I Will Run You Like A Thread (Fem!Stiles x Derek)

Write it on a piece of paper, honey (put it in my coat before I go)

For a long time, after, Derek remembers hating Laura. He'd hated that she came back here. Back to the one place they both swore they'd never come back to. He'd hated that she went, even when he'd begged and pleaded with her not to. He'd hated that he would always know the exact moment she died, when he felt the bond between them get cleaved in half. Felt the exact moment her last shuddering breath left her body as he stared into the broken mirror in the shitty bathroom in the even shittier apartment they had shared for the last six years.

Derek remembers now, how within a day he'd felt overcome with it, a pull, a little like someone had shoved a hook straight into his chest and yanked on the lead. It had been a maddening feeling, had made him feel like his body was as ill-fitting as clothes that were too small. And he had sworn that when it got quiet, he could actually hear his mother's voice, Laura's too, whispering in his ear to leave, to go back. To go home.

He had only made it a week alone in the city before the feeling became so overwhelming that he couldn't sleep, couldn't eat, couldn't focus, could barely even control his shift. So he'd gone, gone and found his sister dead, and in pieces. It almost hadn't seemed real that Laura, who'd been so full of life, warm where Derek was always cold, had just been lying there, all motionless and gone, on the same scorched floorboards that Derek could still remember being whole if he shut his eyes and let himself remember..

They'd tried to outrun it, but in the end, she was just one more dead Hale in Beacon Hills.

Derek remembers how he could smell her still, on his clothes, soaked into his skin, faint yet achingly familiar. All it had done was fan the fire of rage that sat low and hot in his belly, made him grip the shovel so tight as he buried her that the skin of his fingertips just kept tearing and healing, over and over, until his hands were soaked and stained with blood and sweat.

Most of all, he remembers hating her for leaving him here, all alone.

Derek doesn't dream anymore, hasn't for a long time. Not like Stiles does. The ghosts of his family don't haunt him like that anymore. Instead, it's the hours at night when he's staring at his ceiling, awake and willing himself to sleep, and it's almost like he can hear them, smell them again, if only somehow his body could catch up with his mind instead of always just being a little bit out of reach, dulled by years of distance and the persistent trying to forget.

He used to be able to control it, keep those little bits of his past from slipping out, drip, drip, drip, from drowning him completely. Used to be, the armor was enough – if he kept himself angry, if he hated anyone or anything enough, just let it fill him, he could keep that door locked and shut tight. But Stiles had been a surprising and, at the time, unwelcome complication. A crack in his walls he hadn't anticipated.

Derek can still remember when he saw her for the first time. He'd been expecting a cop, maybe a wayward search and rescuer, or some idiot dog-owner searching for a lost pet, but the girl standing in front of him couldn't have been older than sixteen. And he remembered exactly how she'd smelled, like junk food and cherry chapstick, that chemical bite he knows now was adderall, all tied up together in that I-just-finished-masturbating, sex-tinged stench that had been so shockingly obscene at the time that it'd made him blush, and that wolfish growl stir, unbidden, in his chest. And christ, she'd looked like prey – all wide, bright eyes too big for her face, and smooth, pale skin wrapped around lanky limbs still shouldering the weight of teenage awkwardness. Like a deer begging to be chased, because she'd acted like prey, too, Derek had thought (with something he'd failed to recognize in the moment as appreciation), with the way that she'd thrown her hands up in supplication and backed away, how she wouldn't quite meet his eyes or turn her back to him.

It had crept up on him, the wanting, mostly since it had been years since he'd felt anything close. Until suddenly it hit him like a fucking car crash, like a switch flipped inside him, because he never thought he could want something so badly that he could actually physically feel it, that yearning, that ache – like her name had been carved into his bones and into his flesh as if she'd done it with a knife. And he'd really tried to resist, done everything he could to keep her at arms length because Derek thought he knew for certain back then that he didn't deserve anything close to happy, to content. That he didn't deserve her.