Chapter Text
The cave is shallow, more a low overhang than any kind of shelter. The thick leaf-litter intrudes, making intolerably loud crackling sounds where Derek collapses. His eyes are drooping and his breaths come in hissing, panted moans, like his throat is caught on a whimper. Reality seems to blink and stutter, blackness intruding, tunnel vision. It’s all he can do to flip himself onto his front, barely able to summon enough strength to push his face out of the mud.
There isn’t enough room for him to sit up, so struggling out of the leather jacket is pure agony. His movements are sluggish and uncoordinated and he can hear the staccato stammer of his heartbeat. Too fast or not fast enough? It pounds like a war drum in his over-sensitized ears. His vision flashes red. Red like the blood welling up in the wound in his arm.
It’s a deep shot - through and through the tissue of his bicep. The armor-piercing round cracked bone and still came out the other side. He tries to convince himself that it would be worse if the bullet were still lodged in there, festering a wolfsbane sore that will spread to his blood and his heart before it finally takes root and chokes off his life at the source. But even with only a few seconds of bullet cutting through flesh, the damage is done. The bone is infected and it will rot through while still in his body if Derek can’t find a way to excise the already-doomed tissue.
If only he could just move. His breathing has gone shallow and he’s cutting himself on the sharp incisors that he can't keep from growing. His tongue lolls out like some pathetic dog.
He doesn’t have a knife and he can barely roll over, let alone make it the nearly three miles back into town. Even making it to the end of the road a quarter of a mile away seems impossible.
He does have teeth, though. He can gnaw at the bone like the wounded animal that he is. He’s seen that before, running through a snow covered forest, running away from his human family and their cruel lack of understanding. A fox, red like a splash of blood on the new snow, its foot caught in a trap and half chewed off already. The image was mesmerizing - nature in all its messy glory, and yet it was the designs of men that caused the pain - the rusted whine of the trap as the animal trembled, the fierce way it snarled and bit at Derek as he reached over to release it. He’d felt pity as he watched it limp off into the snowfall, not even looking over its shoulder at the being that had set it free. No gratitude, no regret, just fear - fleeing the awful thing that had imprisoned it.
He wonders if some god is looking down and feeling pity for him now, the wounded animal in a different kind of trap.
The hunters won’t come for him. Kate Argent had smiled that twisted beautiful smile, knelt down and caressed his face, whispering that it wasn’t him they were hunting. There was something else in the woods and they intended to use him to lure it out. She pet him and cooed at how he’d grown since she seduced him and killed everyone he’d ever loved. She was still just as gorgeous as they day they met. And just as deadly.
She’d tied him up, left him for whatever it was the hunters really wanted, whatever could draw them to a town that had been werewolf-free for years, since its resident pack had been exterminated. Was it just the deer with the spiral carved into its side? Or was that a symptom of something as mysterious and terrifying as the over-zealous, over-armed state of Kate’s group implied?
Derek had escaped the bonds they’d used to tie him, but he hadn’t escaped far. The hunters must be so confident that Derek is too wounded to do much more than die a bloody death that they haven’t even bothered to reset their trap. Maybe they don’t need him alive. Maybe the smell of his rotting corpse is as good a lure as anything.
Or maybe they think he’ll howl to call the thing out. But he won’t. He won’t lure whatever they’re hunting out of the woods. It could just as easily kill him as it could save him and even a deer-mutilating creature of the night doesn’t deserve whatever sick fate the Argents have planned for it.
He allows himself a whimpering whine, writhing and smearing the granite shelf of his shelter with blood. Blackness is courting his vision. He’s going to die, he realizes. He knows it and the Argents know it. The question is whether he will die with a whimper, the sniveling pathetic last member of a pack that was over years ago, or if he will die as the proud animal he is - fighting, tooth and claw, until his last breath.
He looks down at the wound. Already the purple tendrils of infection are spreading downwards with the bloodflow. He can’t feel his fingers any longer. Now or never. He flips himself onto his back with a groan then pulls off his shirt and then ties the whole thing around his bicep with his teeth. It’s not much of a tourniquet, but it’ll have to do. A wolf, especially an alpha, can lose a lot of blood and still survive, but the wolfbane has weakened his healing abilities, so Derek screams through tightening his makeshift tourniquet as much as he can.
He snarls to force his incisors out. They ache. His whole body aches with the pressure of not transforming. But he can’t go full alpha now - he’d lose himself to the beast if he tried. He grabs his bad arm with his good and pulls it over his face, biting down above the wound.
Blood pours into his mouth. It’s decaying already, a black necrotic river that bubbles out, and he coughs and hurls, trying not to swallow any of it and make himself sicker. Even if he succeeds in amputating the limb, he could still poison himself this way.
He should have stayed in New York, let Sven sign him up with some modeling agency or maybe even live as a rentboy while he tries to make it as a playright, like so many other young theater graduates, holed up in the few square feet the city can cough up for yet another starving artist, choking on dreams. He’d be clawing at the walls of a shoebox apartment, meeting up with the other city wolves to shed their hipster clothing once a month in the park, pay the dues that keep the NYPD off their backs, and long for weekends visiting the family upstate where he can truly run.
He’d hate himself, but at least then he wouldn’t be dying a horrible death alone in the woods less than a mile from where his family died their horrible death, an ignominious end to a life lived ignominiously.
He chews mindlessly, trying to ignore the fact that he now knows the taste of his own flesh, like this is a rabbit or like the one time he caught a deer and tried taking a bite of it while in human form. It’s not his arm. It’s not his bone flashing white or his black blood boiling with poison. It is, all it is, is his survival.
And then, as he just reaches bone, getting ready to snap it, he hears it: the sound of salvation.
“You’re the one who’s always bitching that nothing ever happens in this town,” a voice says. It’s high pitched, a little strained - a teenaged boy. The rapid heartbeat of the speaker belies any of the flippancy of his tone.
“I was trying to get a good night’s sleep before practice tomorrow,” the owner of a second, even faster heartbeat complains.
“Right, ‘cause sitting on the bench is such a grueling effort,” the first kid replies. Derek has to agree. The second kid has a wheeze in his voice and his heart has quickened from exertion, not fear. Asthmatic, probably severe.
They go on to talk about lacrosse. Derek recognizes the sport. He played first line himself in high school, one of his Aunt Penny’s many attempts to get him to at least try to fit in. Being good at sports made him popular, but being popular didn’t make him whole. In fact, it just emphasized how little he cared about the things kids his age were supposed to care about. In a cruel twist of irony, hating being popular only made him more so. Derek had been happy to escape into the anonymity of college in the big city - little theater productions and underground raves, girls and later, guys, so many guys, who would gladly lose a night with a beautiful mysterious man like Derek and never try to ask about the edge of loss and danger that drew them to him. The artists - they wanted to paint him, not know him, and that suited Derek just fine.
“Besides, me making first line is at least a hell of a lot more sensible than you dragging me off into the middle of the woods because joggers found a metric fuckton of human blood and saw some people wielding crossbrows. You know what that sounds like, right?”
“Like there’s a cult that hunts people?” Derek chokes on a laugh. The kid is strangely right about the Argents - their essence in a single sentence.
“Yeah, actually, that’s what I was going to say. Except, Stiles, we’re people. Why do we want to be running around in the dark with only one flashlight when there’s a cult that hunt people on the loose?”
“Huh. I didn’t think about that. Also, your fault you didn’t think to bring your own flashlight.”
These kids are idiots, Derek decides, but if there were joggers and now there are two teenaged idiots, then there are also police, which means that the Argents have probably been forced to retreat, which gives Derek a window of opportunity to get away from here. He forces himself to roll over. If he can just get his knees under him, maybe he can push himself up, get the boys to take him to a hospital.
Except they’ll try to sew him up. They won’t listen when he begs them to cut it off. They won’t take the arm and he’ll die in the hands of humans with only the Argents around to hide what he is, if they’re willing to stick their heads out even that much. He can’t put his kind in danger like that. He can’t let a human doctor cut him open and find his too-big heart and his strange skull structure and the way that aconite poisoning has ripped through his veins like nothing they’ve ever seen before. No, he has to keep to this course and hope that the police keep the Argents out of the woods long enough for Derek to gain the strength to make it out of here under his own power.
“Maybe they’re not hunting people,” one of the kids says. The voices are fading. They’re veering away from Derek’s hiding place. If he just stays quiet, they won’t find him. “Maybe they’re hunting something else and they hit a person and now they’re covering it up, like conspiracy-style?”
“Isn’t that still bad for us?” the reasonable, asthmatic one says. “I mean, we’d be witnesses.”
If anyone were hunting ordinary people, Derek muses, these boys would already be dead, what with all the noise they’re making. And then he remembers, whatever the Argents were hunting might be out here too. Even if they can’t save him, Derek needs to get to the kids, warn them so they can get out of here. At least the hunters and the cops can probably take care of themselves, but from the sounds of it, these two can’t even defend themselves from a lacrosse stick, let alone whatever supernatural force had Kate Argent in body armor.
Derek pushes at the ledge, succeeding in falling back far enough from the corner that he can stand up without hitting his head, if he could actually manage to stand up, that is.
“Come on,” he pants to the forest, to the crows and the squirrels and the deer that he’s sure don’t give a good god damn. “Come on!” he yells at himself. “You stupid, worthless, sack of shit,” he says, eyes flashing red, like he’s the alpha training the pack he’ll never have. “Stand up!”
And, amazingly, he does. He staggers to his feet, winded, leaning against his ledge, but standing.
“Wait, did you hear that?” one of the boys says. The voices have stopped their retreat.
“Scott, if you’re trying to freak me out, let me tell you that you are absolutely succeeding.”
“No, I’m serious. I thought I heard someone. Hello?”
Derek thinks about calling for help, but then he’s back in the old dilemma. Finding him will get the kids moving out of here, but the way he looks, they’ll insist on taking him to the hospital.
“Is there someone out there?”
“Scott! There’s nobody out there.”
“I heard someone talking. I think they sounded like they’re in pain. Hi,” the kid continues, “Um, I’m Scott and this is Stiles and we don’t want to hurt you. We’re, um, not going to hunt you with crossbows. I promise.”
“And if you’re thinking of hunting us with crossbrows, then, I wouldn’t,” Stiles adds. “My dad is the sheriff and I don’t think he’d take very kindly to--” that at least explains how these two clowns found out about all the blood and the hunters.
“Don’t tell them that!” Scott snaps. “What if they want to kidnap you?”
“Better kidnap than hunt me with crossbows,” Stiles replies and Derek realizes that he really, really can’t afford to be seen by the Sheriff's son in the state that he’s in. Derek remembers Sheriff Stilinski. He was a kind man with stern features who wrapped Derek in his jacket - he smelled of pine and Scotch and just a faint whiff of sorrow that lingered. He looked at Derek with such pain in his eyes, as though by sharing it for even a moment, he could take Derek’s pain away. It had hurt to lie to him.
Stilinski would remember Derek, would care enough about him that he’d definitely notice if his arm grew back. He cared enough about Derek that maybe he would dig deeper, find out about the Argents and probably get himself killed in the process. And Derek couldn’t allow that to happen to the one person who had been a comfort to him at his worst moment.
Derek whimperes involuntarily.
“Maybe it’s not a person,” Stiles says. “Maybe it’s an animal. A wounded animal that people were hunting with crossbows and we should really get out of here.”
“You’re scared of an animal but not by a cult that hunts people?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I don’t want rabies, man? Have you seen the giant shot they stick into your stomach?”
“Since when does it have rabies? Can’t it just be an animal?”
That’s when it occurs to him: the solution to all his problems. He can be an animal. Dogs don’t get fancy restorative surgery - they get their limbs chopped off. And they don’t get questioned by the police or monitored by the Argents. And even if all he succeeds in doing is to scare the kids, at least they’ll get out of here and far out of reach of whatever is roaming around in these woods.
Derek fumbles with his belt, falling down back into a pile of leaves as he struggles to pull his pants off and kick them back into the shallow depression that he’d been calling a “cave” and kicking a pile of leaves over them. He yanks the tourniquet off and adds it to the pile. It’s not very well hidden, but Derek can’t manage more than ten steps away from the incriminatingly human pile of clothes before he collapses against a tree trunk, breathing hard with cold sweat dripping down his brow and blood, so much blood.
He summons that cool, empty place in his mind, where anger anchors him to his human consciousness, but the wolf howls, a beast unleashed in a barren valley, echoing through the chambers of Derek’s empty heart. He feels the pawprints of his ancestors in the snow, the mark of the beast in his marrow. Running and running over frozen lakes and through abandoned, wilted hills, alone, so alone, with his human family waiting back by the hearth and Derek left with nothing but the beast inside of him.
He’s been screaming as he changed, the agony of his cracked bones and ripped flesh transforming more than he can bear.
“That’s definitely a person,” one of the boys says at the same time as the other insists, “It’s definitely an animal.”
They’re both right. Derek is whatever they fear and he’s afraid that he’s done what he promised he wouldn’t and called the Thing the Argents had an arsenal to hunt.
But then a pale, scrawny kid is rounding the corner around the rocky embankment, skidding and tripping over his own feet as he sees Derek. “Holy shit!” he exclaims, ducking as though Derek, a wounded wolf, is about to shoot him.
The other kid runs into his back, but his instincts are better. He crouches low, ready to sprint, but not moving. His breath wheezes with asthma, but he keeps his eyes fixed on Derek, alert but not threatening. He doesn’t bear his teeth or tense in a threat.
“It’s a wolf,” Scott says. Derek can smell him now: he smells like medicine and mint toothpaste and locker room sweat.
“There are no wolves in California,” Stiles replies. He smells like a know-it-all. “There haven’t been for like seventy years.”
“Well, then both our eyes must be lying, because that’s not just a wolf. It’s the biggest wolf I’ve ever seen.”
Derek’s wolf form isn’t half as big as him transformed into a full alpha, but he’s bigger than a normal wolf, probably weighing close to what he weighs as a human. He’s pretty for a wolf, looking more like a Siberian Husky, with his light colored eyes and neat lines of dark fur on white instead of muddy grey, but nobody is going to mistake him for a dog, the way his muzzle curls and by the size of him.
“Maybe it’s just a wolf dog, then,” Scott offers, stepping forward.
Derek’s instinct is to growl at him. It hurts less in this form, because he has to fight the wolfsbane less like this, but the pain is closer to the surface, more raw, and its grating on his animal nerves, begging him: fight or flight. He doesn’t think the boys can handle either.
“Don’t just go up to it!” Stiles protests. “Scott! What if it bites you?”
“It’s not going to bite me. Are you, boy?” Derek wants to snarl that he’s not a dog and he shouldn’t be treated to the Rover-speak, but there’s something comforting about Scott, even though he smells like a hospital. He’s obviously been around a lot of animals, because his approach is slow and steady. He doesn’t tense when Derek’s wolf twitches, flinching away from him.
“What’s the game plan, here, Scott?” Stiles whines. He smells afraid, but he hasn’t moved and has even ceded the flashlight to Scott. “Even if that’s just a really big, really terrified, wounded wolf dog, it’s still a wounded wild animal.”
“It’s hurt, Stiles. We have to get it back to the clinic.”
“What about Dr. Deaton? Maybe he can come here?” Stiles’s voice trembles, but Derek can see the concern in his eyes. These boys are idiots, but Derek is reassured by their compassion. They will help him.
Scott shakes his head. “Wolf dogs are illegal in California. We’re supposed to test their blood and call animal control if we find any. Dr. Deaton can’t know.”
“Well,” Stiles creeps closer, making a face when he catches a glimpse of Derek’s wound, “I don’t think that thing can survive without a vet. It’s been chewing it’s own leg off, man.” He makes a gagging motion.
“I’ve helped Deaton with the surgery before. I think I can do it without his help.”
Derek really doesn’t like the idea of some untrained vet’s assistant hacking at his arm, but it’s a better option than gnawing at it with his own teeth. He growls a little at the idea.
“Scott, seriously, that thing is going to bite your face off.”
Scott ignores him, reaching out his hand. Derek quells his instinct to bite. The last thing he needs to do right now is to make another werewolf when he can’t even help himself. Maybe, though, with his asthma and his kindheartedness, Scott would make a good pack member - someone who would be grateful for all the bite could do for him. Derek files that idea away for later, ducking his head under Scott’s extended hand to nose at him and letting Scott run a soothing hand down his flank.
The human side of him, the part that Aunt Penny and Uncle Dave have taught to be ashamed of casual touch, like their whole family of uptight New England WASPs, balks in horror at being petted by a human, but the wolf part of him that is lonely and hurting soaks up the easy comfort like the parched ground soaks up the first autumnal rain. He remembers, vaguely, Laura sneaking into his bedroom the night he fell from the tree in their front yard and broke five bones, her tiny hands stroking him as she whined, licking the tears from his face and nuzzling against him until, by morning, the pain was nothing but a dream.
But she burned. They all burned and now all he has is a teenaged boy who thinks he is a dog giving him a lopsided smile and telling him that everything is going to be okay.
Derek whimpers as he’s lifted up into Scott’s lap. Then eventually, after Derek has demonstrated his ability to not bite Scott, Stiles has joined him and both boys are carrying Derek out of the woods.
He thinks he sees a pair of glowing yellow eyes as he finally passes out, but then, it could have only been a dream.