she had at Stanford, since
she never got to finish, and doesn't let herself think too deeply about why
she's breaking out into a sweat walking through the halls, or why unease is
prickling up and down her spine.

Ten minutes into her medieval literature class, and it hits her: this is what
she was doing. She was at the library doing research for a paper. She only went
to college because of everything they gave her, even though it meant leaving
pack territory for four years, even though it meant she was alone and couldn't
help, even though it meant that she was reading Shakespeare while they were
burning, and she didn't even know--

She bursts up out of her chair and calls Derek as soon as she's in the hall.

He picks up on the twelfth ring, voice echoing like he's in a bathroom. "What's
wrong?"

"Hey," she says, breathless with relief, "hey."

"Are you okay?" he asks immediately, worry sharp in his voice.  

"I'm fine," she assures him, sliding down the wall to sit on the floor. "I'm
okay." She breathes in deeply, and lets her breath out slow.

"…Did you need something?" He sounds more suspicious than concerned now, which
is good.

"No," she says, closing her eyes. "No, sorry. I was freaking out over nothing."

"Do you need me to come get you?" he asks seriously. Never mind that she's the
one with the car, or that he's the minor who's skipping chemistry right now, or
that she's his alpha. Shame licks at her throat, making her voice hoarse.

"Definitely not," she says. "Look, I'll see you tonight, okay?"

She hangs up, and heads straight for the registrar's office.

I'm strong enough for this, she tells herself. She changes all her classes from
English to Criminal Justice.I am.

*

Derek gets better. She tells herself he's getting better.

He does pretty good in school, even if he doesn't really make friends. He
thinks her major is ridiculous, and gets a kick out of calling her Veronica
Mars. He goes outside more often.

He falls asleep on the couch, and his head gently droops onto her shoulder. He
doesn't wake up when she eases an arm around him, relaxing into the touch.

*

Laura doesn't get better. At least she doesn't feel better. There's still this
white-hot rage in the pit of her stomach, and with everything she's learning
about forensics and the justice system and how murders work comes this
unshakable need to know.

Hunters, Derek had said. That's what they'd both thought. But why? They'd never
broken their Code. Unless someone had? What kind of hunter kills humans? Human
children? It doesn't add up.

She's pretty sure she isn't better.

*

She gets a call from Beacon Hills Memorial Hospital. Peter's come out of his
coma.

Sort of, Laura corrects herself, and almost crushes the phone in her hand.

"He's in a catatonic state," a doctor says calmly on the other end, and nothing
brings the fury back like those cold clinical voices. "That means that while he
is conscious, and capable of guided movement, he is unresponsive and incapable
of speech. Do you understand, Miss Hale?"

"We'll be there as soon as we can," she says, and hangs up the phone before she
adds something stupid, like: tell him we're coming.

She picks Derek up from school and fills him in on the way to the airport.

"So he could be awake," Derek says immediately, focusing in on her intently.
"He might just not trust the human doctors, or--"

"Or maybe he's not awake yet," Laura says grimly. "But he could wake up at any
time." And if it's his healing starting back up--if it's taken almost two years
to ease him out of a coma, then rousing him from catatonia shouldn't take long
at all, not when he knows Laura and Derek are close.

"You should sleep," she orders Derek when the plane starts its ascent. He
already looks tired and freaked out, and they've still got eight hours before
they land in Sacramento, and then a two-hour drive to Beacon Hills.

Derek glares at her. "Are you gonna sleep?"

"Yes," she lies. She reaches over him and slides his window shut. "I'm serious,
Derek. Sleep."

He shuts his eyes pointedly, and then turns away from her, so all she can see
is his shoulder.

They both stay awake with their eyes shut until the plane starts its descent,
and then she's pretty sure Derek starts drifting just to piss her off.

She hates the way he wakes up: not slow, not sweet, just freezing, clearly
assessing what he can hear and what he can feel before he lets anyone know he's
awake.

"Come on," she says. "Time to go."

Derek doesn't talk at all on the drive up. She would worry more about him
starting to shut down if she didn't feel like silence was their best bet, too.

They make it to the hospital just before visiting hours end.

Peter has a private room--Laura made sure he had that much, as soon as she
could--and he's sitting in a wheelchair facing the window when they get there.

"Uncle Peter?" she says, taking a step into the room.

He doesn't move.

She walks closer to him. He doesn't look bad--not nearly as bad as she
remembers, when he was almost entirely covered in white bandages. He's wearing
a grey bathrobe and she can just see his face in profile. "Uncle Peter, it's
Laura. Derek's here, too." She puts a hand carefully on his shoulder. He
doesn't twitch, so she pulls him around so she and Derek can see him dead on.

She flinches back immediately, and through the rushing in her ears she can hear
Derek drawing in a harsh breath, too.

Peter's face is a ruin. It's like he's Two-Face--half of him is smooth and
unblemished, the uncle she remembers, and the other half is wrecked, red and
angry and blistered, exactly like he'd been burnt in a fire, exactly like--

like the thing Laura has been trying to forget about for two years, the tiny
charred thing on the bed in the hospital, next to the moaning wreck that used
to be her mom, the thing that twitched when she said "Emily," aloud
involuntarily, then rattled, as if it were trying to answer--

and she's shaken back by the sound of someone running, and she realizes that
Peter's still sitting there, vacant and motionless, and that Derek is gone,
that Derek couldn't deal.

"I'm sorry," she tells Peter hoarsely, and then she goes after her brother.

*

She finds Derek at the house.

It looks a lot like the last time she saw it, except that the smoke and the
yellow tape are gone.

Derek's in what used to be their living room, sitting on the blackened floor
with his knees drawn up to his chest, leaning against the couch. She's
distantly surprised the couch survived. She sits down on it anyway.

"I'm sorry," she says finally. "I should have made that easier for you."

He barks out a laugh, but doesn't look up at her.

"Yeah," she sighs. Like anything about this was ever going to be easy. "But.
I'm your alpha. It's my job to take care of you, and that--" she takes in a
deep breath. "That was me messing up."

Derek looks up at that, mouth twisted. "It's not your fault," he says angrily.

But it is. There's a thin emotional connection between betas and their alpha,
and a strong alpha only uses it to calm their beta down, or offer comfort.
Laura brought Derek into a traumatic situation, and instead of looking after
him, she started projecting horror.

"No. I'm not--doing this right," she says roughly.

"You're fine," Derek snaps. "You--you have nothing to do with what went wrong,
okay?"

"No," she agrees, because she wasn't here, and she's never going to forget that
she wasn't here, not until the day she dies. "But this could be better now, and
I'm sorry that it's not."

"It's not your fault," Derek repeats, eyes wide and desperate, scrubbing a hand
over his mouth.

"We can go home tomorrow," she tells him helplessly. "We don't have to stay, if
you don't want."

There's a long silence where she pretends that the word home isn't floating in
the air between them. "That--won't help," Derek says finally.

He hides his head in his arms and doesn't move, so Laura curls up on the couch,
which smells like smoke, and doesn't move either. She doesn't tell Derek that
she's afraid he'd be better off without her. That maybe she'd be better off
without him, because then she could give in to the rage that has never stopped
burning, to her impossible need to know, and she wouldn't have to worry that
she was hurting him.

Much, much later, she will give in, and she will be rewarded. She will come
back to Beacon Hills, entirely alone, and she will learn and learn until she
knows exactly who she has to kill. She will feel hungry and righteous, revenge
hot and ripe on her tongue. Peter will wake up, and for a brief moment it will
feel like she has everything she asked for.

For now, she breathes in when her brother breathes in, and breathes out when
her brother breathes out. She closes her eyes, and lets herself sink into the
familiar couch. She ignores the smell of smoke. She tells herself they can keep
on going. 
End Notes
     And that's all she wrote. :) Comments and concrit make me happy.
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