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When Derek dies, he wakes up in Bardo.
He’s still leaning up against that little ruined wall he died on - maybe it came here with his consciousness or something - but there’s no doubt that this is the place Scott described back when he first activated the Nemeton. Bright white fluorescent lights buzz overhead in a vast, low-ceilinged room, both endless and claustrophobic. The whole place is white; impossibly, there are no shadows.
Derek tries to sit up, but his body seems to creak. There’s no pain anymore - not when death is so close, is already here, has already come--
Jesus, he’s freaking dead--
--but every atom of his body is screaming against the movement anyway, like his muscles have been replaced with cotton balls and his bones are made of lead.
He’s still not used to being startled the way humans can be, so when he hears someone speak behind and beside him, it’s like the sound comes out of nowhere, and it kind of freaks him out.
“Get up,” says the voice. “Heal.”
Slowly, Derek manages to turn his head, and what he sees there is impossible, too, and it takes him a while to process it, because he’s looking directly at his younger self.
And next to him, at the end of a red leather leash, sits a large and very visibly displeased black wolf.
Young Derek is tight-lipped, pulling the leash’s handle taught and short and close to his body; the wolf leans uncomfortably away, ears flattened to its head, though it isn’t growling. Wolf and boy aren’t at the point of a full-on tug-of-war, but neither is relaxed and neither is comfortable, like Derek’s caught them at a moment of ceasefire in an ongoing struggle.
This version of himself is still young enough not to have grown into his ears yet, but old enough to have perfected his scowl, and he’s using it now, looking down at Derek with truly magnificent contempt. “Seriously, why aren’t you healing?”
Derek unsticks his tongue from the roof of his mouth. His throat is the Sahara, and when he speaks he sounds like the desert wind. “I can’t,” he says with effort - with a sigh. “I’m dying. I’m human now, and this wound...” He trails off. They both know what a fatal wound looks like, and judging by the sheer amount of blood on his chest, this injury is definitely that.
Teen Derek makes a face of total disdain. “That’s crap,” the kid says. “We’re exactly as human as we always were. Now get up, because she wants to talk to you.” And the kid points with both his chin and his brows to someone behind Derek in the other direction.
More movement. Urgh. Derek manages this turn a little better, and what he sees does make him sit up in surprise, despite the tightness in his bones. Instead of the Nemeton sitting near the end of the room - that’s what Scott described both times he’s been here, at any rate, so of course Derek’s expecting that - he finds himself face-to-face with the burned-out Hale House. The ruin fills the space impossibly, taller than the low ceiling itself in a way that somehow still seems to make perfect sense to look at. There are no trees, but the front porch is littered with dry yellow leaves anyway, gathering at the bare feet of the tall, elegant woman standing to the right of the front door - a woman long dead.
Talia smiles her barely-there smile. “Hello, Derek,” she says, and though her voice is quiet, he can hear her like she’s right next to him. Maybe it’s the magic of Bardo.
“Mom,” Derek croaks, and struggles to stand. He’s unsteady on his feet, and it takes a second to find his balance, but once his legs vaguely remember the rhythm of walking, he stumbles his way towards his mother. He’s seen her in the memory hidden in her claws, of course, but that had been a memory, and if Bardo is what he understands it to be--
--well. It could very literally be her.
“Am I… already dead?” Derek leans on a porch pillar to keep himself upright. He can’t even lift his feet to get up the few steps to the porch itself, to get to her level.
But Talia’s smile fades as she heads over to him, footsteps crunching in the impossible leaves. Gently, she puts two fingers underneath Derek’s chin and lifts his face up, just as she did so many years ago in the root cellar, where he’d tried to hide his eyes from her. “Yes and no. Not completely, anyway,” she says. “You have some things to do first.”
Derek has no wolf eyes to hide from her this time. He swallows, trying to steady himself. With his mother - his first-ever Alpha, who still seems to know him so well - touching his face and holding his feelings out in the open like this, he’s as vulnerable as he ever was around her.
Derek suddenly craves her direction. He needs it. “What do you mean?” he asks, and his voice sounds desperate, even to his own ears. He must have always been born to be a beta; he needs the support of an Alpha in this moment like a suffocating man craves a deep breath. “What am I supposed to do?”
Talia smiles again and lets him go, crossing her arms over her torso and surveying her son like someone somewhere has told her a joke, and Derek’s the only one not in on it. “My beautiful boy,” she sighs. “You’re supposed to find a way to live. Whether you believe it or not, you are my heir, and there’s one more piece of my inheritance you haven’t come into yet. One that can make you a leader in your own right.”
“Wh--?” Derek starts, then thinks better of it. He’s not an unintelligent man - far from it - but his mother has always been truly brilliant, and every once in a while when she was alive, Derek felt completely left in her dust, just as he feels now. He’s suddenly forcibly reminded of how much the Hale family’s tendency towards vague answers to simple questions drives Stiles up the wall. “Did I… miss something in the vault? I thought I’d catalogued everything we have. Or is it in someone else’s vault?”
She laughs. “You won’t find it in a vault, Derek. You’ll find it here.” And she makes a tiny gesture with one hand - a gesture encompassing all of Bardo.
Derek straightens, confused. “Here? What can I find here?” Standing on the front steps of the house he grew up in, he feels lost. He knows there’s nothing here; he’s lived in the ruins of the Hale mansion, spent months getting to know every creaking stair, every brittle floorboard, and he knows exactly what’s left here, after the fire.
Besides, this house doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s been bulldozed. It’s not real, and so there’s nothing to find in it.
“You can find you,” says Talia, and her barely-there smile is back. “This isn’t the first time Kate Argent has hurt you. It may not even be the last. But she can’t take who you are, or who you’re meant to be - no matter how hard she tries.” She leans down and presses a soft kiss to Derek’s forehead. “It’s going to take more than some curse to take down my son.”
Derek’s eyes are wet, which is strange, because a minute ago he felt so dry from the inside out. He rubs at his brow furiously with the heel of his hand, as though he might be able to play it off without Talia noticing. It’s a futile endeavour.
“Do you know what it takes to do a full shift, Derek?”
Derek looks up, startled. It’s so out of left field, that question, and has nothing to do with his curse at all. But Talia’s looking past him, over his shoulder - maybe at the young Derek behind him, and at the wolf on a leash. She goes on like she hasn’t noticed his surprise. “It takes balance. True harmony between your wolf side and your human side. That’s what I had to learn to be able to fully transform.” She smiles down at him again, an enigmatic little expression that would have been unreadable even to a werewolf sensing her every chemosignal. (Not that Derek can do that now.)
“What do you mean?” He has the strange sense that his mother is trying to tell him something very important, and that he’s missing it.
Talia’s gaze is intense and penetrating. “Some people get lost in their animal,” she says. “They shift so far they’re unable to shift back. But once they come back to two legs, they’re not able to find the animal again, because their full shift didn’t come from balance - from trusting the wolf and the human equally.”
Derek doesn’t know what to say to that. He swallows, and his throat sticks, but he knows his mother, and he can tell this conversation is over no matter how many follow-up questions he has. Something in his chest tightens at the thought, though; if he could, he thinks wildly, he’d stay here on his front porch with Talia forever, having every conversation they never got the chance to have. Even the cryptic ones.
But Bardo and his mother seem to have other ideas. “You should keep going,” Talia says, stepping back and gesturing to the front door. It’s standing open now, though Derek doesn’t remember hearing the creak of the hinges, or even seeing it swing wide from the corner of his eye. “There are more people here to see you.”
Painfully, Derek pulls his feet up the five steps towards his mother, but she urges him past her and through the front door with a familiar go-on-I’ll-be-fine-out-here wave of her hand. It’s almost painful for him to tear his eyes away from her, but eventually he can’t resist the compulsion.
In the entrance hall stands another familiar figure, posed like a Mean Girl with a hip jutted out, feet apart in the the wickedest of power poses, hair perfectly sleek. Derek freezes.
Laura definitely inherited the patented Hale glower - in fact, she had always been even better at it than Derek is - and she’s giving it to him at full strength now. When he goes to her, slowly enough not to disturb the mirage (if that’s what she is), they’re almost of a height, she’s so tall in those spike heels.
“Taking your sweet time, I see,” she says, but she can’t stop the slight uptick of her mouth. All those years together in New York mean that even still, the two eldest Hale children know how to read each other like cheap paperbacks.
When she can’t hold the smirk in anymore, he can’t either, and it’s Laura who cracks first, opening her arms for a hug from her little brother. She seems so real, and Derek holds onto her like a lifeline. He looks for something to say, anything at all, but he’s always been bad at words, and Laura has a gift for them. She finds hers first.
“Look, I know how you like to wallow, Der, but we don’t have time for that crap right now,” Laura says into the hug, and pulls away, an Alpha expression suddenly all over her face. Time for business. When she starts to pace, the move is so familiar to him that Derek has to resist the urge to bark out a laugh, so he looks at his shoes to hide his smile until he can watch her with a straight face.
“So I know at first it seemed like the curse Kate laid on you was a regression spell, but if you think about it, that can’t be quite right,” Laura says, eyes on the rafters. She’s doing that thing she used to do where she works out a problem by narrating her thought process out loud; in some ways, it doesn’t even seem to matter to her that Derek is there. “She did make you your younger self, but you had your normal eyes, then went back to your proper age, and then your eyes turned gold. If it was truly a regression, you’d have stayed young and gone backwards from there to lose your blue eyes, right? And you’ve never been a human, so theoretically you couldn’t regress to that, either.” She taps on her chin, studying imaginary notes on the ceiling that aren’t really there.
“So what do you think it is, then?” asks Derek, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jacket. He’s still bloody from where the Berserker stabbed him, but it somehow seems to be drying; he has to peel the leather away from his shirt to get his fists in. “If she didn’t regress me, what did she do?”
His sister, his second Alpha, stops pacing in front of him like he’s said something astonishingly dim. (The Hale women have been geniuses for generations - the men just learn facts and languages in an attempt to keep up.) “Don’t you get it yet? Your blue eyes, your power… You define yourself by them. You consider yourself, first and foremost, a werewolf who killed an innocent.” Her voice gets quieter. “Who killed his first love.”
It’s a punch to the gut, even after all these years, and Laura knows it. She comes close enough to touch his elbow, lending him her silent support, her brow knitted hard in the way they both got from their father. “Taking that away the way Kate did… that’s an attack on your sense of self, Der. She specifically undid the things you believe make you you,” Laura says. “That’s not regression. That’s unravelling.”
For just a moment, the whole world tilts with the realization.
“She took me apart,” Derek mumbles, more to himself than to his sister.
“Exactly.” Laura’s voice is firm. “But the pieces of you she took apart… they’re all here, inside your mind. So it’s your job to put yourself back together. Can you do that?”
He’s not sure. Kate’s magic - whatever she did - has systematically taken apart every little thing that makes him Derek Hale, and putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again seems like a pretty massive task.
And all before his body gets cold, too, out there somewhere in the real world. He’s still pretty sure he died just now, after all.
“Where do I even start?” Derek asks her at last. Where do you begin to put yourself back together? How, when you’re stuck in the space between life and death? It’s him who starts the pacing now, a slower, more careful echo of his Alpha older sister. If he still had his werewolf senses, he’s pretty sure he’d be able to smell the stress coming off of him in waves. “I’ve never done this before. Scott would know what to do – he’s been here before. But I’m not Scott. I don't even know what I’m looking for.”
Laura makes that annoyed little tutting sound that’s still so recognizable. “Typical, Der.” Another thing she’s always been better at than him: that irritated look that says someone’s being a complete blockhead in her presence and she’s not having any of it. “You’re so convinced you’re in a place of death that you haven’t stopped to ask yourself when else any of your friends have been here.”
It takes him a second, but he remembers, like a puzzle piece snapping into place. “When Scott and Lydia went into Stiles’ mind to get the Nogitsune out. They said they saw him in Bardo, playing Go with it.”
“Ding ding ding, ten points to tall, dark and broody,” says Laura. Her smirk is back. “We’re in your head. And hell, they brought Stiles back, didn’t they? They found him inside his head. So you can find you, too. Simple as that.”
It’s like Derek’s aching body is now suddenly full of energy. Scott and Lydia had gone searching through all sorts of barriers until they found Stiles, but when they did find him, Lydia said that figuring out what to do to get him free had been sheer instinct. She had just known they needed to get Stiles’ attention, to get him to stop playing the demon’s game.
As soon as he finishes the thought, it’s like his own instinct makes him look around. He knows where he’s supposed to go next.
The single remaining sliding door to the living room is open now - like it has always been that way, though Derek could have sworn it was shut a minute ago - and Cora is half-sitting on the edge of the little table there, perched on the end of it like she’s just aching to jump up to speak to him.
“Derek?” Her dark eyes are round and wide. He’s been doing anything for those eyes, bending over backwards for them, from the moment Cora was born, really. “You’ve gotta find your way out of here. I need your help.”
Not for the first time (but instead, realistically, for the last), Derek looks at Laura for permission to go and waits for her little nod before walking up to the only other surviving sibling he has: his little sister, who is just as much in Brazil right now as she is here in front of him.
Cora jumps fully to her feet the moment Derek crosses the threshold into the room, as though she’s been waiting for his permission to move. (Like she would for an Alpha. Like she never even did for him when he was one.) When she stands, for a moment the light from the fireplace outlines her like a halo.
Only there isn’t any light. There can’t be - it’s impossible, because the fireplace is half-crumbled and the house is burnt to cinders. The smell in here isn’t from a warm hearth, it’s the stink of soot from the long-ago inferno that killed most of their family.
Derek doesn’t like fire any more than he likes guns.
He shakes the scent out of his nose. When he speaks, his voice is low. “What do you need?”
“The Nemeton in Brazil,” says Cora. Agitation seems to come off her in waves. “It’s attracting… things. More than we can handle. Our Alpha’s in trouble.” She looks over her shoulder to the window - boarded-up though it is - as though she expects something to burst through it, to come after her. “Please, Derek.”
Derek is already doing the math, figuring out how long it could take him to get from Mexico to Brazil, given the time of year and the roads. That he’ll help isn’t in question. “It could take me a while. How long can you hold out?”
Cora’s already shaking her head. “Not long. There aren’t a lot of real fighters left here. We have too many injured.”
“And the Alpha?”
“She’s trying her best, but she’s in over her head, given how many fighters are off the board. And she’s too proud to ask for backup.”
Derek nods his head once. “You don’t need to ask. I’m coming.” He feels his jaw tense defensively. “But… I’ve lost my power.”
Cora makes a little disbelieving sound through her teeth, her brows all wrenched together at an unfamiliar angle. “Do you think I care?” she hisses, stepping close. “It doesn’t matter what power you have. I don’t need you because you’re strong - I need you because you’re my brother.”
For a moment, there’s nothing Derek can say to that. He’s been so unable to help the Pack since he lost his power that until Braeden taught him how to use a gun, he was next to useless. It comes as a small, strange shock to hear that someone would want him around anyway.
He’s nodding, tiny little movements he barely registers. “Okay. I’m coming.”
Cora slumps, a tension across her shoulders releasing all at once. “Thanks,” she says, and her voice is quieter, somehow less businesslike and more personal. She crosses her arms in front of her chest, pulling her body away. “I know you have… your own Pack now. And your Alpha’s in trouble, too.” She falters a little, like she’s looking for somewhere to go with the idea, but loses the thread of it. (She and Derek are so alike, in so many ways. Words have never been a strong suit for either of them.)
Derek follows, though. He’s tempted to reach out, to touch her, but thinks better of it. “You’re my Pack, too. That hasn’t changed. We’ll save Scott and then I’ll come find you.”
Cora bites her lips, then presses them together, swallowing a more difficult emotion before settling on gratitude instead. “Thanks, Derek. If you want, I can put in a good word with my Alpha, when all this is done. If leaving them, you know… means you’ll need a new Pack.”
But just like he knew Cora would be here, he knows the only possible answer. It’s like he’s always known it, really. He almost laughs at himself, but looks away instead. “Thanks for the offer,” he says, feeling some of the tension start to seep from his shoulders. For the first time since he got here, he’s starting to relax. “But I don’t think I’ll need it. I’m starting to think that what makes someone Pack… it’s not as simple as we thought it was. As it was for us, before everything.” Before the fire.
“What do you mean?” Cora’s dubious eyebrows are the strongest among any of the Hales. She’s even more defensive, more withdrawn, more distrustful than he himself was at the beginning of all this, Derek realizes with a pang. And he hasn’t been around to help change that.
He looks down at the pads of his fingers. No sign of claws. “I think if Pack worked the way I used to think it did, a lot of things would have been different.” He examines his nails, even squeezes at the bed of one as though he might be able to coax a claw out with pressure. Nothing. “I should have lost my Pack connection to you when you became part of the Brazilian Pack, for one. But I didn’t.”
That hangs in the air like a drum beat. Derek has never said that aloud - not to Cora then, or to anyone else now - but it’s true. Leaving her behind in Cabeceiras should have felt like tearing out his heart; the loss of a Pack member always feels like that. Derek knows the feeling well.
But that rending, tearing, screaming pain of the separation… just never happened. He’s missed her then the way humans miss people: profoundly, yes, but not with the visceral, body-horror sensation that wolves have. Somehow, he had remained part of the McCall Pack without losing his connection to the last Hale sibling, far away though she was.
The quiet starts to echo between them. Cora unsticks her tongue to fill it first. “So you think mom was wrong? That Pack isn’t just the Alpha’s choice?”
Derek’s already shaking his head. “If she knew, she didn’t take the time to explain it to us.” Back then, the intricacies of Pack dynamics had been only Talia and Laura’s concern. And besides, when the Hale Pack had been huge, loud, and secure, no one had even imagined it would ever be relevant.
Derek turns away, looking out towards the foyer and the front porch, but both Laura and Talia are gone. Somehow, he realizes, he had expected as much. The silent hum of Bardo is the only thing listening in.
“I think your Pack might be more complicated than just whoever your Alpha thinks is in it,” he says, to Bardo as much as to his sister. “So you may not be in Scott’s version of the McCall Pack… but you’ve always been in mine.” He hears - feels, senses, smells - Cora come up behind him and stand just over his shoulder. When he looks back at her, she’s got that little smirk on that reminds him so much of Laura.
“You can’t get me to say it back, though,” she grumbles.
Derek just smirks. “Don’t have to. You already showed your hand when you asked me to come.”
“So you’ll come, and you’ll stay with us,” she says. “But you’ll still be a part of his Pack. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of it before.”
“Yeah, well.” He feels his eyebrows raise. “Scott’s Pack is one of a kind.”
Cora smiles. It’s a real, true-blue smile, honest but not large, the kind that he’s almost never seen on her face since the fire.
“You’re going to be good at this,” she says, her voice a familiar cadence, and suddenly Derek is full of memory. Déjà vu.
“What? What do you mean?”
But he can’t stay to hear Cora explain herself, no matter how urgently he wants to. There’s someone else waiting for Derek at the top of the stairs, and the distance between him and his baby sister is stretching unnaturally.
“Go find him,” says Cora, and Derek desperately wants to ask her more questions, but the space is shifting around him, pulling him away from his sister and towards the staircase, compelling him onwards.
At the top of the grand stairwell, barely a step away from the edge and as relaxed as though Derek hadn’t died on a mission to save him, stands Scott McCall.
“Scott!” Derek races up the steps as best as he can, as relieved as though finding Scott here means finding him in Mexico somehow, even though it patently doesn’t. Here, Scott’s wearing the same denim shirt Derek had last seen him in, hands in his pockets and his posture relaxed. He’s not missing or in trouble or captured - in fact, he’s just smiling that lopsided smile he’s always had, the power of a True Alpha coming off him in secure, regular waves, in time with his heartbeat.
With Derek’s heartbeat. If this really is his mind, and he’s hearing a heartbeat, it must be his own.
“We’re looking for you,” Derek says, by way of hello. “We’re gonna bring you home.”
“I know you will.” The simple way he says it releases a lot of tension from Derek’s body. Scott’s young, but he has the quiet assurance that only the very best Alphas do; in fact, he reminds Derek a lot of Talia. Just Scott speaking the words aloud makes them feel true, and Talia had had that effect, too. Her words bore weight in a way Derek’s never did, when he was the Hale Alpha.
Derek swallows. “I’m sorry I wasn’t more helpful in finding you. Before I– you know.” Died, he doesn’t say.
“You have nothing to apologize for,” Scott says, in that even, quiet voice he saves only for the important things. “You came to Mexico willing to lay down your life for me, and I should be thanking you for that. But I want you to know that you don’t deserve that death. Not for me, and not for anyone.”
That hits Derek heavily. Scott’s eyes are deep and full of emotion; the familiar smell of gratitude fills the room, with no filter and nothing to undercut it, a genuine and deep appreciation for his presence. Derek’s only recently come to terms with the fact that there are people out there - not just family - who care about him, who want to keep him alive for his own sake, but every once in a while it’s still a little overwhelming to think about, and it is now.
“I’d do it again,” is what he settles on saying, but it comes out a little slurred, like it’s hard to move his mouth around the heaviness of those words. “Anytime. You’re my Alpha.”
“Betas don’t need to die for their Alpha. It’s not your job,” says Scott. His voice is so quiet and so steady, it’s almost in time with the ambient heartbeat Derek’s been hearing. “The whole Pack protects each other. We all do that, so we all can survive. That includes you - whether or not you think you deserve it.”
Again, Derek has no words. He feels unbalanced, as though the familiar floorboards are buckling under him. When he hears Scott’s voice again, for a moment it sounds far away, like he’s hearing him from across a wide desert plain.
“Do you know what I’ve learned about being an Alpha?” Scott is asking, and Derek focuses his hearing on the even, quiet voice until he comes back to himself, and the floor feels tangible again under his feet. “It’s not about being powerful or strong. It’s not about people being afraid of you, or even just respecting you. The most important thing about being an Alpha is just caring for your Pack.”
Derek reaches out to the handrail. He’s not weak anymore - it’s just grounding to him to feel the old balustrade under his skin. His fingertips touch the wood, but his palm hovers. His voice is quiet, too. “What else can I do to help them, when I’m not a wolf?”
“You’re always a wolf.” Simple, steady. Like the heartbeat in the air. “You’re always a human, too. Nothing’s changed about that.”
A small scoff escapes the side of Derek’s mouth before he can censor it. “Right.”
“It’s true,” says Scott, and turns to face the whole staircase properly, a lopsided smile on his face. “You’re both. And you can accomplish a whole lot, human or wolf or both. Just look at what you’ve already done.”
Once again, that strange knowing that comes with Bardo crawls up Derek’s spine. He knows even before he starts to turn to look at the whole foyer below him what he’s going to see, and it should be beautiful, but instead it makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.
The Hale House is filling with light.
Spreading from the charred edges of the entrance hall, crawling around the walls, is a strange and brilliant un-fire, de-burning, restoring. In its eerie wake come clean walls, never singed; photos reappearing in their frames, unmelted; cracks in glass fixtures retreating, long-dead bulbs igniting in their lamps. It’s as impossible as the rest of this place.
Derek can’t speak.
It’s not complete, he notices after a minute. There are still some cobwebs in the corners, some exposed wall beams that the line of light won’t touch. The hole in the door to the living room - he threw Scott through it, ages ago - is still there. There is no clutter of toys from so many children running through the halls.
“It’s not the same as it was. It hasn’t gone back in time,” says Scott, turning to Derek with a smile. “It’s just healing.”
Derek’s not ready for this. There’s warmth in his hands now, the heat of life making his fingertips prickle. “I’m healing,” he says, and he hears the confusion in his own voice more than he feels it in himself.
“You’re finding the things Kate took away from you,” says Scott, not disagreeing. “The things that’re really important.”
All of the people here. The important people.
“Keep going,” says Scott, and once again, Derek knows he has to. His eyes are on the closed door to his mother’s old study, just at the end of the hall. It’s not opening, like all the others did, but it’s calling him. There’s a strange sensation pulling at him from behind his navel, drawing him towards it.
Before he goes, Derek claps his hand on Scott’s shoulder, and without hesitation, the young Alpha does the same back. Scott squeezes once. They don’t need any more words than that.
Derek is oddly nervous when he reaches the door. When he was a kid, this door was closed whenever Talia (and sometimes Laura) were conducting official Pack business here; the rule had been never to intrude unless it was an emergency, and the instinct telling him not to enter is still strong. He shakes it off and rolls his shoulders back, turning the old doorknob - still tarnished, burnt, unchanged by the un-fire - like he’s mad at it.
A strange sight greets him. It doesn’t look like this room’s been ravaged by fire anymore, but it’s certainly not restored. Instead, it kind of looks like it’s been hit by a missile, because one half of the room is pristine and the other half is gone.
There’s a burnt-edged crater where the far half of the study should be, wooden beams exposed to the harsh white light of Bardo. The other half, the half that’s there, has obviously been touched by the spreading restoration; at least a good chunk of his mother’s reference library extends along the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf, across from where Talia’s desk should be.
The line between House and hole has left the two chairs that had once sat across from the desk untouched, despite the fact that there’s no trace of the desk itself. The charred edges of the hole in the house look like a scar, a strange bisection. Like a hemicorporectomy.
In one of the untouched chairs, sitting right at the edge of the hole in the floor and looking for all the world like she belongs there, is Paige Krasikeva.
“Hi, Derek,” she says, as lightly as if he’s only been two minutes late for a date. “You look good.”
He doesn’t, of course. That’s bizarre. There’s dried blood covering his whole torso.
Derek has to figure out what to do with his tongue to make words. “Paige,” he croaks, and of all the things he’s seen today, in some way this makes the least sense.
She’s older than she was when she died. As old as she should be now, maybe - if Derek hadn’t killed her. Her old overalls and unfinished teenage style have been replaced by well-fitted jeans and a simple white tee, and natural waves have settled into her hair.
She smiles at him and it makes his chest ache.
“I was just admiring the portrait you put on the wall.” Paige gestures gently to the large, ornate frame on the wall directly beside Derek, and the movement is almost hypnotizing.
“I didn’t put it there,” Derek says, trying and failing to blink away his daze. “Family heirloom. One of the Hale Alpha women from the 1880s, I think.”
“Is it, now?”
The familiarity of her knowing little smirk, the same one she used to use whenever she made fun of him, grounds him a bit. Derek steps further into the room, turning to look at the portrait from her perspective.
And his stomach falls.
Standing in an identical pose to the original portrait - wearing the same severe, puffy-sleeved gown, the same non-expression around her mouth - is Jennifer Blake. It’s undoubtedly the same painting, with the visible brushstrokes around the edges and that one little misplaced stipple of black paint on the back of her hand, but the face has unmistakably changed.
It’s her beautiful face, he notices a second too late. Not her real one.
Before he knows it, every defense is up. “I definitely didn’t put this here,” Derek breathes, bracing for an attack that certainly can’t come from a painting. She can’t crawl out of there, can she? Suddenly he’s not so sure. Even so, he steps towards it, as though the answers to the million questions buzzing in his brain are painted into the very canvas itself. “What’s it doing here? Why does it look like her?”
Paige’s laughter is as musical as her playing. “I’ll tell you why I think it’s there… but only if you can show me one werewolf-y thing first.” Derek rips his eyes away from the painting, a protestation already halfway out his mouth, but she’s already holding up one pale finger to silence him, her eyes twinkling with strange light. “Just one fang or one claw - whatever you want. Show me what you got, big guy.”
Big guy. She’s not the one who calls him that. Weird.
If Paige realizes Derek’s confusion, she certainly doesn’t acknowledge it. “I know you think you don’t have your power, but I’m not convinced,” she says. “You did just restore half the House with your mind, and that sounds pretty powerful, if you ask me. Besides, if you give it a try and it fails, what do you actually have to lose?”
Nothing, Derek knows. He has nothing, and so he has nothing to lose.
Besides, when Paige Krasikeva looks at him like that, he is completely powerless to refuse her. He’d pluck the full moon out of the sky for her, if she asked, even after all these years.
Derek closes his eyes with a sigh. Pulling his wolf eyes out over his human ones was one of the first things he ever learned as a teen trying to control the shift - if he’s going to give this a fair shot, he supposes, he should try for the easiest thing first. So like he’s done since he was a kid, he reaches for the space inside him where his wolf has always lived, a space which for the last few weeks has seemed empty and cold. He expects, of course, to find nothingness - since the curse, he’s been alone inside his own body, and lonelier than he’s ever been.
He reaches. And reaches. Reaches farther than he’s ever had to to find the wolf–
–and sucks in an astonished breath.
There is warmth in the wolf’s place again. Sure, it’s not the palpable feeling he used to have of his body existing in two shapes at once, of fur and teeth and claws lying parallel to his human skin, but somewhere deep inside him there is the unmistakable heat of a shifter.
When he opens his eyes, he knows without doubt that they’re not hazel anymore. He can’t exactly see body heat coming off Paige the way he normally might - she’s dead, and Derek’s still coming back to life, and they’re not interacting with physical bodies anyway - but he recognizes the shimmer about her as the way the wolf sees.
He doesn’t know if his eyes are gold or blue, but he doesn’t quite have it in him to ask.
When Derek blinks his wolf eyes away, Paige is standing in front of him, close, her eyes full of an emotion that could bowl him over with the sheer size of it. “I think Jennifer’s picture’s up there because she’s a symbol,” she says. “You think she was a sign that you don’t deserve love, or to be loved. Because you believe your love has caused too much suffering.”
It has. Chaos followed in the wake of everyone he has ever loved. Derek tries to school his features, but he knows they’re twisting and pulling at his face, his brows wrenching and twisting together despite his best efforts to calm them.
“You don’t need to punish yourself for falling in love, Derek. And you’re not broken for it. I wish you could see that.” Her pale hand rests on his shoulder.
Derek is bad with words, and when emotions get too big and too wild, he loses speech completely. He’s helpless to do anything but raise a hand to her wrist, thumb hovering just over her pulse point.
Gently, Paige leans up to rest her forehead against his. Her voice is only a murmur, but his keen ears miss nothing. “Your great love is still ahead of you, Derek, if you just let them in. One day, you’ll be able to take Jennifer’s picture off the wall, and take your heart out of the box you’ve shut it in, and you’ll see. It was never defective - it’s the biggest, kindest, most generous heart I ever knew.”
His chest tightens sharply. Twice. When she straightens, Derek could swear she’s almost glowing with contentment. “Go,” she says, her hand sliding down his arm to take his hand one last time. “You’re not quite done here yet.”
Suddenly the room feels like it’s stretching impossibly again, pulling him away from her and backwards towards the door.
“Paige–”
He feels like needs to have a proper ending, a good goodbye at the very least, to replace the horror of their last one. But there’s no time - the magic of Bardo is pulling him too fast, he can’t find the words.
But when his eyes lock with hers, Paige seems so… relaxed. At peace, even. She waves, one hand casually resting in her pocket, that warm almost-glow still about her.
“I love you,” she mouths at him. “I’m fine. Go.”
Derek barely has time to rasp out his goodbye before he’s in the hallway again, the door to the study shutting in his face with a quick thump.
For a moment, he doesn’t actually know where he’s supposed to go. He knows, the way he’s known so much about this place, that trying the doorknob again would be futile, and he feels his shoulders slump with the knowledge of it. His visit with Paige is over, and he can’t see her again.
“Where am I supposed to go?” he calls out into the empty foyer, but the only answer is his echo.
All of Bardo is still.
And then, slowly, Derek finds himself turning his head, looking down the hallway towards the library - the final room.
It’s calling to him, Derek realizes, just as his mother’s study had done before. When he was a kid, the library had been his favourite room in the whole house, with its floor-to-ceiling bookcases, its cozy reading nooks inset into big bay windows, and its strange collection of both harmless nicknacks and semi-magical relics peppering the shelves.
He had spent hours there when he was young. It had been his sanctuary.
And he needs to go back.
There’s someone waiting for him inside, Derek knows, but honestly, he can’t imagine who it could be. He’s nearly run out of friends. He cares about Braeden, sure, so theoretically it could be her, but they’ve both known from the start of their fling that what they have is temporary and not deep, so his subconscious saving her for last seems unlikely; likewise, the idea of either of the other Beacon Hills Hales being here seems improbable, given he’s not close with Malia and that he actually successfully murdered Peter that one time. Either way, he knows that when he opens that door, there will be someone important behind it. He knows it the way he knows that the sky is blue, and that he is a werewolf, and that he isn’t really dead anymore.
This doorknob is as clean and polished as it ever was; the strange un-burning must have restored it. It’s cool as copper in Derek’s hand, its vintage details leaving familiar indentations in his palm.
The door is sticky on its hinges as he pushes it open - Derek remembers in a flash that no one ever got to oiling it before the whole house burnt to the ground - and when it opens, he has to wait a moment for his eyes to adjust, because what’s streaming in here is not the cold light of the fluorescents, but the real, true, warm sunshine that this room was always filled with in his memory.
There’s a silhouette in front of one of the window nooks, outlined in an improbable nimbus of warm morning light. Derek only needs to step inside for the silhouette to settle into a face - into honey eyes and a lopsided smile, a red hoodie and a smattering of soft little moles.
Derek feels his eyebrows shoot up his forehead so fast it almost hurts.
“Aww, don’t give me that look, big guy,” says Stiles, making a face that doesn’t stop his eyes from twinkling. “You’re not actually surprised to see me. Your trip down memory lane wouldn’t be complete without your favourite human!”
Derek begs to differ, but he says nothing.
Stiles laughs, an open, easy, secure sort of laugh, his posture languid and loose, like a cat lounging in a sunbeam on a Saturday morning.
This Stiles is happier than the one he’s just seen in Mexico, Derek realizes with a pang. It’s hard to reconcile this relaxed, comfortable teenager with the boy who had turned back at La Iglesia and looked at him the way he had, big doe eyes full of fear and understanding and something else too terrifying to define. (Derek had had to focus on the pain, because it was better than what he’d seen on Stiles’ face.)
This Stiles doesn’t look conflicted or scared or whatever else Derek doesn’t want to think about that he had seen on him then. He is calm. Happy, the way he deserves to be - the way the whole Pack deserves to be.
As always, Stiles seems to find it hard to keep still; his long fingers are gently, absently fiddling with something, twirling it around in his hands, and it takes Derek a second to recognize it.
Jesus Christ. “Did you steal the wolf’s leash?” Honestly, the kid is the only person Derek knows with the brain of a cop, but the heart of a thief.
Stiles just smirks his goofy, open-mouthed smirk. “He wasn’t using it anymore,” he says, leaning one shoulder on the bookshelf by the window and gesturing outside it lazily with one hand. “Take a look for yourself, if you don’t believe me. But since I’m kind of a figment of your imagination, like everybody and everything else in this place, I’m not exactly likely to be wrong about it. You should be taking my word as gospel, really. You know nothing, Jon Snow.”
Derek walks over to the window just to shut him up. Looking right up at the window is his younger self, still by that little ruined wall with the wolf, leashless. But it seems like it isn’t needed anymore - the tension, the fight between the two of them is gone. The wolf is just sitting calmly, tail giving a slow, curious little wag, eyes locked on Derek’s own. Teenage Derek is so at ease with the animal that his hands are even stuffed in his pockets.
“See? Gospel,” Stiles says with a grin. One ankle is even crossed over the other, he seems so relaxed.
“Why are you here, Stiles?” Derek can hear the terseness in his words like it isn’t his own, like he’s listening to a character in a movie speak with his voice.
“Isn’t it obvious?” When Stiles looks at him, his eyes are so wide and so open. Something begins to open inside Derek’s chest, looking into those eyes, but he slams it shut. He has to walk away.
No.
Maybe he doesn’t have to speak aloud in this world, because Stiles responds as though he heard Derek thinking. “I’m here because you still need to figure your way out of Bardo. Heck, it’s not like this is the first time your brain has given you me when you were in mortal peril and needed to solve a puzzle.”
Derek remembers, all too well, a six-fingered Stiles in the locker room at the school - a Stiles that hadn’t been real. Maybe that had been Bardo, too. “Alright. So what do I need to do to get out, then? I need to save Scott. And then I need to go help Cora.”
Stiles looks away, out the window and down towards the watching wolf below. “I have a better question: after you help Cora, will you be coming back?” To Derek’s surprise, the air between them starts to smell bittersweet, bright and delicate and sad, like cut sunflowers as they start to die. The impossible morning light is beautiful on Stiles’ skin, and turns his whiskey eyes a warm amber-gold.
Derek swallows, feeling suddenly guilty, though he’s not sure why. “I don’t know. I don’t know how long I’ll be needed.” The heartbeat in the air skips a beat.
Once again, the House around him seems to heave and stretch, but this time, it doesn’t pull Derek away; instead, the space between him and Stiles seems to forcibly shrink, and he’s suddenly so close to Stiles’ body it’s stifling.
“Come back,” Stiles whispers.
For a moment - the kind of moment Derek hasn’t allowed himself since before Jennifer - Derek is hypnotized by Stiles’ mouth. The air around them hums. If he leaned in now, just a little, their lips would touch.
Derek knows that if they did, his whole world would turn upside down.
There’s a reason he’s never let himself think too hard about why it was Stiles he had seen when Kate had attacked him in his loft - why it was the thought of Stiles and no one else that had brought him back to reality. It’s a truth too dangerous to name.
Derek closes his eyes, pressing his eyelids shut as though he could push away the image of Stiles’ parted, waiting mouth. When he speaks, his voice is a croak. “I can’t do this. I can’t. You’re too young.”
After a long, still second, Stiles’ forehead drops onto Derek’s shoulder. “You’re not Kate,” the boy sighs, his voice gentle in a way Derek’s never heard it before. “You’re not manipulating me, or– or grooming me just because you feel the way you do. You never would. I know that… and I’m saying it, so somewhere in there, you must know that, too.” Stiles jabs a finger inelegantly into Derek’s sternum, in the relative direction of Derek’s heart.
When they look up at each other, the space between them has stretched back to normal again, one man on each side of the window, the wolf still staring below them. Stiles’ eyes are back to glittering, like he has a secret Derek can’t smell on him. In his hand is a thin wooden box Derek could have sworn had been on a shelf on the other end of the room a minute ago, and he’s fiddling with it just like he’d fiddled with the leash.
Derek’s chest feels like it’s imploding in slow motion. He can’t watch Stiles - cannot, like looking at him would be staring into the sun - so he watches the wolf and his old self, instead. The young Derek’s hand is now buried in the thick black fur on the wolf’s head, and they’re looking right at him, listening. Both their hearing is good enough to catch every word. “I can’t do anything about it, Stiles. About… whatever we have. Even if I could, I’m not ready.” His voice is unfamiliar to his own ears. “I hope I can… let myself just be in love again someday. But even then, by the time I am ready, you might be happily married. Maybe you’ll have kids.” His jaw clenches. “I can’t open this can of worms, Stiles. Either way, there’s no way it ends in anything except disaster.”
In his periphery, Derek catches Stiles’ head cocking slightly. “It’s okay not to be ready to move on from the crap you’ve gone through,” Stiles says, his voice full of the real understanding Derek knows only someone like him - someone who has hurt people he cared for, whose love for his friends put them directly in the path of a monster, whose guilt is a part of every breath he takes - can have. “That’s fine. Just don’t hold yourself back from living your life because you think nothing good can come from your love. I mean, the risk of it all - of trusting someone that much - is sort of the point, isn’t it?”
Derek has nothing to say to that. The silence stretches on between them for an age. But Stiles is patient, when it matters; together, they wait in each other’s quiet company, looking out over Bardo and teen Derek and the wall and the wolf, listening to the steady heartbeat in the air until Derek’s thoughts finally find their words.
“How did you do it, Stiles?” Derek murmurs an eternity later. “How did you learn to trust yourself again, after the Nogitsune? Trust anyone again?”
Stiles just smiles and holds out the box for Derek to take. “I don’t know, Derek. How do you start any big task like that? How do you eat an elephant?”
The moment Derek’s fingers touch the box, feel the grain of the wood, he recognizes it. (Amazing that he hadn’t realized what it was before.) Slowly, as if from far away, Derek watches his own fingers pry open the familiar latch, revealing the Triskele medallion inside.
And in a crashing wave, a flood, a tsunami, a single idea takes over his mind. What he needs to do to escape this place is suddenly so clear, it seems impossible that he’s missed it this whole time.
Stiles’ voice is everywhere. It’s around him, in him, under his skin, in every part of his mind and body, everywhere. “It definitely doesn’t happen to you, big guy. You gotta do it yourself. It’s work. You start somewhere, and you do it one bit at a time.”
Derek takes the Triskele from the box, turning it slightly between thumb and index finger. “...I can start by getting myself out of Bardo.” He may be Scott’s beta, but right now, Derek Hale doesn’t need an Alpha’s guidance. He’s so sure.
Stiles’ smile is so soft, so warm, it feels like it stretches to eternity. It’s been there since the dawn of time and will be there when the universe winks out. And then his free hand comes up to Derek’s face - and pats him gracelessly on the cheek. All at once, he’s an awkward, weird teen again.
“You got it, big guy. Everything else… it’s okay. You’ll figure it out someday.” Stiles shrugs and almost trips over the movement of it, all angles and flailing limbs. “You know what you gotta do. Now go do it.”
Derek doesn’t know when his hand came up to touch Stiles’ - to thank him with a gesture, if not a word - but that’s the point of contact he notices falling away first, before he registers the familiar pulling behind his belly button that means the House is shifting around him. The stretch of time and space in this place has never been faster, more purposeful, more intense; he isn’t leaving so much as the House is folding around him, and he scales the staircase and flies out the front door.
The wolf and the boy are waiting. Young Derek has stepped back; he’s sitting on the wall, watching, a triumphant smirk threatening to split his face in two.
Talia’s voice comes from everywhere and nowhere, spurring him forward. Derek can’t see her, but he knows her well enough to recognize the sound of her smile. “I always knew you were the one to get it. Not Laura, not Cora. Certainly not Peter. This was always going to be yours.” The heartbeat that drives this place is wild and fast, pounding hard in Derek’s veins.
He crouches in front of the wolf until they’re eye to eye. The animal’s eyes twinkle with intelligence just like Stiles’ had, filled with moonlight where Stiles’ had reflected the sun.
His mistake his whole life had always been to think this wolf was his whole self. He’d spent so long rejecting his own humanity in favour of what he thought had made him special, as though that was the only important part of him. In the wolf lay strength, he thought; in the human lay only weakness. Fragility. Pain. He’d suppressed it. The way his human love had caused so much pain had only been confirmation that it was something to be ashamed of.
But he can’t be ashamed. He is both a wolf and a human, and he’s been hurt, but he has survived.
It’s time to balance the scales.
“I’m healing,” Derek murmurs to the wolf. “But not all the way. I need to get out of Bardo to save my friends. Can you help me with that?”
The wolf tilts its head slightly. It’s listening. A clear assent.
Slowly, Derek reaches out for the fur of his wolf’s neck, running his fingers through it. The wolf is so palpable - so real. He’ll be able to bring it out into the real world with him if this works, he knows.
For a moment, man and wolf lean in, forehead to forehead. He’s missed this connection, too, just as he had missed Talia and Laura and Paige.
Balance.
He sits back on his heels, and teen Derek is gone. There is only them.
“What triggers the werewolf healing process?” Derek murmurs to Bardo, and it listens right back. He pushes up the sleeve of his leather jacket, offering the meat of his arm to the wolf.
“Pain.”
The wolf doesn’t attack. The whites of its eyes never show. The ears never flatten, or press straight forward. It just does what they both need it to do.
Balance. Balance. Balance, whispers Bardo.
Man and wolf are one and the same. A team.
His wolf bites down.
And Derek flies apart and comes back together in the Mexican desert with a howl, wearing a new body, as strong as he has ever been.