Archive of Our Own

Derek comes around to the taste of blood in his mouth and a vicious pounding in his head.

His bare skin scrapes harshly against the cold, rough surface he’s slumped against. When he tries to move, he realises the reason his shoulders are straining is because he’s chained up.

That thought’s followed by an icy rush of adrenaline that kicks him savagely into wakefulness, his eyes widening and nostrils flaring. He takes in the musty, stale scent of wherever he is; old metal and peeling paint mixed with earth and… dried blood.

He tries to strain forward against the shackles around his wrists, but there’s another clang of heavy metal-on-metal, and a sharp pain digging into his underarms. Metal bands circle his shoulders, more chains leading to bolts in the wall, his ankles restrained the same way, thick iron attached to D-rings in the floor, well out of reach even if he could free his arms.

He’s mostly naked, a few ragged scraps of what had been his layered shirts, jacket and old, thick jeans left draped across his waist and sashed about his ribs. The cold’s doing its best to push under his skin, body heat just barely keeping it out. If he were human he’d shivering. But if he were human he wouldn’t be here, would he? If he were human he would have died a long time ago.

Derek doesn’t know how he got here.

He remembers the motel, remembers taking notes from a newspaper article hidden a half dozen pages behind the headlines, random ‘inexplicable occurrences’ that only look random if you don’t know what you’re looking for. He remembers the warehouse district, the smell of wet concrete gleaming slick under dim street lights, the flask of holy water digging into his hip. He remembers a faint trail of sulphur winding through the cold air, and then nothing.

With metal rubbing his skin and chains holding him down, stone pressing into his back and the undersides of his thighs, Derek’s aching head floods with a thousand thoughts of how badly he’s failed again - let himself be ambushed, captured. Whatever happens to him now if he can’t escape is because of his own stupidity.

The shame becomes frustrated rage, taking hold easily enough, hot breaths huffing out his nose as he tightens his hands into fists and pulls at the chains harder and harder, letting his rigid control go slack and pushing the human side away like cutting through a rope pulley until the weight drops free.

Tendons burn. His lungs ache as they empty on a rumbling howl. The Alpha-red bloom of his eyes is like glowing blood drops in murky water.

Nothing happens.

He can feel his body trying to shift, to go from human to the large wolf shape that at some point he’s started thinking of as more him than the one he wears when dealing with hunters and navigating the human world.

Laura used to tease that he was a little more wolf than average; always reluctant to climb back into his human skin, never as comfortable on two legs without fangs or fur.

That memory, her faint smile and mocking laugh, the smell of packhomesafe that’s atrophied and dreamlike now, only makes him angrier as he tries to force his body to obey his mind. His body is all he has.

But nothing happens.

He collapses back against the wall, panting and lightheaded, dizzy and sweating as the manacles grip his skin.

Closing his eyes, Derek tries to anchor himself with the futile rage thrumming under his clenched knuckles and spiking in his blood. He hears his own breathing, the sound of his heart as it slowly drops to a less rampant pace, but nothing beyond that. He can’t hear outside the room, can’t smell more than the most obvious permeating scents of this place between notes of his own sweat and exertion.

Derek’s trapped, the chains or whatever was done to him while he was unconscious have caged him inside this shape, the man who’s not a man, the lie of skin and flesh that ignores his will.

He thumps his head back viciously enough to hurt, to throb fresh in his skull with the ache of a forming bruise. He drags a long breath through his nose and listens to the hiss.

Derek opens his mouth, with its blunt teeth and human vocal cords, and yells until there’s nothing left in him but resentment and the ringing in his ears.

Silence floods the spaces between his shouts like water through gaps in rock. One bellowing cry after another, and Derek doesn’t know who or what he’s calling to, whether there’s anyone for miles who might hear him anyway. He doesn’t care. It’s not hope, he knows that much. Hope stands out in Derek’s head like bright colour on a grey canvas, and there’s nothing around him but the drab concrete, no colour anywhere to see. It’s the anger, his foundation and guidepost.

And it’s useless, like everything else.

He keeps shouting, his throat going raw and mouth running dry, tongue heavy and levering from the bottom of his mouth like it’s made of lead. Derek keeps on shouting until he can’t anymore, the fire sputtering out and the failure closing around him, smothering as his eyes droop.

There’s a cough, and Derek’s eyes jerk open and land on a… a teenager, standing across the room just in front of the door.

He looks like a pretty regular kid, tallish and pale, buzzed-short hair and faint outlines of compact muscle showing through the tight shirt that sits slightly above the waistband of his jeans, a hint of the lines of his lean hips showing. He’s attractive enough, but that’s not what’s making Derek’s instincts ring alarm bells through his head and the hair at the nape of his neck prickle.

“You alive?” the kid asks, pretty nonsensically but with a creepy sort of focus that slips over Derek’s skin like a phantom breath.

Derek might’ve almost thought he was a hustler who’d wandered in to check out the noise coming from what has to be an abandoned building. He could see himself maybe asking for help, playing the scared kidnapping victim for all he’s worth if it’d get him set loose. He’d issue demands or threats or just pleas with big, wet eyes. Whatever lies it took.

But he’s kind of distracted by the wicked, glinting knife dangling carelessly from the kid’s long fingers, and the underlying smell of sulphur that Derek can still pick up even with his senses hampered, his body tiring much too easily to be coincidence.

It’s reflex to tug at his chains again, no matter how pointless it is, the kid’s deep-brown eyes watching him struggle like a trapped animal, which is how he feels as he spits out curses and strains against the metal that burns friction and something else into his skin.

He goes preternaturally still when the kid takes a step forward. Then another. And another, worn boots thumping against the stone floor. The sharp light catches on the sharper blade of the knife. The boy’s narrow hips swing a little with each step. It’s calculated; weaponised teasing, predatory.

Inhuman.

"Christo," Derek mutters, and a flinch plays across those high cheekbones, a harsh blink that hides the amber colour of the kid’s eyes as he stops dead.

When he opens them again, there’s no warm brown, or even white at the edges. Just a pure black sheen, endless like the dark at the end of everything.

The kid - the demon - takes one more step forward, fingers curling tighter around the handle of the knife.

He - it? - crouches just enough to bring them to a level stare with one another, still out of reach, and Derek can feel the look as it traces methodically over his body.

“You know,” the demon says, considering. “I had you pegged as being slower than that. Last hunter who came after me fell for the pretty boy act right to the end.”

"Did you chain him up too?" Derek says, forcing the snark partly just to keep his control, stop his voice from wavering with the anger.

The demon’s laugh is a curl of smoke, puffed out between his lips. “He wouldn't have enjoyed it as much as you. And we didn't exactly have time to discuss kinks, pick a safe word, yadda yadda. Not with him so attached to his little shotgun. So sad when guys feel the need to compensate, y’know?” He makes a show of lowering his head and tilting it back up, smirk spreading wider. “Or maybe you don't.”

Derek jerks forward with an all too human snarl, and tries to push past whatever block that’s keeping him from shifting, tremors rattling down his bones and sharp fire throbbing in his muscles.

“Yeah, that’s not gonna work,” the demon says, waving a hand in Derek’s direction, watching him struggle with a look verging on bored. “You really think I’d go to all the trouble of chaining you up if you could just pull a Larry Talbot and free yourself?” He clucks his tongue, shakes his head, corner of his mouth pulled up on an indolent smirk. “You know what a bitch it is to find wolfsbane-infused chains after midnight? And people think civilisation’s moved on.”

Derek slumps back against the wall, panting as sweat trails from his temple. The relentless itch-sting that’s hooking under his flesh makes more sense now, even if he can’t smell the aconite.

“There,” the demon says, point made, catch of light on the knife sparking into Derek’s eye as he gestures. “You done? Or do I need to get you a shock collar too?”

“Just kill me,” Derek spits out, the tired ache pressing at him harder. “Or are you gonna talk me to death?”

That gets him a quirked eyebrow. “Kill you? Well, I might, hell I’d even call it likely, but why waste it, huh?”

Derek warily watches as the demon rolls to his feet, steps off to the side of the room.

“I’m sure you’ve got a name, yeah?” the demon says, slipping the knife into his waistband. He drags a mostly-rusted chair across the floor on two of its legs, toward where Derek’s back to trying to pull on the manacle bolts in the wall without it looking like he is. “And really, I’d be more patient if you hadn’t already pissed me off so much.”

The chair clunks down in front of Derek, the demon spins it and straddles the grimy seat, steepling his fingers on the backrest and dropping his chin onto them, examining Derek with oily-black eyes.

“So,” he says, jaw moving up-down against his interlaced fingers. “Before I spill your guts, how about you spill ‘em for me? ‘Cause call me curious, but I wanna know how a werewolf ends up playing hunter.”

Derek stares into those shadowy eyes, feels the frustrated urge to shift crackling under his skin, the ache in his bones, the churning red anger in his stomach, and stays quiet.

“Oh come on. Look I’ll even go first: Hi, I’m Stiles and I’m a demon, I like curly fries, long walks on nude beaches and men who aren’t afraid to cry.” He smiles down at Derek in a wide line. “Now you.”

He clings to the quiet until the demon - Stiles - sighs.

“Well I know you’re a werewolf,” he says. “Even if you do a better job at acting human than most; but you don’t stalk demons carrying hunter gear and then not have any anti-possession stuff on you. Plus, your soul just reeks of werewolf, trust me. And then there’s this.” He picks his head up and reaches back with one hand, brings it back from the waistband of his jeans with the blade in his hand again. When he turns it, Derek can make out the symbols carved deep into the metal.

“Don’t see many of these,” Stiles muses, turning the knife in his hands like it’s made of thin glass or bone china, or like you might hold something venomous you don’t trust not to bite you. His eyes dart up and catch Derek’s unaware. “Well, not outside of uh, certain circles, I guess you could say.”

Derek says nothing. He’d gotten it from another hunter two years ago. Not a pleasant memory, so it blends in nicely. And now it’s been taken from him, probably about to be stuck into his flesh.

The smile melts off Stiles’ face. “What were you planning on using this for I wonder?”

“Give it back and I’ll show you,” snaps free from Derek’s mouth before he can rethink it. Stiles laughs.

“I’m not really into the whole permanent death thing,” he says. “Never saw the appeal. But hey now that you’ve found your tongue, you can answer my question.”

“And then you’ll kill me?” Derek mocks.

“Maybe,” Stiles says. Something sharpens in his expression. “Or maybe I’ll let you go. Depends on what you tell me.”

Derek scoffs and bites down on his tongue. He’s not here to have some kind of back and forth with a monster.

“There’s no one coming for you, is there?” Stiles asks after a while. It doesn’t sound like a real question. “Lone wolf,” he muses. “Pretty rare thing for an Alpha.”

He smirks when Derek can’t keep his face blank. “Thought so,” he says. Derek curls his hands into fists. “C’mon, gimme a name and maybe I’ll take you for a walk; doggy park or something.”

“Why do you care?” Derek catches himself asking.

Stiles shrugs with a loping up-down of strong-looking shoulders. Derek wonders how old he is - how old his body is.

“I like to know the names of the guys who try to stick things in me,” Stiles says, lofting the knife in his hand.

“I wasn’t-” he starts and then swallows it back, turning his face away and trying to avoid wincing.

“So you just carry a demon-killing blade for chopping vegetables then?” Stiles says. He sighs. “Look, torture tends to bore me, okay? Plus eventually people just start telling you what they think you wanna hear and it’s all useless. I really will let you go, limbs attached. Just start talking.”

“Why?” Derek asks again. It’s starting to develop a bad taste.

Stiles shrugs. “I’m a sucker for tall, dark and brooding I guess.”

Derek’s eyes contract to squints as he makes another feeble attempt to push through the wolfsbane tying back his abilities.

“Trying to tell if I’m lying?” Stiles asks. “Not too reliable when I can control all the messy, fleshy aspects of this body is it?”

“That’s not your body,” Derek spits, because no matter what happens to him that at least deserves saying.

Stiles pauses. “Really? ‘Cause it feels like mine.” He holds his hands out further, fingers waggling even around the handle of the blade in his one hand. “See? All mine.”

“You’re possessing a kid,” Derek rumbles, and Stiles just scoffs.

“I’ve had this body for a long time now. Coma wards; the bargain bins of humanity.” He smirks. “Or maybe he’s some poor street urchin I got the drop on. Maybe I stole him from his cookie-cutter family just for the hell of it. I could’ve even dragged this shape up outta the Pit with me, just a raw shell waiting to be filled up. How would you know?” He slouches a little more in the chair. “You pick whichever truth you like most.”

“Truth,” Derek repeats like the word doesn’t fit in his mouth. “You’re a demon, truth is-”

“Is relative,” Stiles cuts in, body getting somehow broader, his facial features sharper. “It’s all just rationalisations and comforting delusions; whatever you want it to be. Truth is in the eye of the beholder, and looking into yours I can tell truth isn’t something you’re that concerned with.”

“So kill me,” Derek shouts, almost goading now. “Put us both out of our misery. C’mon, do it.”

There’s something on Stiles’ face now, not quite in his eyes but creeping around the edges. It isn’t surprise or anger. Maybe it’s not anything human at all, who even knows what demons feel, if they even feel anything.

Stiles stands up, the chair skidding a little with the sudden roll of his body like there’s no spine in there with him.

Derek doesn’t flinch, doesn’t look away, and doesn’t even blink as Stiles gets in his face, slight tilt to his head like a curious bird and his eyes devoid of colour or life.

His hand comes up, and then he’s striking Derek across the face with a kind of brute strength that shouldn’t exist in the muscles of a lithe teenage body.

The tip of the knife is at his throat, the leaping of his pulse fluttering just beneath it.

“The thing is,” Stiles whispers. “That just sounds too much like giving you what you want.”

Then he’s standing up, backing off while Derek tries to wipe any trace of expression from his face and keep his breathing regular.

“What do you want?” he asks, more suspicion in the tone now than rage or fear.

“What I want,” Stiles says from across the room. “Is to stop having to look over my shoulder. To get out of this crapheap and move on to bigger and bloodier things.” His mouth pinches down to a thin line. “What did she give you, huh? What deal did you make to get turned out on the streets like a kid playing dress-up? Werewolves don’t go to Hell, in case you didn’t know, not people Hell anyway. She promise you power? She threaten you?”

“She-” Derek starts to ask and then stops himself. There’s something there, a hint of a larger puzzle piece he can’t make out. Not that it matters if he dies chained up in this room.

Stiles eyes him from where he’s standing. “There’s no such thing as a trustworthy coincidence,” he says. “Either that bitch sent you after me or you’re just another hapless moron being played. She’s persuasive I’ll give her that.”

Derek stays quiet. The puzzle piece looms just beyond what he can grasp. Something in the way he says she.

Stiles’ jaw clenches before he smiles again, a dead thing that tugs his lips. “Guess I’ll have to do a little digging then. Leave you to take stock of just where you are, and how few options you really have. Think on it, sleep on it.” His smirk widens “Pray on it. I’ll be back.”

The sound the door makes when it slams closed behind him repeats itself in Derek’s head, the melody of rattling chains and the sound of his own breathing all he’s left with.

He grits his teeth until his gums ache. He tries to centre himself, to ignore the messages his body sends him.

Derek slumps against the wall, and fails at not feeling anything.

| |

“So,” Stiles is saying, almost before the door’s shut behind him. “Derek Hale.”

Derek’s head is jerking up before he realises what a stupid move that is to make.

“I did a little research,” Stiles tells him, the word research uttered like it involved digging around in someone’s entrails. “Turns out there’s a certain werewolf who’s got himself a reputation for hunting demons.”

He looks away, too late, he knows.

Stiles snorts a laugh. “I mean, I should’ve figured, but still. You’re kind of infamous. How many hunters have dealt with you not knowing what you are, who you are? I’m impressed, Derek.”

The floors scuffs with grit as Stiles settles in front of him, not bothering with the chair this time. His face is intent, prods at Derek’s instincts like his thoughts are all splayed out on the crease of his brow of the motion of his chest, the light catching in his eyes.—

“So I’ve got a problem,” Stiles says like it’s small talk. “‘Cause if I kill you, then I’m back to the square one of trying to survive in the mess you’ve spent six years totally failing to clean up.”

Derek can almost hear the way his brain tracks back over everything Stiles has said so far.

“Kate,” he mutters, just to watch Stiles’ reaction. He doesn’t disappoint, whole posture freezing for just a second.

“Yeah, Kate,” he says spitting the name. “Or what used to be Kate. She embraced the dark side pretty fucking hard; even the bosses downstairs tread lightly when it comes to her.”

There are little moments that can affect everything that comes after, things you can sometimes feel even if you can’t change them. Like knots that creep along your string of time.

This feels like one of them.

He forces himself to look looser, more at ease. He turns a smirk up at Stiles, tried to play it for all he’s got. “She’s after you,” he says, mimicking the teasing tone he’s had to listen to for however long he’s been here. He widens the smirk. “What’d you do to piss her off?”

Stiles’ jaw clenches, and Derek’s almost expecting a blow to land somewhere on his body. But Stiles is too tightly wound around himself for that, like a snake all coiled up, still capable of striking but only if you get too close.

“I survived,” Stiles says, chopped-out words from between his teeth. “Kate’s kind of an anomaly; hates demons almost as much as she hates humans. Or werewolves,” he tacks on. “That happens when your dear old grandpa twists you into selling your soul I guess.”

Derek doesn’t have anything to say to that. He knows the story. He’s spent too long telling himself it doesn’t change anything.

“So now what,” Derek says, taking the emptiness that’s hollowing him out and turning it onto Stiles instead. “You hand me over to her, buy your freedom.”

Stiles snorts. “Don’t make deals with demons, Derek,” he says almost rote. “And especially not with demons like Kate. There’s fine print and then there’s loopholes so big you could get a truck through them.”

He makes a show of a hampered shrug, the chains rattling. “So can’t kill me, can’t use me as a bargaining chip.” He grins. “I guess you’re pretty screwed.”

Stiles’ hands slap against the wall on either side of Derek’s head, a quick clap of sound. He leans closer, and Derek’s gone still, waiting for… something.

“Tell me,” Stiles says in a wave of warm breath, so close Derek’s eyes can’t focus on him. “How much of your life have you thrown down for this? How much of yourself have you sold?” He slides into Derek’s lap with a swinging shift of his hips, hands not moving an inch, caging him more than the chains. The scrape of denim over Derek’s bare skin is the softest thing about any of it.

“What’s your revenge worth to you, really?” Stiles whispers, like he genuinely wants to know. “Is there anything you wouldn’t give?”

Derek’s throat clicks, and he takes a breath that’s full of Stiles and not enough air.

“You want my soul?” He asks, just as low, jutting his chin up in a goading twitch. “Take it. I don’t care.”

More air out of Stiles’ mouth plays along Derek’s skin. All he can see is the pale outline of his face, the occasional dark blur of a mole, the slightest hint of the warm colour of Stiles’ eyes.

“You’re not lying,” Stiles says eventually, stare obviously dipping to the middle of Derek’s chest, creepily distant. “Huh.” His brow creases and he pulls back enough for Derek to blink and try to focus.

Maybe it would be easier.

He’s been chasing this for so long already. Even if he sometimes wonders whether he’s running to or running from, every narrow scrape that he makes it out of just feels like putting off the inevitable.

But then that’s all that living really is.

Stiles hums, considering. “I don’t want your soul, Derek,” he says, with a wry look. “It’s useless to me no matter what; not human enough to be worth anything downstairs.”

Derek swallows back a snort. Like that’s not something he didn’t already know.

Stiles stands and backs away, Derek watching with a painfully detached sort of interest.

“No,” Stiles says, just missing the determined clap of his hands to complete the tone. “I think you need a different approach; special case, special circumstances.”

He pulls the knife from the back of his jeans and steps closer again.

Derek’s hands grip into fists as he pushes forward like he can suddenly break through the restraints.

The knife flashes with razor light as Stiles holds it up, trails it back and forth in a teasing weave.

“I don’t wanna hurt you, Derek,” Stiles says. He pauses. “Well okay I might want to, but not if it’s pointless.” He stops his pacing in front of Derek, crouches down to his level again. “The thing about most demons, the ones who’re into death and gore for its own sake, is that they never get how self-destructive it is. You do enough damage, slaughter enough people, and sooner or later a bunch of righteous dickbags with holy water are breathing exorcisms down your neck.”

Glare from the blade snares in Derek’s eyes when Stiles edges closer. “And the thing is, I don’t even need to torture you.”

He reaches out with his free hand, and even though Derek’s expecting another brush along his skin Stiles just holds his arm between them like a dividing line. Derek watches him smoothly spin the knife in his grip so the curved tip points at the floor.

Before Derek can think enough to be confused, or gather up enough stupidity to ask a question, Stiles is pressing the narrow point to his own skin and dragging it up towards the crook of his elbow. A crack of sound escapes Stiles’ throat as a frown creases Derek’s face.

Blood wells up in a linear streak over Stiles’ pale skin with a metallic sting on Derek’s tongue and the choking note of sulphur on the air. There’s an undercurrent too, something prickling that irritates Derek’s senses but gets inside his head like cloying smoke, almost visible streams of it wrapping around him and tightening.

Small trails slick down the sides of Stiles’ sinewy forearm. Thick, liquid ruby puddles around the wound. Stiles looks up at him with his bottom lip slipping from between his teeth, until he gazes at Derek wearing a wolf’s grin.

“Think of it like an incentive,” Stiles murmurs, shifting closer on the balls of his feet. The tips of two of his fingers stroke up through the blood, sending more dripping onto the flood in wet patters.

It catches the light like it’s sucking it in, vibrant as the only real colour in the room. That buzz of something gets stronger.

With a move almost too quick to track with his abilities quashed practically to nothing by the wolfsbane, Stiles moves in and smears the still-warm lifeblood over Derek’s lips.

The copper-sulphur tackiness clings to his skin and invades his breaths as he rears back into the wall, more in surprise than any kind of horror. The scent becomes so strong his eyes almost water, his skin feeling hotter as he jerks his head to the side and empties his lungs on a forceful huff. He can’t wipe his lips clean. He’s trying not to lick over them.

Then Stiles is kissing him, wet presses of sticky-clinging lips that smudge blood between their mouths. Derek’s brief breath of surprise is enough to get a flick of Stiles’ tongue between his teeth, a deft curl of wet muscle and the taste of Stiles’ blood in Derek’s mouth.

It hits him as Stiles’ hand cups the underside of his jaw, fingers gripping and holding Derek in place when the uncertain sound he can’t stop turns into a filthy slide of Stiles’ bloodied tongue over his own. More blood fingers that skirt the gap along Derek’s mouth.

Stiles pulls back, trailing wet, cooling fingers over the scratch of hairs along Derek’s jaw and cheek, leaving traces of blood that highlight the wash of Stiles’ breathing over Derek’s skin, his lips.

“What-” Derek starts, rasping right as a rush of adrenaline and frenetic wantrageneed jams itself up tight between his eyes and restricts like a coiled spring at the base of his skull. Heat pours all through him, fire in his veins and a nova at his heart, blinding and burning.

He arches in a helpless bow curve, back slamming into the wall and chains rattling distant like the sound’s travelling down a long, reverberant tube. Thuds of his pulse hammer against his breastbone, his slick, sticky teeth scrape together as blood pounds thicker around his body.

A surge of heat pools low into his belly, another whipcord arch as the sudden present ache in his dick radiates down through his thighs. His balls draw up tight; he throws a pained groan out between his teeth as he twitches into the wiry hair around his navel. Precome slides like burning ice on his skin.

“That’s it,” reaches his brain in Stiles’ syrupy, teasing voice. Colours flash deep behind his eyes like negative fireworks. “First time’s always the hardest. Just gotta get you there.”

Warm-wet fingers press to his mouth, and he’s sucking before he even feels his lips part, dragging his tongue around long digits before he remembers telling his body to do it. They stroke over the sleek insides of his mouth, along the sides of his tongue, and it’s like fine brushes right down his chest to his cock for the way he shivers, gooseflesh scattering in a wide band, nipples so tight they hurt.

Derek can feel the mindless, sucking drag of pressure as he sucks again and again, like he can draw the blood right from Stiles capillaries if he just sucks hard enough; if he’s good enough and strong enough, cheeks hollowing and throat working.

He’s too aware of it all, too present in the human shape.

The buzz gets louder even though it’s not a sound, everything made of shadow and flares when his eyes open in blown-wide slits and look back at the darkness. He’s falling into those eyes, pleading for the damnation even as the wind roars past him and the room spins in a vortex beneath his curling feet.

His cock brushes cool air as he leaks down to his balls. There’s a groan that doesn’t touch his vocal cords as Stiles encourages him to stroke over his fingers more with the slutty-hungry roll of his tongue. Each time he reaches the blander whorls of skin the digits leave his mouth, ragged breaths he doesn’t want as much as he wants the bloody touch to fuck back between his lips again.

There’s strength thrumming just out of reach, the kind he only feels when he’s got a throat between his fanged jaws and the moon edging along his back as a coaxing hand, urging him to hunt, to kill and prove himself. It’s the Alpha stripped raw and base, the essence of that violent potential. It’s perfection.

“Good boy,” Stiles croons somewhere near his sweat-beaded temple, and Derek groans as his hips shift futilely upwards. The power in Stiles’ voice calls him in, seductive, promising so much eager pain and sweetness, addictive misery. The way he sounds, breathy and hot and inhumanly smooth, a plea to the caged part of Derek’s mind that’s clamouring to bite and claw and taste; to own and fuck and keep taking until there’s nothing left. The part that loathes the fire but wants to burn alive just the same.

“More,” rattles from his chest and burns out his throat, lips working sloppy around the shove of Stiles’ fingers, hips still stuttering and the jump of his pulse in his dick striking empty air and the precome-matted hairs of his belly. His thighs try to spread as his toes curl tighter, muscles in his stomach tightening.

Stiles’ thumb pulls at his bottom lip, Derek’s tongue already sliding over it, hits of sparking rage and ferocity that flares the slit of his cock and sends more slick rolling down his scorching skin, makes his chest shudder as he remembers the need for air.

“Just this for now,” Stiles answers him, echoing like it’s glancing off the stone. “I can take it all away, Derek. Break you and remake you better. Just let me in.”

It resounds in Derek’s hollow spaces, a multitude of vague and conflicting answers he can’t work around the spinning of his thoughts or the impossible weight of his own tongue, the grinding mill of morepleasemore that sits in his chest and carves out a home for itself.

He’s on the edge of coming, he realises with a sludgy roil of need, amplified by the shame licking bitter down his throat, letting Stiles’ thumb rest against the corner of his mouth and breathing in the dregs of sulphur. He wants to rip out of his skin and through his bones to the traitor of a soul that coils like a serpent around his heart, unworthy and sinful as sin becomes all it’s worthy of anyway.

The animal in him doesn’t need redemption or want forgiveness, only blood and shredded flesh. And who could stop him? With so much black and oily power leaching into every vessel and pore, what chance would they have? He can be slow, purposeful, drag the dark smoke of Stiles’ offer around him and weave it between his teeth.

“Yes,” he groans like a dying thing. “Take it. Please.”

More blood coats his lips, and then Stiles is kissing him like it means something, glossy tongue and filthy scarlet smudged between them, a tarnish passed back and forth.

“You see?” Stiles breathes right against the topmost curve of Derek’s mouth, needle pricks of sound puncturing and curving as barbs that Derek arches tighter into. “See what I can do for you if you stop fighting.”

Hairs at Derek’s nape stand on end, muscles shivering and sweat rolling from his hairline, curls at the base of his cock brushing like sandpaper and silk around the tight blood-hot length.

He grunts like a punch to the gut when Stiles wraps a sticky hand around his dick, not stroking but holding tight, clenching his grip in waves of pressure until Derek’s head knocks back into the concrete and he whines. His eyes flutter, trying to close and stay open at the same time. His breath forces into his lungs.

Stop fighting.

Ringing metallic-tinged and sonorant, gliding on a crest of red, the words bound on a loop through Derek’s every muddied thought, follows him into the dark and welcomes him where he belongs, where he’s always been.

He could stop. He’d get more if he could stop.

The agile twist of fingers on his dick wring his body for more sweat and desperate pleading sounds, and he wants to see his skin blurred with precome and Stiles’ blood and whatever spit he slicked over that hand himself. A press of blunt nails under the head drags a whine from him, another when they roll up over where he’s clingy with precome and still pulsing out more.

He can’t breathe. Can’t think. Can’t feel anything if it’s not the ways Stiles is touching him, flaying open all the calloused parts of him and filling them up with himself.

Pressure stokes and twists from his thighs, the small of his back. More fingers tug at the hairs of his legs and work up into the hot space between, press unrelenting and damp at his ass, tug at where he’s tightest and clenching with the jacking motion of Stiles’ other hand.

Derek’s teeth dig grooves into his lips, shuddering noises bursting in cracks of noise outward from the buzzing, taut line of his throat, fucking shamelessly into the tight, too-dry grip around his cock.

A long, tapering finger wriggles into him, spreading him and burning through the ache of it, twisting and sleek with something thinner than the blood and cloying.

It’s come, he thinks like a flare shot into gloom, kicked toward the teetering point of orgasm like the edge of a knife.

Stiles’ finger crooks into him until his balls ache and his dick doesn’t stop jerking and leaking everywhere. Stiles’ blood and come and spit marking his mouth and veins and cock, and Derek can’t even feel the chains, knows they’re there but can’t remember why it matters.

The wet sound of Stiles’ hand working his dick gets louder until it’s all he can hear, pressure from inside as he’s spread by the push of another finger, grunting and shaking and trying to stop himself from begging.

He cries out, loud and uncaring when both fingers crook in his ass and Stiles’ hand twists viciously tight around his cockhead, orgasm hitting sudden as a fist to the small of his back, a snap-release of the pressure building in his head like a gasp after hours of anoxia.

In the stringy, pulled-loose connections to his body, Derek can feel the jerks of his dick as his balls empty, come spurting onto his belly and thighs and over Stiles’ fingers.

It lasts forever, one eon to the next as he jerks and soaks himself with his own release, Stiles’ fingers working inside him until he’s dry and heaving and his eyes won’t open.

White-hot light snatches him up and drops him back into the throbbing mess of his skin and bones, eyes just barely catching on the slick length of Stiles’ dick in the V of his spread-open jeans.

His tongue unsticks from the roof of his mouth, thick and heavy, sticky with copper. Stiles’ hands leave his cock and his fingers pull out of Derek’s ass, a hiss of breath when a trace of wet follows them out and he feels so empty it’s another kind of pain.

Aftershock rattles his spine and pours lead over his limbs, the chains doing more to hold him up now than he’ll admit.

The high erodes slowly, the orgasm leaving clearness in place of the rampant sensation the blood gave him, but he still feels different, split apart and reassembled in a new order. His stomach twists and he blinks hard. It takes a few grasping seconds when he can’t make himself feel anything, the guilt resting not out of reach but uncompelling, too easy to pick up and throw aside. The anger never leaves.

Come cools on his thighs. Stiles smiles at him, leans up and runs a finger up his cheek, reversing the path of a bead of sweat.

“Guess I made my case?” he says, standing before Derek can pull together an answer. When he looks at Derek again, his eyes are molten brown. Derek watches him tuck his clothes back to rights and wipe his hands on a rag, just pushing the blood and come around. The knife clatters as he drops it onto the chair.

Derek can hear his heart slowing, steadying out. Or is it Stiles’ heart? It’s both.

When the door shuts behind him, Derek forces his eyes wide and stares into the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling, leans his weight forward until the chains tug at him, and roars until he feels it in his bones.

| |

They’re lying on the ground, sweaty and breathing fast, Derek’s own heart beating like it’s about to jump out from his chest.

Kate smiles up at him when he brushes a lock of hair behind her ear. She smells like sex and faintly of something stronger, thicker.

He tells her he loves her. She grins and her hand runs through his hair.

Around them, the flames climb the walls. Faceless bodies loom down around them. The air boils; it’s full of screaming.

Derek sucks down a breath as he wakes, shaking.

Memory flood back like mercury over a mirror, sleek and glaring. He doesn’t know how long he was out, but it can’t have been long by the faint dizziness and overtired fog in his skull.

He doesn’t remember sleep taking him, but his eyes are heavy and there’s cotton stuffing his head full, muscles heavy. He smells of sweat and come and more faintly of blood.

Another tremor runs up his legs, a spike of pain hammering up his neck and into his jaw. His back shudders against the wall and his fingers spasm as he grunts with the force of it.

Breath comes shakily and bitter in his mouth, stings when it hits his lungs and his ribs move outward.

Derek remembers the hushed stories, how couldn’t he? Humans that rejected the bite, either dying horribly or having to be put out of their misery by others, the grief and loss of the person who tried turning them.

Is he rejecting the blood? Is he gonna die?

He can’t die. Not yet. He can’t.

Curling forward as much as he can, Derek grits his teeth tight while his heart races. His head aches with a fierce pound in between the throbs of his heartbeat. Sweat cools on his skin and the light hurts his eyes.

The door opening makes him flinch, Stiles’ shape blurred at the edges and painfully sharp in the corners of his vision, even his eyeballs aching with the banging in his head.

Derek’s shaking constantly by the time Stiles’ feet land in his warped field of view.

A hand touches his shoulder, and he whimpers before he can hold it in, pain like twisting shards of chilled metal digging down his arm and rippling over his chest. It moves to his chin and pulls his head up, another grunt of pain as light stabs at his eyes.

Stiles is ringed in a muddied halo by tears and the clinging weave of Derek’s lashes. The irony almost makes him laugh, before the pain starts again.

He bends back with a quaking twitch of muscle as Stiles’ weight settles on his hips, the narrower undersides of his thighs sliding over Derek’s.

Stiles’ hand skirts up Derek’s chest, Derek’s heart leaping behind his ribs and his breath faltering.

“I can help,” Stiles says, hushed but still a long scream that drills into Derek’s temples.

He makes the mistake of trying to shake his head, sending his vision into swirls of colour and contrast.

“I don’t -- I don’t want your help,” he sputters through lips that cling together and out of a mouth that’s bone dry. His own voice scrapes his larynx and prickles like pain against his teeth.

Stiles leans closer, both hands on the topmost curve of Derek’s shoulders, pinning him under Stiles’ body.

“Fighting it won’t save you,” he says, breath boiling against the chill of Derek’s cheek.

“Y-You did this,” Derek shivers.

“Wedid this,” Stiles counters against the corner of Derek’s jaw, presses a kiss that aches like a bruise. “It’s just the start. First times tend to suck; I shouldn’t have to tell you that.”

It’s all just razor wire on raw nerves, salt in one giant wound. Derek tries to turn and snap when the back of Stiles’ hand strokes over his face. The smell of arousal reaches him like a slow note that builds and builds in a crowded room, everything else falling silent.

“Please,” he whispers. He doesn’t know why. It doesn’t seem to matter.

Stiles’ hand pauses, then moves to his neck. His teeth run over the hair at Derek’s jaw. “Please what?”

Another jerk of his head that flings his brain about in his skull, makes the room spin. He chokes on a breath that carries more of Stiles’ scent into his body. His blood thickens. “Please.”

If he turns his head their lips would brush, he could bite and lick his way into Stiles’ mouth. He doesn’t turn his head.

“Not gonna ask what I want in exchange?” Stiles asks. It doesn’t sound like a real question.

Derek’s throat clicks and hurts when he swallows, and his eyes are trying to roll into his head, but he manages another shake.

“‘M I dying?” he asks, the thought bobbing back to the surface, and Stiles’ fingers stall on him again.

“No,” Stiles finally answers. “But it’ll get a lot worse; you’ll keep getting weaker and the fear will come back. You won’t get what you want.”

His eyes open reluctantly, and right there is Stiles’ face, falsely human and playfully cruel.

“Do it,” he says, hoarse. He only thinks he knows what he’s asking for.

Stiles’ eyes go black and gleam like buckshot. There’s a knife in his hand again.

The smell of blood winds across the tiny space as a carmine thread unspooling from the dripping slice in Stiles’ forearm, spheres of it falling and spattering in slow motion on Derek’s skin and the floor while Derek helplessly watches.

Derek’s mouth is open before Stiles’ fingers even reach his lips, stiller than a statue and poised on the edge of pleading again.

Time turns even further inward on itself as Derek goes from sucking blood from Stiles’ fingers to lapping over the cut itself, whorish pulls of his mouth as the liquid rolls over his tongue and down his throat, the cresting wave of energy and raw, anger-fuelled strength like he could tear the world apart with his bare hands.

He swears and spits every vile thought that chases the power in his nerves and turns sparks to flames along his neurons, feels like he should be glowing, lit up from the inside and casting shadows.

He’s become the fire, the fire is him. He laughs and it sounds horrid. It feels good.

Stiles’ arm leaves his mouth, Derek’s pointlessly human jaws leaving teeth marks. He’s not the only one who can leave a mark. The weight leaves his lap, only to come back a second later bare and skin-warm, Stiles wriggling naked on his hips.

His cock slips between the rounded swells of Stiles’ ass, and he rumbles a noise along the separation between his teeth, eyes coming open hot and alive, the fire starting to spread.

Tight, barely-wet heat clings to the leaking head of him, chains clanging when he tries to grab and claw and fuck up into it like the animal he feels beneath the lies.

It’s Stiles who moans then, hole spreading around Derek’s precome-sticky cock, fucking himself down with a practiced swivel of his hips.

“Good boy,” Stiles laughs against his temple, and his breath smells like blood and smoke and things that Derek wants to drink.

“Not your boy,” he snarls back, rolling up and stuffing more dick into Stiles’ ass even with the manacles pinning him like an insect to cardboard.

Stiles’ breathing scatters along the shell of his ear. “Could’ve fooled me,” he says, with a last drop that leaves Derek seated all the way inside the clenching grip of his insides, both of them panting and hurting and neither of them caring.

Derek snaps and clacks his teeth along whatever skin he can reach when Stiles starts to move, more blood hitting his lips and hauling base noises out of him.

One slam of bodyweight gets harder than the one before, and Derek can smell the musk of Stiles jerking himself off, the wet sounds above the grunting and the metal sounds of Derek’s restraints.

“This what you wanted?” he punches out when Stiles grinds against him, flutters around him and makes a sweet little hurt noise that fucks Derek up even more, clings to the base of his spine and whispers to every debased idea rummaging in his head.

Stiles laughs again and it’s a breathy train wreck of a sound. His hands scrape and open cuts on Derek’s chest, the scratch of hairs louder than sandpaper and the broken-open clench of his ass like boiling honey that clings sticky to Derek’s bones, hole rubbing up the stiffness of Derek’s cock and getting tighter around the flare of head.

His heart’s thundering in his throat, forcing heat through the veins that should be red with light and black with how unendingly deep-dark it all feels.

Derek tires to curve his thighs up and meet the downward shove of Stiles’ body, that same lightheaded wave building right from the bottom of his toes, high on adrenaline and power and the taste of blood in his mouth.

Stiles comes first, grunting and spattering wet over Derek’s stomach and flooding the air with bittersweet musk that he gathers on his fingers and shoves into Derek’s mouth. He sucks around them and drags his teeth along them, the come giving way to aftertastes of sulphury copper.

With Stiles fucking himself on Derek’s dick and the overload of every cell in Derek’s body, when he finally shoots off inside that squeezing, perfect heat he feels like his head’s going to explode.

His vision blanks, goes white then purple-blue with blotches like a negative with no colours to come after it. He screams even though he can’t hear it, can only feel the unrelenting drag of noise out of his throat and his lungs emptying along with his balls, one twitch after another.

Come leaks sloppy down Stiles’ thighs and onto Derek’s skin, and when Stiles taunts him with a kiss he bites and sucks until the heat of his lower lip gives way to more blood, Stiles’ cock feebly jerking enough to make Derek laugh.

Scratches and cuts on his body sting with the salt of sweat and Stiles’ come, all of him singing with sensation he can’t contain, doesn’t want to contain, wants to explode outwards in black smoke and curl around everything taketaketake.

There’s a passing minute between one fury and another where Stiles is resting in his lap, both of them struggling for air and covered in each other.

When Stiles staggers up and off him, saying something Derek doesn’t catch, Derek feels the chains holding him down and doesn’t feel like a prisoner.

Next time the shakes take a lot longer to arrive. The guilt never does. Derek wonders if he misses it.

| |

Icy water empties in a torrent over his head, shocking him out of the grey blankness with all the subtlety of a gunshot.

He gasps, river of chill skating from his hair to his eyes, his lips, off his chin and down his chest.

Glaring up at Stiles he swallows the slightly metallic blandness of the water.

Stiles sucks him off like that, still dappled in droplets that’d have him shivering if he were human.

Derek knows - he does - that there’s no way to explain or describe this that isn’t completely destructive.

He doesn’t care.

Stiles’ lips stretch obscenely around the flushed head of Derek’s dick, part wet-wide and slutty around the shaft and when he sucks Derek’s head cracks back into the wall.

Eyes flicker up to watch his face, only sometimes do they look human and none of the time are they honest. Power tugs between them like a rope snapping taut.

He watches Stiles’ head bob in his lap with the slurping roll of his tongue and the needy noises that crack loose from his long neck. He wonders if Stiles if getting off on this, using Derek’s cock like a toy. Derek shifts up and hears him choke, and smiles down at his black-swallowed eyes.

The heat melts upward and outward from Derek’s hips as Stiles sucks him like a punishment, throat fucked open and squeezing in tight ripples, all of it so wet it sounds deafening in the insulated silence. Derek idly wonders where Stiles has done this before, to get so good at it.

Shadow pools in the hollows of Stiles’ cheeks, light damming up behind one cheekbone. He wants to get his fingers on Stiles’ skull, not enough hair there to grip and tug, wants to see his fingers curving around the shape of Stiles’ head. He wants to thumb at the stretched-out corner of Stiles’ mouth where there’s drool and precome slipping free and trailing down his chin, feel the slippery glide as Derek’s dick snugs tight between his lips.

Derek murmurs filth without thinking about it, like throwing stones at a storm cloud for all the good it does him, Stiles pulling off and lowering back down in a painfully slow twist of cheeks.

He’s got a hand low on Derek’s belly, fingers spidering wide and long, playing in the thatch of hair above his dick. His clinging lips reach right to the base, and the sound Derek makes grinds in his joints, the backs of his knees and the cracking curl of his toes.

With his thoughts like brackish water stirred up full of silt, Derek watches Stiles mouth clamp tighter around him as he comes, heart overfull with blood like it’s about to burst in his chest, balls pulled up taut, subtle ache in his ass as he clenches down and shoots.

One sopping pulse after another empties into the sucking space Stiles’ makes with lips and tongue, shivers wracking Derek’s body. Stiles’ head never stops working for it, greedy and dirty, sucking and swallowing around Derek until it hurts and the pain blends into the rest of his body.

Empty and wrung-out, Derek pants when Stiles lets his spit-wet cock fall from his bruised mouth on a crude pop, one last swipe of tongue over the head and a raw-sounding chuckle when Derek’s abs twitch and he hisses. Stiles’ eyelashes are dark, spiky with tears and framing the whisky-amber he uses to look up at Derek with.

It’s somehow scarier than the demon blackness.

Stiles rolls to his feet. There’s a wet blotch spreading shiny on the front of his tight jeans.

Derek’s mouth is half open on a less than half formed sentence when Stiles turns away and stalks to the door, steps out into whatever’s outside Derek’s ‘cell’. His footsteps echo until Derek’s hearing fails him.

The silence reminds him that Stiles hadn’t even spoken. His pulse reminds him that he didn’t take any blood.

Before long, the tremors start.

| |

The next time, Derek begs for it.

Stiles is barely inside the room before Derek’s pathetic attempt to hide the shaking or the chattering of his teeth breaks, and he looks up at Stiles even though the light is a laser scorch right into his brain.

It takes so long for Stiles to move that Derek can feel the bristle of shameful tears at the edges of his eyes.

“I-I need it,” he chokes out, for what has to be the fourth time. The fifth?

Then Stiles is pulling the knife again, and Derek makes a sound of such plaintive gratitude that he flinches.

“I should’ve got you a tumbrel,” Stiles muses.

He slips the blade over his skin, and Derek doesn’t even try to stop the moan when his lips slip through the trickle of red. He can’t hide anything else, not the shudder of his chest or the look that’s probably beaming from every muscle in his face. Not the way his dick’s curved up tight to his belly.

Sucking around the flow of blood, Stiles fingers wind into his hair and twist, lances of sharp-white pain pushing down through his scalp and neck. He groans, and sucks harder.

He should be trying to escape.

Through the Alpha haze, the drunkenness weighing on him as heavy as liquid lead, he can’t remember why it’s important.

| |

Derek gets violently kicked out of an uncomfortable doze by an echoing, booming clang of wrenching metal, the sound of hushed voices nearby, getting closer.

He forces himself to focus, to concentrate past the sting of the unhealed nicks on his chest, the soreness around the chains and the subtle trembling from whatever aftereffect Stiles’ blood had had on him, still slowly wearing off.

His hearing, shoved back and restrained just as much as his body by the wolfsbane in his shackles, sharpens in fits and throbbing starts, starting a painful ache inside his head. Still he makes out the thud-thud of heavy footsteps, and the quickfire rattle of unknown heartbeats, before he’s dropped back against the wall panting and sweating.

Derek could call out, could yell until whoever’s busted their way inside this place stumbles across him, try and talk them into cutting him free. No mater why they’re here, they can’t be worse than a demon can they?

There’s a shout, muffled but audible even with Derek’s senses so limited. Then the barking retort of gunfire resounds off of concrete and steel, thuds of bodies hitting unforgiving walls and floors, and Derek’s heart almost drowns everything with the rush of blood past his eardrums.

So still he’s almost vibrating, trying to hold down the shaking, Derek hears a crunch closer to the room he’s in that he just knows is bone snapping, he just can’t get anything more than that.

The sounds get closer, a scraping grind of boot heels, harsh breaths. He can barely get a fix on the heartbeats, two of them now where he’s sure there were three or four. There’s another one closer to him, rapid and steady. It’s familiar.

So they haven’t killed Stiles yet, or at least not the body he’s in, depending on if Stiles was lying when he said the body would die without him.

Derek hates the way his gut unclenches at the sound of that rhythm, relieved against his will that Stiles is still alive, still mobile. He doesn’t know why he cares.

With a jerk the door creaks open, then shuts again as Stiles slumps back against it.

There’s blood soaking down Stiles’ right side, sweat on his face and neck, the smell of him panicked and urgent as the clatter of a pulse that Derek can see at the base of his throat. Notes of copper and sulphur pervade the room, a fishhook tug in Derek’s gut toward that fizzle of power that has him scraping blunt nails against the floor.

Derek’s mouth waters. He wants to bash his own stupid skull against the wall. What the fuck’s happening to him?

“What’s happening?” he asks like it’s solely about whatever’s going on outside the room.

“Uninvited guests,” Stiles spits, distracted and pressing fingertips into his side that come away slick and shiny red. Derek feels himself go still, watching a few crimson droplets spatter on the grey around Stiles’ feet. He’s too pale, even under the flush of exertion, the stark light and sheen of sweat outlining the shadows beneath his eyes, the blue ropes of veins in his hands and arms. “Hunters,” he adds when he spots Derek’s blank expression.

“How’d they find you?” Derek grinds, past teeth that’re clamped so tightly shut his pulse is itching in his temples. He needs to look away from the blood on Stiles’ hands, his clothes, streaming under his tearable skin. “I thought you were laying low.”

Stiles’ head comes up to level Derek with a glare. “Who says they’re after me? You’re the wolf in hunter’s clothing, remember,” he says, the force of it lost a little by the fact he looks like he’s been run over by a truck a few times. “Besides, it doesn’t get much lower than the sadistic bottom feeders I left running around out there.” He presses a palm to his side and hisses.

Derek can hear the footfalls getting closer again.

He’s ignoring Stiles’ heartbeat. He is.

“Let me out,” he says, almost surprising himself. More voices nearby. “Stiles, let me loose. I can help.”

Stiles’ mouth falls open, and with his eyes lacking that motor oil sheen he almost looks like the regular teenager Derek never really mistook him for. Or maybe just some poisonous animal, displaying colour to lure in whatever’s gullible enough to take a bite.

“Oh sure,” Stiles scoffs, a little high-pitched. “Just fling myself between the rocks out there and the hard place in here? Because Hell really leaves you with a taste for that kind of masochism. No thanks.”

“Stiles,” Derek urges, still trying to keep his eyes off all the red, to ignore the smell and what he’s mortified to have to call taste memory. “They’re coming. I can hear them.”

“So can I,” Stiles hisses. “And who d’you think tipped them off? We’re in a disused meatpacking plant in a dead warehouse district, Derek. You think they stumbled in looking for a bathroom?”

Derek’s insides freeze cold, a fractured moment of realisation that burns to cinders when the old, familiar rage washes up again.

“Let me up,” he insists again, tugging at the chains leading from his wrists for emphasis. Stiles stares him down, a hard, scrutinising look that’s no easier to predict than the blank blackness.

“They’re coming in either way,” Derek points out. “The only difference is the odds. You’re already wounded, and there’s still two of them out there.” He lifts his head and builds a smirk at the edge of his chapped mouth. “You need me, and you know it.”

A moment ticks over. There’s a grind of a heel in what could be the next room.

Stiles straightens, takes a step forward. “Try anything, it’ll be the last move you make,” he says, heart steady like that means anything. Derek can hear the hunters getting closer.

He nods, and Stiles walks right up to him, more drops of blood falling in a lazy trail that gets smudged under Stiles’ gait.

There are no locks on the manacles, no clips or fastens on the chains. Stiles kneels a little to Derek’s one side, reaches out with a hand that isn’t steady, and presses a few fingertips to the loop of thick metal around Derek’s wrist.

There’s a flash of heat like the press of a cigarette on bare skin, and a sharp, snapping click, and the chains fall away and clunk to the floor one by one.

Derek gasps a little as his body kicks into overdrive. Out of contact with the wolfsbane-tainted metal, his senses dial up and the dozens of little scrapes he’s accumulated heal all at once, strength pooling through his body with a heady, liquid rush.

Stiles stands and moves back, a wary set to his shoulders even with the sluggish leak of blood down his side.

“What did they do to you anyway?” Derek asks, rubbing his quickly healing wrists. It’s an excuse for where his eyes are fixed.

Stiles smirks, but it’s a ghost of his usual attempt. “Nothing I didn’t repay a few times over,” he says, and Derek snorts as he rolls his shoulders and steadies on his feet. He doesn’t even know how long he was chained up. Now’s not the time for that though.

He picks out the two heartbeats beyond the room almost without trying, and there’s an arrogant spin to the power returning to his body now that he’s loose.

“You up for this?” he asks Stiles, getting a raised eyebrow and a haughty sniff in return. Derek smirks back. “Right. After you then,” he says, waving at the door.

Stiles’ jaw works, he blinks and his eyes turn dark. Then he moves to the door and tugs it open, steps out into the gloom of a narrow corridor. Derek hears him pause a few paces away, then the whisper of “Get your ass out here if you’re so eager to stick it on the line.”

With the edge of a smirk creeping over his lips, Derek finally lets the human part of him drop and the animal part take over, breathing going ragged and conflicted roils of pleasure-pain heating up his insides.

He groans as his bones reshape, muscles lengthening or bunching together, thick fur sprouting from his skin along with claws, razor-sharp fangs lining up in an elongated muzzle, thick tail curling in the air.

He drops to all fours, shakes his head and blows air though his nose in a huff. Scent and sound beat at him, eyes clouding briefly with Alpha red before he propels himself forward and through the open door.

Stiles isn’t there.

There’s a sliver of light streaking along a wall at the end of the corridor, Derek padding warily down towards it, ears twitching at a scuffling noise and the multiple jumping heartbeats further on.

A cry of effort and pain ricochets off the cold walls, Stiles’ voice unmistakable, and Derek snarls as he springs forward without pausing to consider it, using the right angle of the corridor’s turn to twist his body and speed himself along.

The light turns out to be a glint from a high, small pane of glass with its covering layer of duct tape peeling away in patches. It throws silvery shards of light over more bare walls and a long stretch of dirty floor, spray painted nonsense scrawled over a few surfaces, scraps of wood and glass everywhere.

More shouting and another thunderclap gunshot barrel into Derek’s ears, and he’s running faster, skating over the concrete and around a corner toward the sounds and smells of Stiles.

Nameless pieces of metal and debris skitter out from under his paws as they shove down against the ground and push him quicker, more urgent. There’s anger building in his chest and frothing out from behind his teeth. He can smell blood.

Rounding into a long, straight entryway, Derek takes in the sight of Stiles with a knife in his hand, blood on his temple and side and oozing from his shoulder, another body littering the ground in a broken heap.

The last hunter’s dragging one leg, obviously broken. The metallic stink of it all in the small space makes Derek’s heart pound and his vision cloud.

He springs forward, up and against the hunter’s back, bowling them both forwards in a graceless spinning sprawl.

A booted foot kicks out, catches Derek in the ribs, and he growls like stones scraping together as he snaps down and digs claws along the chest of the man pinned under his weight, a harsh cry and the smell of more blood rising up.

Everything turns to blurs of grey and red and shadow. More kicks lash out at Derek’s legs and abdomen while hands try and push his jaw to the side before he can shove down with fangs at the hunter’s neck.

There’s a boom and a flash that sears Derek’s eyes, more pain lancing into his body. Then Stiles’ foot kicks out and with a crunch breaks the hunter’s arm back at the elbow, his yelp of agony turning into a gurgle of shock and pain when Derek’s fangs find the fluttering pulse at his throat, clamp down tight and twist.

Blood clogs his nose and slicks between his teeth, drips from the black fur of his chin and blots out the smells around him. The hunter’s body gives a few meagre twitches before going still, the beat of his heart stopping like a clock in need of winding.

Derek steps off the cooling body, then lets out an involuntary note of pain when his chest burns and spikes of heat shove into the muscle behind one of his front legs.

It’s the first time he’s been shot. Derek’s been beaten, stabbed, clawed, burned and bitten, but never shot. Supernatural creatures don’t tend to gravitate toward guns, too modern maybe, too human.

It’s a burn that runs deep and white hot, even though the ragged hole feels weirdly numb.

Stiles steps closer, and Derek rounds on him, snarling with a bloodied face.

“Damn, puppy,” Stiles laughs, even if it’s shaky and followed by a hard swallow Derek would bet tastes of blood. “If I’d known you’d be this useful with paws I’d have gotten you a crate instead of the chains.”

Derek’s lips pull away from his teeth, hackles pricking up and drool mixed with someone else’s blood dripping off his jaw.

“Whoa hey,” Stiles mutters, quickly stepping back again. “Easy. You got the last one, it’s over. Code yellow or whatever.”

Derek stares at him, the waft of sulphur and the tang of power clogging up his senses.

He could take it, he knows, just set his teeth to Stiles’ flesh and drink his fill, he can’t tell if Stiles would bother trying to stop him. He might even like it.

But somehow it’s better when Stiles tells him he can, when he slips a blade over the pale softness of his own arm and veins, offers it up like a sacrament. Damnation shouldn't look like a benediction, and it shouldn't feel like salvation either.

Derek doesn't care.

He’s free now. He could end this whole mess. He should end it.

A brush of cold air stirs over the side of his face, and he turns to see a thick set of doors left slightly ajar, the promise of night and damp and outside.

“Hey,” Stiles says again when Derek takes a few uncoordinated steps toward the fresh air. Blood patters like a leaky pipe onto the floor under Derek’s body. The hunters already stink of death.

Derek wants to be outside.

His side butts and scrapes along the wall a little, and he knows Stiles is following him. He’s turned his back on a demon, he realises with a muted thrum of frustrated confusion.

The door’s rusted hinges protest with an iron screech as he pushes through them, walking into a wall of cold and asphalt smells, the hint of exhaust and ozone as he sucks deep breathes through his mouth and nose and ignores the fresh pain that carves fire along his body.

Stiles steps into his field his view as he looks up at the sky, pale beams of moonlight hidden behind cloud and painted over with light pollution.

“You should change back,” Stiles says when the silence pulls long and tight between them. “You’ve still got a bullet in you.”

Derek turns to look at Stiles, then away again. He sways a little on the spot, claws scratching at the ground.

“Wow,” Stiles says. “I didn’t think your conversational skills could get any worse.” The mocking becomes a hacking cough as he turns, profile to Derek, and spits blood onto the pavement. “Seriously though,” he says when he turns back, gesturing. “You’re not healing so long as that’s in there.”

Another pause as Derek stares Stiles down, then he reaches along the thick rope of his self-control, finds the hanging thread of ‘humanity’ and pulls until it fills him and his body ripples with the shift.

Fur retreats into skin, his face contorts from a muzzle to a jaw, four legs becomes two legs and two arms. He coughs black blood as the wound in his shoulder stubbornly tries to heal and can’t, more blood streaking down his chest when he presses at the edge of it.

Stiles steps in front of him, and Derek feels himself catch on the fact that Stiles is the same height, verging on taller. He dismisses the thought, doesn’t know why it reared up in the first place.

Reaching out with the knife Derek’s ashamed to realise he’d forgotten about in his rush to be out of there, Stiles steadies him with a hand and presses the blade into the wound. Derek hisses, slow and deliberate between pressed-tight lips, trying to sublimate the pain.

“Why do you care?” he grits out, stupidly watching the twist of the knife into his shoulder, then bites his tongue as a distraction.

“I don’t,” Stiles snaps back, eyes darting up and then down to Derek’s wound again. “But you’re no good to me if you can’t fight.”

His voice is steady. His heartbeat isn’t, the tiniest flicker in the rhythm.

It doesn’t feel as much like a victory as Derek had been expecting.

He watches Stiles’ face, the crinkle between his too-human eyes and the pinch of his mouth, the steadiness of his hand as he grips Derek’s other shoulder and turns the knife along the shape of the bullet.

Derek’s hands ball up so tight they almost go numb, but he doesn’t move, not even when he can feel the bullet moving under his skin, sliding back and out, hears the occasional wet tap of metal on metal.

The bullet finally falls with a tinny clatter on the rough ground, and Derek shakes with his breathing as he loses some of the tension and bows at the waist, hands scratching against his thighs until the blood stops and the wound closes, skin knitting with an itching tightness like nothing had ever happened.

“Huh,” Stiles says when Derek silently straightens up and rolls his shoulders, wipes sweat from his face and neck. “That was pretty cool, actually.”

Derek rolls his eyes. “So what now?”

Stiles gives him a look. “What now?” he repeats, loaded up with sarcasm as his eyebrows rise. “Now we don’t get butchered? Now we turn this whole shitstorm around, that’s what.”

“As what, a team?” Derek scoffs. “No thanks.”

Another look. “You know where she is then? How many cronies she’s got helping her? D’you even know where to start?”

“And you do?”

“Did my research,” Stiles says, tapping a fingertip against his temple. “And even if I didn’t, your grudge match partner’s tracking us, remember? We could just stay still and try for an ambush if it’d make you feel better.”

“It really wouldn’t,” Derek says, pulling his shoulders back until his spine pops, breathing deep lungfulls of cold night air like he’s drinking it down.

“Then we work together,” Stiles says, “Enemy of my enemy, etcetera.”

“No,” Derek snaps, sounding firmer than the possibilities careening through his head. “I don’t trust you.”

“Good,” Stiles answers, instead of the argument Derek had been - stupidly - expecting. “Because if you did, it’d mean I’m collaborating with a moron, and that just reflects badly on me.”

Derek shakes his head, rolls his eyes. “Then why-”

“Because we want the same thing,” Stiles points out again. “I want whatever’s left of Kate Argent dead, and so do you. Granted your need might go a little more… deeper, than just basic survival, but that’s all details, right?”

“And after?” Derek asks, because despite everything he knows better than to trust a word Stiles says. He knows better than to trust, period. “If neither of us die trying then what happens?”

Stiles smiles. “Let’s jump off that bridge when we come to it.”

Derek wants to walk away. Screw the thrum of connected energy that’s wrapped around them both, it’s not a pack bond, it’s just the blood. It’ll wear off.

He meets Stiles’ gaze. “If you try anything-”

“You’ll kill me, I know,” Stiles says. “There’s worse things than dying, Derek, and that includes what’s out there right now. If this goes south I could end up back in the Pit for good. I’d rather you took me out than that.”

The honesty shouldn’t surprise him. One of the first things Derek learned about demons was that they don’t just lie, that’d be too easy; they mix lies with enough truth to make them taste better, dig around in the topsoil of your thoughts until they turn over something they can use.

Derek takes a stock of where he is, what he’s got, and what he has to do. He’s come too far, is the only thing he can fixate on; too far to stop, to go back.

There’s never any going back.

His breath leaves his nose on a long exhale.

“We’ll go to my car,” he says. “If we’re -- if we’re doing this, we’re going to need more than just that knife. And we need to make a plan, somewhere that’s not here.”

“Prude,” Stiles says, raking a quick look down Derek’s body. He’d forgotten he was mostly naked, a few scraps of cloth and fraying denim fallen to his hips. Stiles holds up his hands in mock surrender when Derek glares at him.

“Fine,” he says. “But we’re doing this as soon as possible; no way am I running a repeat of that in there.” He jerks a thumb behind him at the empty building.

Derek gives him a reluctant nod, his loathing to be in agreement with Stiles made worse by how whatever connection they have becomes smoother as a result.

They head in the direction of Derek’s car in silence.

Behind them, the dawn sun strokes orange-violet along the slowly brightening sky.

| |

Derek slings a grubby duffle bag over his shoulder, set of nondescript clothes pulled on, Stiles smirking the whole time, watching unabashed. He throws out a comment of “Monochromatic’s kinda your theme huh?” that Derek ignores.

Stiles gives him a general direction, and they find a motel a few miles up the road, a tiny squat building with a patched roof and a neon ‘Vacancy’ sign with a c and the y gone dark.

The clerk gives them a wary look as Derek gets a room, Stiles practically draped over him and winking at the guy behind the desk. The word that gets muttered after them almost makes Derek wish he hadn’t told Stiles to keep quiet.

Both numbers on the faded door of their room are crooked, and Derek can smell rats in the building.

Overhead, the sky’s gone the colour of blue-grey paste, rolls of cloud like inverted egg cartons strung across a ceiling.

“Okay,” Stiles says when the door closes. “We need to-”

“We’re not a team,” Derek says, rounding on him, barking the last word. His control snaps in half. “You captured me. The only reason you’re alive is because you’re useful. Yeah it goes both ways,” he adds when he sees Stiles expression shift at the sound of his own words spat back at him. “You need me, I need you, anything else is a step too far.”

“A step too far,” Stiles parrots back. “And the sex? The blood? That’s what, a lateral move?”

Derek’s jaw twitches and his hands fist at his sides. “That was you,” he says. “All of it.”

Stiles laughs at that, a harsh mocking wave of sound. “Sure, Derek. Was that before or after you begged me for it?”

The wall literally cracks when Stiles’ body collides with it, Derek’s hands bunching in his shirt. He’s not actually lifting Stiles off the ground, but it’s a close thing.

“I’m not chained up anymore,” he says, barely more than a whisper, eyes on the twin pools of black staring back at him. “And whether I can do this without you or not, I will rip your throat out if you push me.”

He sounds so convincing he thinks he might actually believe it.

Stiles’ expression briefly flickers before it firms again, turns into a smirking mask of indifference.

“Nice to know you care,” he says, one hand patting Derek on the chest when he snarls and lets Stiles go, pacing to the other side of the room. “Especially after I went to all that trouble back there.”

“Demons lie,” Derek spits.

“Who doesn’t?” Stiles returns. “You ever think maybe we’re just better at it?”

Derek’s teeth scrape together hard enough to hear. “So you’ve been lying to me.”

Stiles shrugs. “Goes with the territory.” He steps closer, the sickly orange lamplight sliding over his skin. His moles are black spots against paleness like a negative night sky. “That doesn’t mean I’ve lied to you about everything. And I haven’t lied about lying, which has gotta be worse, right?”

Derek snorts, frustrated and tired enough that his lids are weights that he’s fighting to hold up. “And how am I supposed to know?” he asks, helplessness creeping in despite himself.

He’s cracking - has cracked - more splintered edges spreading inside of him than he can count. One push in the right spot and the shards can start cutting him to ribbons. At least then he might get some rest.

Stiles’ grin pulls his lips wide, long-fingered hands spanning wide as he holds them out from his sides. “That’s the fun part,” he says. “Can’t do all the work for you; you might get bored.”

| |

The ‘plan’ they come up with hinges mostly - too much, Derek thinks - on using the unexpected agreement between them for its surprise value; Kate and whoever’s with her won’t expect it, might not even know the hunters they manipulated into raiding the meatpacking plant are dead.

“What about an exorcism?” Derek asks. “If not for Kate then for the ones helping her?”

Stiles shakes his head. “No good, she’s too high up the ladder for a ritual like that to work. And anyone with her’ll have the same binding mark that I do.” He pulls at his shirt, and shows a stark black tattoo under the ridge of one collarbone. “Keeps us anchored to the body, nice and tight, all buttoned up.”

Derek catches his wrist when Stiles lets go of the fabric caught between his fingers. It’s narrower than Derek was expecting, fine bones under thin skin.

“Regna terrae, cantate Deo,” he mutters, and Stiles doesn’t hide the flinch at the words, or the shiver and shaky breath when thick welts score up the underside of the arm Derek’s holding in pinkish ropes. “Tribuite virtutem Deo.”

“Shit,” Stiles breathes as a bruise furls up his cheek to his temple, dark and smelling hotly of blood. He hasn’t tried to pull away. His other hand’s fitfully twitching on his thigh. His dick’s an obvious swell, pressing out against the crotch of his jeans.

Derek watches with a kind of creeping fascination, the random snatches of ritual whipping into whatever part of Stiles is wired against it, the antithesis of the blessing so fundamental, down to the essence of him.

“It hurts you,” he says, swallowing when it comes out rough. “Even if it can’t expel you from your body.”

Stiles’ laugh is all air and blatantly weak. Flash of tongue over his lips. “I can-” He sucks a breath though his lips when Derek’s fingers press on one of the welts. “I can hide it, sort of; heal it if I want to. Call it a fringe benefit,” he says, giving up the pretence and shifting his hips where he’s sitting.

“You like this,” Derek says, and he doesn’t mean it to sound the way it does, like Stiles isn’t the only one. “In nomine Patris.”

The air rattles out of Stiles’ throat as a keening sound, and an answering choked-off noise tries to leave Derek’s chest when Stiles’ bottom lip splits open in the middle, thin drops of cherry red shining and reeking of sex; of power and temptation.

His eyes watch a droplet form, vividly coloured on the plush pink of Stiles’ mouth. Stiles’ tongue sweeps it up, and Derek swallows in a heavy breath.

“You’re not subtle,” Stiles says, sliding over and into Derek’s lap, weight settling onto Derek’s thighs with a sort of unlikely grace.

“Get off me,” Derek mutters, looking up into Stiles’ face, the mark on his lip so close, his breath passed onto Stiles’ mouth.

Stiles leans forward and presses his lips to the corner of Derek’s, then the middle, then the other corner, slow and deliberate as a dare.

“You don’t want me to,” Stiles says, watching while Derek semiconsciously licks away the specks of blood left behind.

Derek’s hands grip Stiles’ hips, muscles clenching like he’s getting ready to stand and throw him off, to send Stiles sprawling over the floor at his feet. A part of him likes the idea, wants to make Stiles crawl back up to him, to beg.

Instead he rucks Stiles’ shirt up to his armpits, sees the tight buds of his nipples around the faint, blotched bruises and shallow marks his clothes were hiding.

He’s breathing hard, and there’s energy pulsing under his skin like he’s caught midway through a shift, the animal part of his mind desperate to take over.

Stiles arches into Derek’s mouth when he leans in to suck a nipple between his teeth and bite down, draw it to a tight point and bruise it the way he has Stiles’ face and chest.

Fingers card through his hair to the back of his head, try to hold him in place, and Derek pulls back, lets go of the shirt he’s pushed up Stiles’ body to grab his arms. Derek’s fingers wrap in tight bands around Stiles’ corded forearms, squeeze down and trap the blood in his big hands.

He holds Stiles’ arms out away from both of them, and grins up into Stiles’ flushed face before he practically lifts him out of the chair and tugs him to the room’s narrow, likely unclean bed.

Stiles pulls his shirt over his head when Derek tugs at it again, then Derek grips Stiles’ hips where his jeans are riding low and flips him onto his stomach, pulling until he’s bent over the edge of the bed.

Derek presses down onto Stiles’ back, feels the shuddering inhale and the long moan of an exhale when he sets his teeth to the meat of Stiles’ left shoulder and bites down hard.

“Exorcizamus te,” he spits when he pulls back, and Stiles shakes as a long, thin line of swelled-up red strokes across his back, like the diagonal caress of a whip. He presses the flat of his tongue to the mark, and feels Stiles’ hips rutting against the mattress when he licks down to the dip of his spine and back up to the nape of Stiles’ long neck.

He grabs the waistband of Stiles’ jeans pulls them down his thighs, hums when he notes the lack of underwear. Stiles kicks the jeans off his feet and Derek kicks Stiles’ thighs apart. His fingers span over the round handfuls of Stiles’ ass and spread him open, faint dusting of hair around tight pink.

Derek sucks two fingers into his mouth, presses his other hand to the dimpled part of Stiles’ lower back, just below the welt he’d raised. He flashes on the duffel bag, the rosary beads stuffed in the side pocket, and wonders how prettily it’d hurt if he bound Stiles’ hands with them.

Stiles bucks back hungrily when Derek’s fingers press at the rim of his hole, friction and clinging tightness when he sinks them in just past the first knuckle, then the second, spreading them as best he can.

Tremors run down the lean muscle of Stiles’ back, hands balled up in the musty sheets, mouth open and moving with no sound.

Almost clawing through his own jeans, Derek pulls the worn zipper down and works his cock free of the fabric, lifting his shirt just enough for cool air to reach his belly.

The drive - the need - to bury himself in Stiles is so strong his hands are shaking, and the sound Stiles makes when Derek works him open with a last jab of fingers before slicking his bare dick with more spit echoes around his head.

“Shit yeah,” Stiles breathes when Derek’s cock pushes through and into him, heat and friction kneading out from his hips.

He lets himself lean down onto Stiles again, can just barely feel the twitching rise of his ribs as he breathes and lets it loose as a high, gutted whine. He turns his head into the sweaty heat of Stiles’ neck, breathes in the layered scent and works deeper.

“Quem inferi tremunt,” Derek whispers as a taunt against the furled tip of Stiles’ ear, fucks in harder, rutting against Stiles’ scorching insides when a cut forms along the curve of his jaw.

He can see the slick-white of Stiles’ teeth when he pulls his lips between them.

The blood he can taste at the back of his tongue is his own, and all he can think is that it’s not good enough.

“God,” he spits, unthinking but not regretting it when Stiles hisses, and arches up tighter into him, his lean frame feeling deceptively fragile when Derek’s hands wrap around the swells of his biceps.

Blinking past the haze and heat of it, Derek looks down into Stiles’ sideways-turned face, pink mouth slack but tightening with every push of Derek’s dick, every pounding grind of hips that shoves Stiles into the cheap, sagging pull of the mattress.

Stiles’ eyes are coated black, and the lust turns like a bitter corkscrew in Derek’s chest, only makes him move harder, relish the slippery drag of Stiles’ ass around him, the shocky outward punch of air from Stiles’ lungs when Derek grits his teeth and slams back in.

He comes like that, half resting on Stiles’ back and his cock stuffed thick and stiff in Stiles’ body, a last few rolling thrusts as the drag inside turns sloppy and obscenely smooth.

Come drags a white line down the back of Stiles’ thigh, and Derek pushes it up with a finger and back into the swollen looseness of Stiles’ ass, adds another finger when Stiles whines and the flush works around his chest and the tops of his shoulders. He smears it on Stiles’ skin and steps back, looks at the wreck he’s made of him. There’s pride like molten rock glowing in his eyes, clinging to the vicious shape of his thoughts.

The sheets are wet and clingy with come when Stiles rolls over. Derek shuts the bathroom door between them. He stands under the tepid spray of the shower, and reminds himself of why he’s here.

| |

Whatever cleanliness he feels after the excuse for a shower doesn’t outweigh the taste of Stiles’ blood in his mouth.

A boost, Stiles had called it, something to give Derek another edge.

He hadn’t even questioned it.

Stiles steps back, blinking heavily and pressing a hand to his wrist. Derek knows the slice he made there will be healed in minutes, the same as all the other marks Derek’s put on him. It’s a weird thing to feel they have in common.

The anticipation, not all of it pleasant, is starting to curl in Derek’s guts, bitter and sweet, tinged with excitement.

Licking his lips to chase the last dregs of iron-sharp sulphur, he clenches his fists and feels the strength in them, the control he has over every movement; the way it’s heightened by the pure rage that’s close enough to touch.

“You clear on the plan?” Stiles asks, like he’s nervous. He might be, Derek supposes, but he isn’t sure he wants to know.

He nods. “I’m ready,” he says.

Stiles doesn’t reply, just stares at him, blinking coal-dark into his eyes like it helps him see better, like he can see some part of Derek that’s not really there.

Faces peer in through Derek’s memories, young and old and in between. Ghosts, keepsakes, whatever he wants to call them now. They aren’t the people whose shapes they wear, those memories are indefinite, scuffed over with so much pain and guilt, and there are times he can’t tell if they were ever real. They only exist in him, and maybe Peter’s shattered mind if there’s anything left there at all, so how real can they be?

Claws dig into his palms, and Derek feels sure of himself, his purpose, fixed to the world and the space around him, present like he hasn’t felt in a long time. He guesses he owes Stiles for that.

Does that make Stiles pack?

He slams the door on that thought, he can’t afford to get -- he can’t. No, no pack, no connections; it’s safer that way, no matter how much more an Alpha is supposed to be than this. It doesn’t matter. Not anymore, it just is.

If they fuck this up then nothing will matter, and Derek won’t be around to care about it.

Standing in the doorway, Stiles makes an impatient motion with his hand, and Derek falls into step with him, back into the dark.

| |

“You’re sure this is the place?” Derek asks, looking out through the windshield. “I can’t hear anything. Or see anything.”

Next to him, Stiles is dead silent. Derek can’t even hear him breathing, even though his heartbeat’s right there. Not human, he reminds himself, then wants to snort at the hypocrisy of it. As if Stiles needs Derek telling him to breathe.

Out in front of them, the warehouse stands like a propped-up corpse in the middle of a dead forest, empty storage and burned out apartment blocks standing vigil in irregular groups.

“Why is it always warehouses?” he asks, partly just to prod at Stiles’ stubborn quietness. He’s gotten too used to having him talk. It’s easier when he doesn’t have to fill silences himself.

The seat creaks when Stiles turns to look at him, black eyes blending with the ambient gloom.

“Easier on the cleanup; less likely that someone’ll wander in,” he says, in a tone Derek can’t place. He turns away again. “And this way you can always just burn the building down if the mess gets out of hand.”

He rattles it off like it’s nothing, and Derek knows he’s staring. Stiles’ expression doesn’t change. He thinks back to the meatpacking plant, and decides to leave it alone.

“But yeah,” Stiles says eventually, quieter. “This is the place.” There’s a pinch around his mouth when he says it, and Derek doesn’t want to know how he’s so sure.

“Then let’s go,” Derek says, clicking his door open and stepping out, bracing his shoulders. Stiles feet are silent when they land on the ground.

Derek’s doing his best not to dwell on how long this moment’s been building, and how it looks nothing like he expected.

He’d be lying if he said he was looking forward to it.

He says it to himself anyway.

| |

Derek sidles alone up to a busted side-door in the corrugated metal of the building.

There are five heartbeats inside. He can’t tell if one of them is Kate’s.

The rusty latch gives way under the pressure of his hand, flaky metal coming apart like so much rotten wood.

He slips into the shadowed corner through the gap, and a fist collides with the side of his face.

Derek reels back, stumbling into the wall with a dull clang, and his vision clears to see an average-looking, stocky guy with black eyes grinning at him.

“Was wonderin’ when you’d show,” he says, slight hint of a Southern twang. “Boss’s been waitin’.”

Derek dodges another swing, but takes a boot to the stomach, white stars flashing along his retinas and bile rising in his throat.

He grabs the next kick that’s aimed at him, pushes the demon back a few feet, but there’s a sudden crack of pain across the back of his head and a sharpness in his side.

Looking down, he sees a discarded triangular slip of grey metal buried below his ribs. Blood soaks warm into his shirt when he pulls it out, viscerally grunting and turning towards another demon, in the body a lithe woman with pointed features and raven-dark hair brushing her shoulders.

The first demon takes two quick steps in and lands a punch into the wood, stealing the air from Derek’s lungs and making him cry out with the fiery pain cutting into him.

“In nomine et virtute,” he croaks as he forces his body not to lean forward at the waist, pulling in air even though it hurts. “Domini Nostri Jesu Christi.”

The possessed woman hisses like a viper as her cheek opens and red slides down to her chin, the guy flinching hard and squinting like the words were a literal flare of pain.

Derek charges the guy before he can recover, feels the skin on his side split again, barely healed as they go crashing to the floor. The demon thrashes under him, and Derek wraps a hand around its neck and bring its head back down hard into the floor with a stomach-churning wet sound.

He rolls to the side just as the second demon slashes out with the bloodied slice of metal.

“Oh we’re gonna enjoy this,” she tells him, blood and spittle flying from her lips.

Managing to sidestep the next swipe, he kicks her knee out from underneath her, pulls the holy water flask from his jeans and scatters the blessed liquid into her face.

She screams, swinging out wildly, and Derek’s claws slice her stomach open, more gore spilling to the ground as the body and the demon in it slump down dead.

The last thing Derek sees before it’s all black is Kate Argent’s smirking face.

| |

Derek comes to as he’s being unceremoniously dragged to his feet, most of him just dead weight, demon blood on his hands and his own sticking his hair to his temple.

“There,” he hears, as if from the other side of a tall cave. “A little activity always does wonders. Welcome back, Derek.”

Blurred shapes turn to outlines as he blinks, head throbbing with every drop of his lids.

A slap stings his cheek and rebounds into his head, the world in dregs of sharp focus and muddled starbursts of colour.

He tries to move, and a pair of arms grip his shoulders from behind. Another set hold a long, thin knife to his throat. He goes deathly still.

Kate stands in front of him, arms crossed over her chest, leaning on one hip and a smirk twisting her features.

She looks the same, literally down to the days on her face.

“You’ve been waiting a long time for this, haven’t you?” she says, then frowns almost playfully. “Caused me more than a little bit of trouble over the years; nothing watching you squirm won’t make up for, of course.”

“Go to hell,” he mutters, worth it even though the knife digs into his throat a little more sharply, itching trail of blood running down to his shirt.

Her smirk widens. “Been there, done that,” she tells him. “Didn’t think much of the place. Now I’ve got higher aspirations.”

She steps closer, the grip on Derek’s shoulders and the blade at his neck pressing in tighter.

Now, Stiles, he thinks. Now. Please.

It happens so quickly that the knife barely stirs the air as Stiles throws it, a near subsonic whine as the blade bisects the space until it embeds in the chest of the demon threatening to slit Derek’s throat. Derek watches him stumble, red and yellow sparks fizzling out behind his wide-set eyes, until he folds to the ground and Stiles moves quick to pull the knife out, never taking his eyes off the others.

“For those of us who’ve died before, a quick reminder of how really not fun it is,” he says. Blood falls from the knife onto Stiles’ shoes. “And trust me, this time it’ll stick. Now let him go,” he orders, nodding at Derek, or the possessed figure behind him at least.

“Fuck you,” the demon holding Derek still replies. But he moves just a little with the outburst, enough that Derek ducks his weight back and jams his elbow hard into the demon’s ribs, the crack just barely preceding the yelp of pain.

Derek rounds on him and hits out with a heavy blow across his face, claws of his other hand wrenching into the demon’s thick neck until his windpipe splits and he falls with a gurgling rasp that’s full of blood.

Shouts reach his ears and the pound of feet echo on the concrete. Derek snarls and casts his eyes about, trying to spot Kate or Stiles.

They’re a dozen or so feet away, circling one another like sharks, Kate’s hair fanning behind her head like flames.

“Cute meatsuit,” she says, holding up the knife the other demon had dropped, posture nearly mirroring Stiles’. “I always did think it was adorable, you going to all that trouble to be kind to the little bag of flesh you’re driving around.”

“Hey my flesh, my rules,” Stiles says with a pointed-edged smirk.

Derek takes a step closer.

“Kind of cowardly though, isn’t it?” Kate asks. “Getting your attack dog to do all the work.”

“Says the one who has to trick a bunch of humans to do your dirty work,” Stiles answers. “Plus someone had to make sure you couldn’t zap your way out of here. And trust me, no more of your pet cronies are getting in, either.”

Her expression gives way to annoyance that she tries to cover with blankness. She turns to keep Stiles and Derek both where she can see them, Derek still trying to move closer.

“You think I’m running?” she says to them, shoulders squaring.

Before Derek gets any nearer, she darts in, cuts deep across the back of Stiles’ knife-bearing hand with her own blade, backhands him hard enough across the cheek that he staggers.

The knife barely stays in Stiles’ grip, but he avoids another jabbing punch and then hurls it across the floor, the blade skittering loudly until it collides with Derek’s boot.

He lifts it and steps in, Stiles feinting at going for Kate’s weapon to keep her focused on him. She crouches and aims a kick that catches Stiles’ sideways across the knee, a high sound bursting from his lips and echoing off the empty space, his leg collapsing under his weight.

Derek spins her off-balance but she jumps back away from the knife when he takes a swing, stepping back further still when Stiles drags himself next to Derek.

“Young love,” she mocks. “So sweet. Can’t say I blame you, Stiles; I couldn’t keep my hands off either.”

“Nice try,” Derek says. They’re getting closer to the outside wall again. Derek thinks he can make out the line of salt by the still-open door, the symbols scribbled onto the stone in black marker. No going back now.

Kate suddenly darts in, a hand dipping into her pocket. She flings it out and bluish powder stings Derek’s eyes, suddenly blooming into wrenching pain that doubles him over, cold fire in his muscles and no air in his chest.

Stiles steps bodily in front of Derek just as Kate drives her knife in a downward swing, and Stiles screams as it goes into his shoulder. Derek desperately scrubs at his eyes and stumbles forward, just barely in time to see Stiles shove Kate away, the short hilt still protruding from below his clavicle.

Derek yells, howls at the pain as he charges into Kate, and follows her down to the floor. He thinks he sees fear in her eyes before they go black and his turn red. She knees him in the stomach, but only as he drags his arm firmly across her neck, four deep gouges from left to right along her throat and the knife he’d barely held onto driven into her side.

There’s an electric buzz and a flare of orange around the hilt, and Derek rolls away, lands on his back and coughs black sludge, his body fighting whatever was in that powder, aconite or something similar.

When he turns his head, he finds himself looking into Kate’s rapidly paling face, eyes just voids that go on forever, blood pooling under her.

Trying to take a full breath, he struggles to his feet and watches Stiles clamber up using the nearby wall for balance, his left foot off held the ground. The stained silvery knife lays abandoned on the floor, pulled free of Stiles’ shoulder.

Derek collects it along with the demon-killing blade, his head an aching blankness as he pulls it free of Kate’s body.

Stiles puts a hand to the side of his knee, and pushes across until there’s a sickening crunch and he makes another bitten-off grunt of pain.

“You okay?” Derek asks, still forcing air down his throat.

“Oh yeah,” Stiles says, swinging his wounded leg back and forth a little and wincing. “Not like I needed all my joints, y’know… joined.”

Derek rolls his eyes out of exhaustion more than anything. “I thought you liked pain.”

Stiles breathes a trembly laugh as he straightens a little more. “Yeah well, mostly when it’s other people’s. And that wasn’t the good kind of pain. I’ve had enough for a century or so; do it to Julia.”

He crosses the space and stands near Derek, off to the side and behind, like he’s unsure.

Derek looks down at what had been Kate, and tries to see whatever it was that made him so vulnerable to her, that blinded him so much he let her take everything from him.

But he can’t. It was always him, and he’s always known it.

“C’mon,” Stiles finally says. “Nothing for us here.”

Derek tears his eyes away, forces them onto Stiles like that’s a safe place.

He nods, and walks past Stiles to the door, scrapes his heel over the symbols and scuffs out the salt line.

“You’re letting me go?” Stiles asks in a tone Derek can’t place.

Derek shrugs, not looking at him. “I promised didn’t I?” Then he snorts, turns a little toward Stiles. “Sealed with a kiss.”

The smile slips off his face. “But I guess you’ve earned a… a reprieve. And I don’t like unpaid debts. You helped, so I’m letting you off the hook.”

“I didn’t do it for you,” Stiles points out.

Derek shrugs again. “Amounts to the same thing. You want me to change my mind?”

“No,” Stiles says, quieter. Then “We’d better get going.” His lips quirk again. “This isn’t a great neighbourhood.”

He nods, and lets Stiles make a slower pace as they leave the warehouse behind, a tomb of too much history.

They don’t look back.

| |

The Camaro is a sleek-shiny curve of familiar darkness, reflecting the random glows and flares of light around it.

Stiles breaks the silence first.

“Should I watch my back? Start looking over my shoulder?” he asks, light in a way that Derek’s too good at seeing through.

Derek pauses, hand on the car door. If he’s leaving, whether it’s to go back to hunting or… something else, then he’d be stupid to let a demon go free, any demon, no matter how he might-

He shouldn’t let Stiles go, he knows that.

He sighs, grips the cool metal tighter.

“No,” he says, quiet underneath the electric hum of the street light. “Not for me at least.”

Stiles nods, expression fixed and eyes blank as seamless tar. “Not gonna ask me what my plans are?”

Derek’s lips wrap around a jagged, humour-free smirk. “You don’t have any plans,” he says.

Stiles smiles a little back at him, stuffs his hands in his back pockets. “Free agent,” he muses, looking up at the orange halo of light, the soupy, star-filled sky above that. “I could do anything.”

Derek shakes his head. “I can’t speak for the hunters out there,” he points out. “You fuck up, leave a bloody streak on a map somewhere, then…”

Stiles nods when Derek trails off. “Never was my style,” he says like a tease, a reminder. “Might see about a little hunting of my own. Supernatural crap’s more of a challenge than the average meatbag. Plus I hear they’re letting just about anybody in these days.” His eyes dip obvious-deliberate down Derek’s body, and the huff of Derek’s laugh is a faint plume of warm air from his nostrils.

“Not your typical chaos,” Derek says.

Stiles’ lips pull away from his teeth on a cocky grin. “There’s chaos, and then there’s fun,” he replies, rocking on his feet, looking every bit the teenager he isn’t.

Derek finally clicks the door open, slides himself into the seat and breathes in the familiar smells.

“Hey,” Stiles says, just as Derek’s pulling the door closed, taking a step toward the car. “Try not to get ripped to shreds, huh? Be a shame to waste all that pretty.”

Derek tracks the minute shift of Stiles’ facial muscles, can hear the even pat-pat of his heart. He can smell him, all of him, sulphur included.

“I’ll do my best,” he ends up saying, a little rueful.

The door shuts with a clunk.

When Derek looks out again, the lot’s empty, its solitary light standing in the concrete emptiness like a looming, slender scarecrow.

Derek starts the engine, and makes himself move.

| |

He drives for three days.

Three days in a blur of faceless road and forgettable gas stations.

He eats sparingly, only when his stomach feels so empty it’s like it’s gnawing right down to his boots. He sleeps cramped and awkward in the backseat, catching sparse hours when his eyes scrape with every blink like there’s ground glass behind his lids.

He winds up on the side of a dirt road, in the middle of the night during a full moon, he thinks somewhere in Indiana. The darkness covers everything like a shroud as he kills the engine and stares out into a grassy field.

Like a puppet with its strings being tugged, he climbs out of the car, limbs heavy and stiff, walking up to the long stretch of wooden fence.

His jacket hangs as a heavy leather flag on the nearest post, legs lifting as he clears the fence with almost automatic ease.

Insects chirp and buzz around his feet as he kicks his boots away into the gloom, overshirt and jeans forming a deeper slump of shadow against the grass. Eventually there’s a trail of clothes leading to where Derek stands, naked under the bloated, silvery face of the moon, scraps of cloud casting ribbons of darker shade in front of him.

His arms lift away from his sides, his head tilts back. Air fills his lungs on a long, sucking breath that he holds until the outward pressure from inside his ribcage is a trembling ache.

Then he opens his mouth and howls - roars - into the darkness, fills the night air and the space between the stars with noise.

Birds take flight, rabbits and mice scatter for cover in a ripple of pure animal panic, leaves and blades of grass rustling in Derek’s ears like shuffling paper as they fly into burrows and hedgerows.

His call dies off into silence. The sky doesn’t answer. The moon washes his bare skin with stolen light.

Derek shifts, barely aware of the tugging in his flesh or the wrenching of his bones, until he’s standing with paws clenching in the earth, claws scarring the soil. His heart pounds and his blood boils, eyes sharply focused and ears pricking at each subtle hint of sound, muscles cording tight and powerful.

He runs.

Through grass and trees, streams and thick patches of bushes, he just keeps running, breath panting through his nose and muzzle, every instinct scratching over his human impulses until they’re scarred over. He leaps fences, skids over trodden paths and veers into untamed woodland.

Time passes with the moon’s loping arc along the sky down to the horizon, the sun pushing it aside and climbing up into grey-blue streaked with pink and white.

Derek runs faster, catching the scent of prey on the breeze that tickles his nostrils.

He kills a deer, flesh tearing under his fangs, muscle and sinew stringing hot and wet with every strong pull of his jaws, blood soaking his muzzle and wetting down his fur. He hears the old ghosts of hunting advice from his mother, the playful encouragement from his father. The taste of blood leads him into echoes of sulphur-tinged power and a beating heart that he can’t find no matter how much his ears strain into the distance. He’s dragged unwilling through memories, thoughts about things that never happened and feelings he doesn’t want, so much he can’t claw out.

Forcing himself to walk, he traces back the way he came, stopping in the chill of a slow stream and letting the water seep cold into his teeth, wash away flaking blood and scraps of meat.

One step falls into another, each deliberate and heavy, paws sinking into dirt and over shifting pebbles. He takes measured breaths and tries to think of nothing. He feels old, weighted in his bones and stretched thin right down to his ragged soul.

His own scent clinging to his clothes leads him to the fence and the Camaro, the sun peeling long shadows over his footprints where they become paw prints in trodden-down grass.

The shift back is painful, drawn-out, the urge to stay wolf and turn his back on the human side almost unbearably strong. He cries out and forces his body to change, every inch of skin stretching like old scars or holey gauze covering a scabbed wound.

Eventually he stands on two legs, naked again as hints of the moon start to show far above. Derek scoops up his dew-damp shirts and cold jeans, his flung aside boots, pulls his jacket off the fencepost like a demolition on rewind.

Dropping into the front seat, the muffling silence embalms him, only his heart and breathing struggling to fill the small space, invasive quiet like daggers and closing walls.

His palm stings as he smacks the steering wheel, again and then again, the ringing slap of it and the radiating pulses of pain up his arm slowly becoming numbness, a deeper pain that won’t leave him as quickly.

A sob escapes Derek’s chest and cracks free from his throat, another scraping his windpipe and prickling behind his eyes, regurgitating bitter, bile-filled anger, rage and regret he could hack and splutter for years and not be free of.

Tears pool at the edges of his vision, everything blurring as his fingers slip over the wheel and curl useless in his lap, chest heaving. Wetness spills down his face and off the end of his chin, ugly sounds unravelling from between his ribs, heaving breaths that never seem to reach his lungs. The sound of it’s deafening in the muted bubble of the car, and trying to stop it feels like falling and trying to catch himself on nothing but thin air.

His stomach aches, twisting as his muscles pull around the force of every mewling, jerking noise.

It goes on and on, Derek pitilessly hauled over each jarring bump of his body curling with the sobs, knuckles cracking as his hands become fists and punch into his denim-covered thighs. Nothing feels real. Nothing makes sense. He keeps tumbling, wound around and spun about, overfull with searing emotion like he’s going to split apart into streamers of agonising flesh.

Derek’s chest burns, half-gasps of air clogging up cries in the back of his throat, convulsive pulls of emptiness around his heart, blood stalling and veins distending.

His face is a ruined, burning smear of tears and spit, head spinning dizzyingly and all his thoughts emptied into a sucking pressure at the back of his skull, senses pushed beyond their limits until he can’t tell where he is or which way is up.

Brittle edges of consciousness scrape together; file him raw and empty, almost new except for too much darkness looming in his memories.

Breaking the surface like a desperate plea for escape, Derek pulls his first solid breath in what feels like hours, shuddering and trembling from his shoulders to his feet. His forehead rests against the wheel, eyes clenching and blinking hard, more streams of tears carrying down his cheeks. He’s bitten right through his lip, can feel it buzzing at it heals shut, can smell the blood.

His head aches, pulse jamming into his temples and between his scratchy eyes.

Air hisses through his teeth and gushes out his nose, leaning back into the seat and pressing his thumb and forefinger into his eyes, coming away coated with salty wet.

Each breath gets steadier, muscles still shaking and skin goose pimpled, not with cold but the chill that’s taken the place of all that hot pain stuffed into every pore and cavity.

He wants to say he doesn’t remember the last time he let that happen, but he’s too raw to cope with the lie. Derek hasn’t cried in six years.

Slowly wresting back control of himself, he swallows with a click through the rusty stab of pain in his throat and drinks in more air like he’s been underwater forever. He stares through the windshield until the glaring brightness resolves into greens and browns and dusty road, the hood of the car, everything real and tangible again, so wide open he almost feels agoraphobic even in his cage of metal and rubber.

His fingers fumble over the key in the ignition, hands heavy like weights have been tied to them. It finally turns, and the rumble of the engine takes the place of all that silence.

Derek feels knocked down to his foundations, flayed open and emptied. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to fill the space with. He doesn’t know who he is without the pain.

The world solidifies around him, and Derek moves over it with a crunch of wheels on dry ground, direction chosen for him by the motion of the car.

He’s on his own. He’s done what he needed to do. There’s nothing for him to reach toward now.

He’ll just have to figure it out.

| |

It doesn’t take him long to realise that he’s not suited or capable for ‘normal life’.

He doesn’t even really try for it. After a few days, he’s fallen into the easy pattern of sleeping in crappy motels and eating in whatever roadside place catches his attention when he’s hungry enough.

Derek does make a point of finding out-of-the-way areas where he can shift and move around. It’s like he’s not used to it anymore, like something’s changed; the need to do it’s somehow become more urgent since… since he killed Kate.

He’s not used to that either, the knowledge that he’s actually achieved what he set out to do almost seven years ago, that the purpose he gave himself doesn’t exist anymore.

Time, he figures. Everything with time. Or most things anyway.

One afternoon sees him picking up a stack of newspapers without even realising it, standing at the counter of a grubby little store and deciding that he’ll just take a look to see if there’s anything obvious.

It’s ridiculous, the thought that he should stay a hunter for the rest of what would probably be a pretty short life. He doesn’t need to do it. He’s not human, after all, and he’s got his revenge - his family’s revenge, made up for his mistake as much as he can. He has some meagre savings, even if he can’t bring himself to touch the insurance money. He could start over, be free of… whatever he wants to be free of. Why should he care?

He’s learned to blend in well enough. If you don’t go around shredding joggers or devouring still-beating hearts, then the majority of hunters will never make the logical leap to werewolf just from looking at you. The Hale name is just an echo now, a shadow of forgettable history. He could leave it all behind him, where the shadows are supposed to be.

He doesn’t stop buying the newspapers.

The first thing he spots that could be a real hunt, he leaves as a tip to someone whose card he’d hung onto just in case, saying that he’s eight states further west than he really is, and that someone should look into it.

It’s a cop-out and a stopgap, but if he can’t make himself leave well enough alone then at least he doesn’t have to carry the extra guilt if someone gets hurt or worse, and he could have done something about it.

Two weeks later, and he’s made three calls just like it.

| |

Derek spends one night staring at a faded, cracked ceiling with a dark stain in one corner, wondering how he’d find Stiles again if he wanted to.

It’s not like he has a direction; a destination; a pinprick on a map - the distance between two fingers, lines of highway and streets like veins and the blood that links them all up.

No way of knowing if Stiles is really out there somewhere, banishing poltergeists or burning bodies, slicing the heads off vampires and burning Wendigos, or if he’s murdering humans and making deals for unsuspecting souls.

Derek likes to think it’s the uncertainty that bothers him the most.

He tries to put the thoughts of Stiles out of his head, stop prodding at them out of what he can admit is his latest way of tormenting himself.

He fails at that pretty spectacularly.

| |

The first hunt he can’t make himself stay away from turns out to be a demon possession, and Derek works through the case like it’ll be some kind of penance, even if it feels more like poetic justice, the irony a chain around his throat.

He’s been doing really well at not thinking about Stiles. Or at least the lie of that’s holding up, it gets hard to tell some days. The dreams are getting less subtle.

The thing’s riding around inside a paramedic, unusually covert in that all it’s doing is overdosing people on morphine and waiting just that split-second too long before playing like it’s trying to save the poor bastards in the back of the ambulance.

He tracks it to a tiny apartment and sweet talks his way inside, claiming to be a concerned cousin of the poor bastard who’s had his life stolen while his body hangs around as cheap suit.

The host’s body stinks of death, reeking out in waves of it that assault Derek’s nose when he breaks one of its legs and twists it to the ground, kneeling on its chest.

It grins up at him with a polished onyx stare, and grins with yellowing teeth, one arm bent at an extreme angle and the other scrabbling uselessly against the dusty floor. Derek’s knee sags into the thing’s chest, a slight give of decaying meat that almost has his stomach rebelling as he draws the knife from his belt, one clawed hand squeezing the demon’s throat.

“Now, now, Derek,” it says, the tiniest fleck of coagulating blood spattering at the corner of its mouth, voice a hacking rasp. “Judge not let ye be judged. You’ve had worse in you than some soupy organs.” It pulls a wet, constricted breath through its nose and grins wider. “Hmm, I can smell it. Did he make it good for you? Did you beg like a good little dog? Might as well stick that blade in yourself, save the other hunters a job.”

The innards of its throat spill across the floorboards, Derek twisting the knife that’s hurling sparks into the stolen flesh with a kind of slow, nauseating fascination, watching the demon turn just as dead as the body it’s in.

He rolls off to the side after the cold quiet starts to wrap like fingers around the bare nape of his neck, wipes the knife on the body’s jeans, idly wondering if this guy’s real a family is somewhere puzzling over an empty grave.

Sitting behind the wheel of his car, he stares into his own face in the rear-view mirror. That other, backwards Derek stares back, and dares him to count the shadows behind his eyes.

| |

Three months after Derek’s hollow vengeance, he drags himself into the tiny woodland cabin he’s squatting in, trailing mud and sludge and charred shreds of Wendigo.

It took him two days to track the thing, by then it had killed five people, including two kids.

The burns on his arms from the stunt he’d pulled with the propane tank have already healed. He’s trying not to be bitter about that. His skin pulls tight with dried mud and gore, his own blood.

His shoulders feel heavy enough to cave in, and his leg aches as the bone gradually knits. He’d walked on it a long way, so he’s probably done more damage than if he’d just let it heal at the time.

He’s exhausted, and not just physically. His bed’s a promise of a chilly night spent tossing and turning with a head full of memories he doesn’t want and guilt he can’t fix, but it’s the best he can do.

The heavy door shuts with a clunk and he leans against it for a minute, shuts his eyes and breathes slowly, catalogues the sounds in the cabin, the animal rustlings outside.

It all dials back up to adrenaline-soaked movements when the second heartbeat resounds in his ears. Then the whiff of sulphur.

Claws extending and fangs pulling down from his shorter ‘human’ teeth, Derek turns his head enough to see the torn line of grey tape along the doorway, bits of rock salt scattered around it. Fucking sloppy, he thinks, that he just stood there and didn’t even notice that.

“Don’t freak out,” gets drawled from around the door frame as Stiles crosses the threshold from the bedroom to the ‘main’ room that includes the front door.

Derek stands frozen, caught between moments, straddling the urge to ask questions or just mutter an exorcism right then and there.

The demon-killing knife soaks up the light as Stiles flicks a lamp on, angles of runes and sigils pooling with orange glow.

“This is such a cliché,” he says with a put-upon sigh, looking at Derek like an old friend. Derek really doesn’t know how to process that.

“How -- What’re you doing here?” he finally asks, still not moving away from the door or lowering the knife.

Stiles walks over to the narrow, lumpy couch and drops himself down onto it, hands folded in his lap. He looks… better, somehow. Less like he’s unravelling at the edges, softer in worn jeans with holes in the knees and sneakers, a hoodie with a logo that’s peeled away so much it’s unidentifiable.

“Not even a hi, Stiles, how are you? Maybe an it’s nice to see you? Manners are a thing, Derek.”

Derek stares until Stiles sighs and stands back up, takes a few steps before Derek holds the knife between them and he stops.

“I gave you a pass once,” Derek tells him, hand steady. “I can take it back if you want. Why are you here?”

Stiles rolls his eyes. He smells mostly the same, skin and sulphur and frenetic life, something more obvious of the outdoors though. His heart sounds exactly the same

“I can’t just be in the neighbourhood?”

“No.”

“I’m wounded,” Stiles says, presses a hand to the middle of his chest. “And after all the work I’ve done to stop you getting your wolfy ass handed to you.”

“Meaning what?” Derek frowns. He still hasn’t lowered the knife. Isn’t planning to.

Stiles aims a pointed smile at him. “On the hungry craving wind, my spectre follows thee behind,” he says.

“Blake,” Derek says, unimpressed.

Stiles mocks a slow clap as he steps closer still. “Bravo. Glad to know there’s something going on under all that product.”

“If you ever get near a point…” Derek drawls like he’s bored. He’s trying to plot a path around Stiles to the rock salt-loaded shotgun he's got tucked away. He’ll be able to use it, he tells himself.

Stiles’ feet make a loud thump-thump as he gets closer, Derek tensing up again. He blinks and there’s that black sheen again, behind the fan of his lashes and making the colour low on his cheeks more obvious.

When Stiles smiles Derek’s hand twitches, pure chance.

“Don’t play dumb,” Stiles says, soft enough for Derek to cut himself on. “I know you better than that. How many times has it been now, huh? How many lucky escapes and impossible saves? I told you; never trust a coincidence.”

Memory sparks behind Derek’s eyes, hunts and meetings and countless things he’d taken as opportunities and never questioned. Derek doesn’t believe in miracles, doesn’t believe in them, but always took advantage when he could.

But demons lie.

He shakes it off. “Doesn’t explain why you’re here,” he says, waves the knife to encompass Stiles standing there. “I don’t see any chains.”

Stiles’ burst of laughter nearly startles him into moving. “Be easier, right?” His arms span out and drop back down. “Just me.”

“You’re dangerous enough,” Derek points out, and Stiles laughs again.

“I’m really not patient or magnanimous enough to keep you alive just so I could kill you myself,” Stiles says. “Promise; scout’s honour, even. If I wanted you dead you never would’ve left that warehouse; which I’m guessing goes both ways, so how ‘bout you put the knife down before you hurt yourself.”

They’ve moved into arms reach of one another now. The door isn’t to his back. Derek isn’t sure when he moved.

“Since when did you start caring?” Derek snaps.

There’s a twitch of frustration on Stiles’ face now, a clinch to his jaw. “That’s the million dollar question isn’t it?” he says with an agitated flex of his fingers. “‘Cause I gotta say, caring? Really isn’t part of the ol’ emotional rolodex when you claw your way through bone and blood and death to get back up here; not part of the plan. You weren’t-” He bites off, looks away and then back in a breakneck jerk.

“So here I am,” he says, and he’s trying for a smirk that’s collapsing at the foundation. “Just a demon, standing in front of a werewolf, asking him not to stab me.”

Derek snorts before he can help it. Stiles fingers close around the handle of the knife, knocking Derek’s own, and his arm drops to his side. The touch doesn’t set him on edge like he’d expect it to.

But that’s it isn’t it? He’s not afraid of Stiles, even if he should be. He’s maybe afraid of what Stiles makes him feel, of how inverted he gets beneath his skin, everything buried turned belly-up for the light to get at. He’s resentful that Stiles makes him feel anything at all.

The knife slips back into its sheath.

“You took a big risk,” Derek says. “Coming here like this.”

Stiles shrugs. “Living is risking, even when you’ve been dead. There’s no such thing as safe harbour for a demon, Derek.”

“I meant with me,” Derek says, really looking Stiles in the eye, dialling up a smirk he isn’t feeling. “Still a hunter, remember? And I’m still Alpha. I could kill you.”

“You could try,” Stiles returns, like he’s playing; cat with a wounded bird.

“Christo,” Derek says, and Stiles eyes pinch as they flood with darkness again.

Derek takes a step closer, two, three, Stiles walking backwards in pace with him. “Pater noster,” he drawls, and a faint bruise billows along Stiles’ cheekbone, his hands gripping the table behind him, pretty mouth falling slack. “In nomine Patris,” he says, voice turning thick and saliva pooling in his mouth when Stiles’ lower lip splits at the corner. Something hot and dark and primal grins behind Derek’s blunt teeth.

Stiles is breathing hard now, heart thumping like a cornered rabbit’s when Derek presses in close enough to almost feel it jittering against his chest, thighs brushing and Stiles made to look to meet his gaze, pressed back against the table in a vague suggestion of restraint. Some things change.

“You got kinkier,” Stiles murmurs low, disaffectedness ruined by the tremble. He flicks his tongue against the blood welling on his lip, the sense memory making Derek’s dick twitch in his jeans and sweat break out across his lower back. He can smell Stiles leaking in his pants, the thick blood-hot swell of his cock pressing into the fabric, body tilted toward Derek like he’s snagged on the feel of it.

“Or I’m done hiding,” Derek says, quirking an eyebrow as he leans in close, breathes Stiles in as he runs his nose up the long line of Stiles’ throat.

Stiles tips his head back, faint chuckle becoming a groan when Derek scrapes teeth from the corner of his jaw to the jut of his Adam’s apple.

“Damn, puppy,” Stiles laughs. “I do this to you?” He spread his legs in a crooked V, Derek’s hands dropping to his hips, fingers pointing into claws that creep beneath his shirt and draw just hard enough over tight skin to pull goosebumps from him.

“You did a lot,” Derek mutters into the skin of Stiles throat, teeth aching as his canines descend and he presses their hips together, grinding snug and promising. “No more than I did to you apparently. Benedicto Dei omnipotentis.”

A shudder works down the length of Stiles’ body, from the strong curves of his shoulders to the hands Derek’s using to pull him in and shove them together, right down to the feet that’re beating staccato against the carpet. A cut opens above his collarbone, small burns like petals that colour the skin at the hollow of Stiles’ neck.

Derek’s lips suck the marks closer to the surface, the promise of power-tainted blood and the sweet hit of submission when Stiles’ legs open wider, curl around the press of Derek’s hips as their dicks grind and drag together.

This close in, Derek can smell the heady, bitter precome and the thickness of the arousal wafting from every pore, between the copper tang and the tacky-cloying scent of sex. It’s a punishment they both want, what Derek wants now is to fuck Stiles until neither of them can walk, bend him back and stuff him so full his hips ache. The savage uprising of want pulls at him, claws its way to the surface.

What happens after thus is fair game, he knows. All of it a choice, something Derek can admit in the pitifully honest corner of his mind he’s been waiting for since they went their own separate ways.

But he wants this first, almost wants it more.

He hauls Stiles around the table, knows he’s just playing along by not fighting it but not caring, shoves and pushes until Stiles is sprawled back on the bed, legs skewed outwards and bracing on his elbows.

Derek’s shirt and jeans pile up near the foot of the bed, his boots clunking as he kicks them off. Stiles strips lying down, wriggling out of his clothes, all that pale, freckled skin catching the even paler light from outside the window. He can see the bruises and thin cuts where the fragments of prayer and blessing had dug into Stiles’ skin.

“Ab insidiis diaboli,” he mutters, stepping right to the edge of the mattress, hands flexing with the need to grip down and take. He pretends the meaning of the words doesn’t matter. “Libera nos, Domine.”

Stiles writhes back into the mattress, arching as his hipbone mottles with colour and a hurt noise works from his thought, hard cock pulsing precome and slapping against his stomach with a wet noise, thighs trembling.

Derek’s on him before he catches his breath, a vicious shoving match of limbs that ends with Stiles’ wrists pinned to the flat pillows above his head. He leans down and scrapes his teeth above the desperate jumping of Stiles’ pulse, bites down not enough to break the skin but enough to know it hurts; enough to know Stiles is getting off on it.

Pressing down with the weight of his hips, Derek’s dick slides along the wet-hard length of Stiles’, shivering with the messy feeling of how bad Stiles wants this.

A broken moan parts Stiles’ lips when Derek tightens his hands around his wrists, shifting under Derek’s body like he wants to turn over, wants to go ass up.

“Like this,” Derek says, a harsh burr of sound. “You’re getting fucked just like this.”

Stiles goes still and another shaking roll of an exhale pushes him tight to Derek again, friction and sleek precome pushed around between their hips.

The heat that’s pouring off both of them is nearly suffocating, boiling and drying out the air, filling it with the musky smell of sex and the faint marring of blood scattered along Stiles’ body.

Derek stares down into Stiles’ eyes almost as a dare when he gives one more push of his hands on Stiles’ into the bed stay, then leans up to grip his thighs and pull him wide.

Stiles’ head flops down onto the bed, hands exactly where Derek left them, the part of his mouth and the burn of colour sitting low on his cheeks driving Derek to squeeze the coarse-haired insides of his legs, pull even more just to see his throat work.

He looks down enough to see the tight-furled hole between the curves of Stiles’ ass, small and fragile muscle waiting to be stretched.

Leaning his weight forward, Derek curls Stiles over on himself, bending his back in a way that has to hurt. Derek grins at how readily Stiles spreads for him, thumbs over the bowstring tendons where Stiles is holding his own legs open.

Stiles’ breath catches hard enough for Derek to hear. “You just gonna stare or oh fuck,” he mewls when Derek ducks down, presses his tongue to Stiles’ hole, around and then in, in, in.

He breathes over it to feel the twitch that runs up Stiles’ body, then laps with slick pressure again and again before he points his tongue and spreads Stiles’ ass around it.

There’s a thump as Stiles’ hands go to move and then sharply drop to the bed again. Derek rewards him with a rumbling hum sent right up into the smooth-tight squeeze of muscle he’s pulling open with his mouth. No fangs, not this time anyway, but Stiles knows they’re there, should be able to feel the points of human canines when Derek pulls him up tighter onto his tongue.

Curling small figure eights against the tightness of Stiles’ insides, Derek’s hips jerk forward into nothing every time Stiles makes another uncaring sound. He thinks about just how tight Stiles will grip down on his cock, and he can hear his teeth scraping over each other as he moans and Stiles trembles in its wake.

Derek’s tongue rolls up then down, and Stiles half-sobs with his neck stretched out and throat bared.

The ache in his jaw overcomes the ability of his body to compensate for it, and he pulls back to suck in a ragged breath, stares down at the gleaming, spit-slick place where Stiles is going to take him, redder and a little open, the skin of his thighs rubbed pink by the hair on Derek’s face.

He lets Stiles’ hips drop down, thighs falling spread around the bend of Derek’s knees. He spits into his hand and strokes himself, precome slipping down from the flare of his slit.

Stiles has his bloodied lip between his teeth, and his chest’s moving rapidly with his breathing. There’s shiny-wet puddling in his belly button and sweat gleaming on his face.

The head of Derek’s dick presses around the subtle give of Stiles’ ass, the whorled skin sucking at him like he’s wanted.

He groans with the pressure of his hips, pushing through and deep on a gradual side. Stiles’ breathing halts, back bowing up and fingers knotting together above his head. He doesn’t move his hands.

Stiles’ hole rubs up the length of his cock, muscle squeezing tight and not quite slick enough, throb of his pulse pushed up into Stiles.

Stiles takes him right to the base, grunting and muttering curses Derek can’t hear.

“Ergo draco maledicte,” he says, voice the texture of sandpaper, feels Stiles tighten around him as he pulls back just a little and fucks sharply in again. “Cessa decipere.” Stiles fingers are bloodless white, wound around their opposites. Pleasure tightens along Derek’s spine like a squeeze of razor wire. “Humiliare sub manu dei.”

A trail of blood runs down Stiles’ calf, and Derek’s nostrils flare as he draws out and jams back in, again and again, red filling his eyes and claws speckling nicks into Stiles’ thighs.

“Yeah,” Stiles breathes into his neck, hitching and halting. “C’mon. You want it. You made me want it, now give it to me.”

The pounding slap of his hips into Stiles’ is obscenely loud, the pink-abused stretch of Stiles’ hole captivating when the length of Derek’s dick splits him open on every thrust that forces him up the length of the sheets.

Stiles’ cock is a painful red, jerking up each time Derek nails his prostate hard enough, spilling precome all over himself.

“You can come from this,” Derek grinds out, breathless, fucking harder, fiercer. “I know you can.”

He can feel the painful squeeze gathering behind his balls, the jarring sparks that flash up his sides each time they hit the curve of Stiles’ ass.

With a snarl he reaches for Stiles’ dick and wraps a tight fist around it, jacking him back into the motion of Derek spearing into him, thumb slipping with a hint of a claw against the underside of the head.

“Fucking coward,” Derek snaps along with the punishing grind of his cock. “Hovering around me; lucky I never caught you. Would’ve ripped you in half.”

Stiles nearly screams as he comes, eyes wide and black, lashes curling out like thrown shadow, mouth working around the garbled sound as he soaks himself, sticky white in painful convulsions of his stomach.

It drags Derek over with a ruined grunt as he pulses deep into Stiles’ body, rhythm faltering, collapsing forward and shaking the bed as Stiles’ squeezes around him with aftershock, feebly spurting a few more pearly drops.

He slips out of Stiles’ ass, come running down onto the sheets. He presses a thumb to the edge of Stiles’ fucked-out hole and pulls him wider, watches the glossy traces leak out, Stiles murmuring some mindless sound.

The kiss is a surprise, which he tells himself is the only reason he allows it. Stiles sitting up and suckling at his bottom lip, Derek humming low and pressing his tongue between Stiles’ teeth like he’s making a point. Stiles laughs a little into his mouth, and Derek scrapes teeth over the cut he hasn’t healed yet.

“Hmm,” Stiles hums as he falls back to the bed, stretching languid and still covered in come and bruises. “That was worth almost getting knifed.”

Derek snorts.

“Which reminds me,” Stiles says, tongue-in-cheek. “Got you a present,”

He reaches for his jeans, hanging half off the side of the bed, clinging on with just one leg. He rummages through the pockets until he pulls out a folded piece of paper. The jeans make a muffled flap as they fall to the carpet. Stiles holds the paper out, waving it until Derek takes it from him, sits further back and unfolds it.

It’s a newspaper article, but Derek nearly drops it like a hot coal when two of the words in the headline jump at him.

Beacon Hills

Forcing himself to look it over, he frowns at the picture, black and white and a little grainy; the body of a deer with a spiral cut into its side.

There’s no location listed, but Derek’s memory hasn’t dulled enough that he doesn’t recognise the preserve. The feelings haven’t dulled at all.

“Animal attacks?” he reads, glancing up at Stiles, who just snorts and shakes his head.

“Right? They couldn’t think up a less overused cover story? Mountain lions,” he scoffs. “I always forget how much crap people will believe so long as it’s fed to them in print.”

Derek picks out parts of the article. Missing teenagers… No leads… Nurse was found dead at… Comment from local Sheriff…

He folds the clipping up again. “Hunters’ll deal with it,” he says. His voice isn’t steady.

Stiles shakes his head. “Nobody’s even gone near the town. Seems the Argents left a nasty smell behind, hunters don’t want anything to do with it.”

Derek’s jaw works. “You can’t be serious with this,” he says, holding up the scrap of paper. “You want me to go back there?”

“Think of it as the begging of a beautiful partnership,” Stiles drawls, crossing his legs at the ankles and teasingly pressing at Derek’s thigh with his toes, resting a hand low down on his belly and scratching at the dark trail of hair made darker with come.

“You want to come with me?” Derek asks, clearly redundant but out of a need to actually feel the question leave his mouth.

Stiles snorts. “Hey I know that quaterlife crises car of yours is a little embarrassing, but you should’ve been around in the fifties.” He shakes his head. “Plus I can zap myself wherever I like now that I’m not keeping off the grid and no one’s watching my ass. Well, nobody but you anyway.”

Derek gives him a silent, sarcastic laugh.

“You realise how insane this sounds?”

Stiles shrugs. “There’s a whole slew of hunters out there who’d nail us both to the wall without thinking twice. I’m just focusing on self-preservation here, mutual protection. Besides, I did some digging in Sheriff’s office - they really need to beef up their security - and one of the eyewitnesses said he was jumped by, get this, a giant lizard. No way am I missing out on that.”

Derek just shakes his head, nonplussed, watching Stiles grin at him, practically vibrating in place.

“Oh come on,” Stiles says when Derek stays quiet. “You can’t tell me you’re not curious. Giant lizard,” he repeats, trying to impress something on Derek.

Words back up against Derek’s teeth, too many things he could say without knowing where to start.

“If you expect me to trust you,” Derek starts. “Just because of this…” he makes some sweeping gesture at the two of them.

Stiles mirrors his earlier head shake. “Not yet,” he says. The look on his face is too real. “But I’ve got… ha, faith.”

| |

The pattern they fall into is frightening for how easy it is, how much of a burden it doesn’t feel like.

He knows he’s putting off leaving, if he’s going back to Beacon Hills then there’s no point sticking around, the preparation work he does before a hunt can be done just as easily when they reach California.

“When you were out there, on your own,” Stiles starts, in that tone that says he’s tired of Derek keeping quiet. “Was it any better?”

Derek pauses with the whetstone in his hand, the whining scrape going silent. He looks down at the weapons spread over the oval-shaped table, the tools of his ‘trade’. He catches his own reflection in the sloping arc of a machete.

“It was easier to hide,” he says.

The scraping starts again. He ignores how Stiles is watching him.

“You were free and clear too,” Derek points out after a few minutes go by. Another scrape. “You didn’t have to keep tabs on me; you could’ve just stayed gone.”

He hears Stiles sniff, sees him shrug out of the corner of his eye. “I couldn’t have lived with it,” Stiles replies like it makes any kind of sense.

Derek doesn’t ask again.

That night, Stiles pulls him in by the belt and kisses him, lips clinging softly to the shape of Derek’s tongue slowly exploring like there’s anything left he hasn’t touched, hasn’t seen.

If Derek’s surprised, the way he kisses back is a good enough cover for it, and the sound he makes when Stiles’ long fingers wrap around them both is completely free of anything like a question.

When he comes, he breathes Stiles name between a line of Latin protection ritual, and Stiles cries out as his come streaks Derek’s skin.

Derek falls to sleep with Stiles sat at the table in the next room, poring over a bestiary Derek keeps at the bottom of his bag.

They leave the next morning

| |

Stiles smiles when he sees the Camaro, and Derek pretends he doesn’t notice.

His bag drops with a heavy sound into the trunk, driver and passenger doors shutting almost in sync.

Derek breathes out through his nose, looks at the cabin through the windshield.

“Hey,” Stiles says, calling Derek’s attention, waiting until Derek turns and faces him.

“You alive?” Stiles asks, slight hint of a smile around his mouth and light collecting in the bourbon of his eyes.

Derek pauses, calling all the way back to that moment, that other life he was barely living. There’s never any going back.

But maybe he can look forwards.

“Yeah,” he finally says, and doesn’t mind that he can’t keep the emotion out of it, or that Stiles hears it. “Yeah I think I am.”