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Derek doesn’t know what makes this time different to any other time he’s been thoroughly kicked in the balls by his shit-show of a life, but it somehow is. Different. Worse. Humiliating. A whole toxic cocktail of awful emotions and pain and exhaustion. Because he is exhausted. He’s so fucking exhausted.
What makes this whole situation worse is that this—this fairly standard kidnap, torture, taunt, torture, throw in a cage routine—is, rationally, much tamer than most things Derek has already gone through in the past.
There’s always something new in Derek’s life; some new threat, some new loss, some new ache to take on the chin and keep pushing forward. It’s a fact of his life, one he’s long since adjusted to. Or, at least, he thought he had.
Taking pain in stride is what he does. It’s what he’s good at. It’s what everyone expects of him. Something bad happens, Derek takes a hit, and then he gets back up again. He’s the lingering stoic pillar casting an unwelcome shadow over the Beacon Hills pack, the one that weathers the storm so that the other’s can shelter behind him.
It’s the only thing anyone keeps him around for anymore.
That’s why it’s so fucking humiliating that—when he’s thrown into his cage at the tail end of the standard kidnap, torture, taunt, torture, throw in a cage routine—he can’t get himself to stop trembling like a whimpering little pup.
No.
Not a pup; a runt.
He curls up on himself, back pressed against the bars so that he can keep a wary eye on the darkness around him. There’s no one else around right now, but it never hurts to remain vigilant.
The room they’re keeping him in used to be some sort of walk-in cooler. He can smell the old, stale traces of raw meat that used to be stored here. Now, there’s a cluster of cages shoved up against the back wall—all empty save for the one he’s been thrown into—and the only visible indicator of what the room once was is the lone original shelf next to the door.
There’s a plastic container labelled ‘meatballs’ on the top shelf but, given the way he scents gunpowder on every breath, he’d hazard a guess to say that’s not what the container is used for anymore. Bullets make much more sense given all the weapons and tools meticulously tuned to werewolf torture that are haphazardly stored on the other shelves.
Whoever these assholes are, it’s clear that they’re the annoying type of hunters; the ones still caught somewhere between having no clue what they’re doing and knowing just enough to be a threat. Morality hunters, he’d say. The kind that haven’t known about the supernatural long but have taken up the mantle of humanity’s protectors from the monsters lurking on the fringes of society despite knowing next to nothing.
There’s a clattering outside the locked door of the walk-in. Someone swears.
Instinctively, Derek scents the air, seeking out any indication of someone coming his way. Instead, his nostrils flood with the scent of omega, pup, fear, pain, death. His stomach roils.
They’ve been picking off the vulnerable until now. Wolves who don’t know better than to avoid their traps, wolves with no one to come looking for them. The helpless. And from the beating Derek’s already taken it’s clear they’ve learnt a thing or two from doing so.
Derek’s body shakes again, muscles still aching from the electric current they had sent through him earlier. He wonders how many wolves they went through before learning that little trick.
They’re getting better at this.
He wonders if they’ve had help, wonders if this was all just trial and error. Do they even know about hunters like the Argents; hunters who have been passing down their knowledge for generations and have a code, flimsy as that may be, that they supposedly live by?
He thinks of Kate—can hardly help it in times like these. She’d probably jump at the chance to help fledgeling hunters like these perfect their craft to the sadistic extreme if she wasn’t already in the grave. Maybe someone like her has taken this group under their wing. Maybe that’s how they’ve made the jump from children and omegas to an alpha such as himself.
Are you sure they’d even need it, runt? says a voice in his head that sounds disturbingly like Peter.
He closes his eyes, takes a steading breath—
Omega, pup, fear, pain, death.
—and then he does his best to push aside all that exhaustion and fear. It’s what he does, he pushes it aside and keeps on fighting. Not that his body seems to care, even as he curls his fists around the bars and pulls.
He should be strong enough to dislodge them, warp them, something. But he’s tired. It’s been one fight after another and his entire body aches and his shoulders won’t stop trembling, and with his pack rejecting him the alpha power seems to count for nothing.
In the end, he achieves nothing in the hours until the door to the walk-in is thrown open and three of the hunters stalk in, arms laden with chains and shackles at the ready. They’re made of silver.
Fucking amateurs.
Even so, they manage to fight them around Derek’s neck and wrists. Then they drag him out—snarling, teeth bared—and the routine begins again.
—
It’s ten days before he hears talk of these hunters being on the trail of other wolves. Ten days of periodically dragging him from the walk-in and into the dingy, blood-stained bathroom that they’re using as a torture chamber. He’s fallen into the routine of it by then.
Every three hours, or at least that’s how long he thinks it is, a new rotation of their group barges into the walk-in and snatches him up by the silver chains. By now he’s figured out that there’s six of them, each as self-righteous and inexperienced as the rest. They’re communicating though, which is admirable. Each torture session they pick up on the last group’s questioning seamlessly.
Little that does to help them, though. Derek won’t talk. He grits his teeth and bares it with a scowl—it’s what he does, it’s what he’s good at. He’s had worse torture, these idiots are all non-finessed ignorance. If Kate didn’t break him then these idiots won’t.
He refuses to acknowledge the way he wakes from whatever fitful moments of sleep he manages, gasping from fear and heart pounding as he searches out the next threat.
“Where is your pack?” one of the hunters demands.
A cattle prod is jabbed harshly into his abdomen again and his whole body bows, tensed against the shock. He gasps, growls, bites down on his tongue until he tastes blood.
When the current is switched back off, his chest heaves for breath. Then he spits blood, spraying it onto the shoes of the hunter in front of him—the one asking questions, not the one with the cattle prod or the one with the hammer.
A growl rumbles in his chest. He flexes his broken fingers the best he can. They’ve nearly healed again, which means it won’t be long before one of these assholes takes a hammer to them. Again. They clearly enjoy taking the use of his hands from him. He assumes they think it means he can’t use his claws with any efficiency, or that with broken hands he’ll be dissuaded from trying to pry his way out of this place.
“What was that?” the questioner asks.
Derek looks up, slowly, glaring up at them from beneath the scowl of his eyebrows. He sees, with a flicker of pleasure, the way their jaws clench anxiously at his fury. He’s always had an innate knack for off-putting glares, which is useful in situations like these, especially with how often he ends up in them.
The third, the one with the hammer, is standing off to the side and so doesn’t get the full effect of his scowl. While the others cast him wary looks, he steps up to Derek where he is chained in place to the exposed pipes, and cracks him in the side of the skull with the side of the thing.
His head rings, vision blurs, and when he blinks through the pain he feels the hot rush of blood gushing from his split eyebrow and down to pool in the hollow of his throat. Fucking head wounds, so much blood. It makes him feel dizzy.
And tired. So tired. He was exhausted before all this, and he hasn’t slept well for over a week by now. It’s a wonder his healing is still making a valiant effort to stitch up the wound already, given that he’s dehydrated and starved on top of all that. He slumps forward, feeling the strain in his shoulders from where he has pulled against his binds.
If he doesn’t get something more substantial to drink soon even his werewolf healing won’t be enough to keep him alive. He can’t even tell if the idea scares him anymore. He’s just tired.
“Fuck… off….” he finally grumbles, voice wrecked. It’s the first thing he’s said in maybe days.
It gets him a cattle prod in the gut again. They hold it there for longer this time, current running until he smells the sickening burning of his own skin from the heat of it. He tries not to think about that, about what it reminds him of.
He pictures Peter’s face as he slices his throat open. He pictures him crawling out of the grave again.
The cattle prod is pulled away again.
He almost misses the hunters’ exchange, sucking in sharp, pained breaths as he is. If the cattle prodder hadn’t slipped away to the bathroom door, cracked open for his hushed conversation with one of the other three hunters, Derek wouldn’t have noticed at all. But the sudden absence of that looming threat is enough to poke at his awareness enough to listen in.
“—a group of them. Do we think it’s a good idea to take on a pack all at once?”
“Do you have a better idea? We can’t leave them out there to kill people. And we might get better intel than with this one, he’s too tight lipped.”
“You’re making no progress? …I guess we have had better luck with the younger ones so far.”
“Exactly.”
Derek decides, if he ever gets out of here, that he’s going to tear these guys apart. Slowly.
“How are we going to catch them if they keep giving you the runaround, though?”
“‘I’ll figure something out…”
Derek is snapped away from the conversation by a hammer cracking against his hand once again. He tries not to acknowledge their delighted interest when that manoeuvre startles a shift from him and, for the first time since they caught him, they get another glimpse at his alpha-red eyes.
—
Derek’s heart plummets to his stomach when—some days later, he’s starting to lose count—instead of the walk-in door opening as a prelude to more torture, the hunters stalk in with bruising grasps on the upper arms of a struggling young man. An unfortunately familiar struggling young man.
“Hey, ow! Gentle hands, asshole, gentle hands. Did your mothers never teach you guys to play nicely?”
That gets Stiles thrown harshly to the ground. Derek rumbles unhappily at that. Stiles is, as much as Derek hates to admit it, definitely one of the closest things to pack he has managed to achieve since returning to Beacon Hills. The alpha instincts in him, tired and malnourished as they are, raise their weary head in indignation at the treatment Stiles is receiving.
Stiles must hear it, because his eyes dart up to meet his through the bars separating them. Something like relief flickers in them for a moment, then resolve. Derek doesn’t have time to wonder why that might be before Stiles is back on his feet and pushing himself up into one of the hunters’ faces.
“What is your problem?” he demands, so much closer than he should be, jabbing a finger into their chest like that isn’t a stupidly dangerous move. “Are you compensating for your underwhelming personality with that toxic masculinity and testosterone fuelled violence? Because it is not working for you.”
“Shut your damn mouth,” the hunter says, shoving him back until he collides into his partner.
There’s a moment of scrabbling until Stiles rights himself.
“Case in point,” he grumbles, earning himself a fist to the face.
Stiles is still wincing from his position knocked to the floor, when the hunters slam the door behind them and lock Stiles in with Derek, yelling at him about learning to mind his manners and calling him a traitor to his kind.
“Well, they suck,” Stiles says, shuffling over to Derek’s cage. He gives him a once over. “Dude, you look like shit.”
Derek can’t see himself, but he’s covered in his own blood from wounds in various stages of healing and the closest thing to a shower he’s had is a bucket of metallic tasting, cold water that was dumped over him yesterday. So, he’s inclined to take Stiles’ word for it.
He’s too tired to manage more than a blank stare, though, and that seems to be the thing that throws Stiles off more than anything. His eyebrows do a strange twitch into a frown before he visibly shakes it off.
“Anyway…”
He holds up a hand and shakes a ring of stolen keys until they jangle, misappropriately cheerful, at him.
“Bet you thought I was being stupid but I totally had a plan. We all do; me, Isaac and Scott. So we need to get you out of this cage and onto your feet before they come crashing in so that we’re ready to be rescued.”
He flicks through the keys, trying them one by one in the lock of the cage until it clicks open and Stiles can swing the door open.
There’s a bright-eyed, pleased expression that takes residence on his face at that success, only to be promptly wiped off when he belatedly notices the shackles still firmly in place around Derek’s neck and wrists.
“Great, more guesswork. Come here then, sourwolf, let’s get this—”
He cuts off abruptly when, even with his shoddy human night vision, he sees the way Derek can’t stop himself from flinching away from Stiles’ outstretched hand. It renews that humiliation Derek has been feeling since he got caught by these novices.
“Woah,” Stiles says, voice uncharacteristically soft and a strange look on his face. “It’s okay, man. We just gotta get that thing off your neck and then I can get your wrists, and then we’ll fight our way out of here and be on the home stretch, yeah?”
Derek manages a curt nod, holding himself as still as he can, chin tilted up and baring his neck in a terrifyingly submissive posture so that Stiles can get to the lock there.
It’s okay, he reminds himself as Stiles flips through keys again with a look of utmost concentration. This is Stiles. He might be a hyperactive idiot, and he might not quite be pack… but he is safe.
The shackle falls away and Stiles makes an encouraging noise as he moves onto the next.
Once he’s unbound, he lets Stiles coax him out of the cage and into the wider space of the walk-in. It makes his body shudder with the effort.
“Can you stand?”
He doesn’t know anymore. He’s spent too long curled up in the cage and dragged across the floor and chained into a kneeling position to have any grasp on his remaining strength.
He tries though, stumbling and trembling. His knees give out before he even fully gets them straightened and then, quite suddenly, Stiles is under his arm and staking the brunt of his weight with a strained ‘oof!’.
“God, you're heavy. Have you ever considered doing less of the obsessive workouts? Scrawny human here. I don’t really have ‘holding up a ten-tonne werewolf made of muscle’ in my list of skills.”
“You’ve done it before,” Derek grumbles, thinking of chlorine and paralysed muscles and the prowl of a reptilian figure.
His head feels heavy and he lets it fall to the side until his brow rests against the crown of Stiles’. His shorn hair is starting to grow out a little, leaving more of the scent of Stiles’ shampoo to snuffle into. He decides he likes it.
“Uh, is that a wounded-werewolf-instinct thing?” Stiles asks. “‘Cause the smelling me thing is new—and very unsubtle, by the way. And I am totally going to never let you live that down, because you have that whole murder-wolf vibe going which is usually impenetrable so having something else to…”
Derek stops listening, attention caught on a ruckus beyond the door. It takes a moment for it to draw near enough for Stiles to hear it and shut up but he eventually does.
Maybe Derek should be dropping into a defensive stance, but the best he can manage is turning his head so that his cheek is smushed into Stiles’ hair and he at least has his eyes on the door.
It’s another couple of agonisingly long minutes before the latch on the door is opened. Derek tries to scent whether it’s friend or foe, but all he can smell is Stiles’ hair and the every persistent omega, pup, fear, pain, death smell of this damned room.
It’s not a friend.
One of the hunters—the one who broke his hands again and again and again and again—slinks around the door and then startles, abandoning his movement towards the shelf of weapons. His eyes flick between Stiles, scrawny and human but glaring him down, and Derek, who’s trying admirably to lift some of his weight off of Stiles.
The man looks startled and unsure for a moment, but when Stiles moves, valiantly pushing Derek behind him, whole body thrumming with wound up tension, he narrows his eyes.
Derek’s breathing speeds. He’s worried, sickeningly worried, because he knows Stiles will put his own life on the line for Derek here because he has done it before. Every shallow breath sucks in the sorrow and pain of the room, and the grimly protective determination wafting from Stiles, and the sickening aggression from the hunter.
The hunter moves forward, knife twitching in hand, preparing to dart towards Stiles. Fragile, human Stiles.
Derek sees red, eyes flashing over Stiles’ shoulder and the hunter flinches, hesitating. It gives Derek, weakened as he is, the window to drop his claws with a painful snick from his still-broken fingers and sink them into the hunter’s gut in one surprisingly fluid motion.
None of them had expected Derek to have the strength to do that, he can smell the surprise from all of them in the moment before the hunter slumps with a pained gurgle to the floor. Blood pools around him and Derek feels only a subdued satisfaction and the fading of his adrenaline.
Stiles is at his side immediately, arm around his waist. With a gentle tug, he leads him towards the walk-in door.
“C’mon, big guy. It’s okay, you got him,” he says, and it’s only then that Derek realises he’s been quietly growling down at the body.
He lets Stiles guide him out into the kitchen, muttering soothing nonsense to him as they sidestep the chaos in their plodding, four-legged walk. Surprisingly, he thinks Stiles’ talking is helping him focus on walking, not that he’ll ever breathe a word of that sentiment aloud. Stiles talks enough as is without encouragement.
Three of the other hunters are slumped on the floor. Unconscious, not dead.
It smells less like death here. It seems that those scents were localised to the walk-in and the gutted bathroom. The prison and the torture room, out of the way, where torturing the werewolves wouldn’t make a mess.
Derek growls again and Stiles’ grip on his waist shifts to a consoling caress.
“We’re nearly out,” he says as they push through a door into what was once the dinding area of this crummy, closed-down restaurant turned hunter headquarters.
Here, finally, Derek is greeted with the sight of Isaac and Scott. The former is holding a hunter pinned against an overturned table and keeping a cautious eye on where Scott is cornering the final hunter. The cattle prodder, stick still in hand, looking like he might piss himself.
Scotts eyes are glowing a threatening gold.
“I’ve got him,” Stiles announces, and Derek sees the exact moment the tension in Isaac’s body uncoils.
“Thank god,” he breathes. “Let’s get the hell out of here, then.”
—
It takes them an hour to drive back to Beacon Hills, during that time Stiles sends Derek frequent worried glances in the rearview mirror of his jeep. He’d shoved a half-empty bottle of stale water into his hands the moment Derek had settled into the back. There was no doubt it had been left there carelessly for days.
It was the best damn thing Derek had ever tasted.
The three of them insist on dragging Derek into Deaton’s office, and Derek is far too tired to fight them on that, but he still hovers by the jeep for a long moment just enjoying the fresh air, letting it clear out the lingering acrid scent of suffering he had been stewing in for however long he was locked up in that place.
It’s dark out. Derek would prefer to be able to see blue skies and sunlight, but he’ll take what he can get.
“You alright?” Stiles broaches after a long moment of quiet.
“I missed fresh air.”
Stiles hesitates, but then the comment slips out anyway.
“You smell like you missed bathing.”
Derek huffs. He should be irritated at that, but all he can feel is: free, rescued, pack.
They’ll probably all go back to only begrudgingly tolerating him before long, but for right now he basks in the knowledge they came to save him. Stiles stood between him and a hunter. That especially feels like it means something.
It’s not the same feeling of pack he got from his family, but it’s the closest he’s felt in so long that he feels overwhelmed with it. Face scrunching into a frown as he tries to come to terms with it.
His gaze darts to Stiles, and then he’s making a move to step closer without even deciding on it. Not that he needs to. Stiles is right there, holding him up, the second he starts.
“Okay, inside we go.”
Deaton has cleared off an examination table and coaxes Derek up onto it, which makes him feel incredibly patronised but he hardly has the energy to complain. He lets the vet check his injuries and question him about any poisoning.
“They didn’t know about wolfsbane,” he tells them. “They were novices. I don’t even know if they knew that there are other hunters out there.”
Stiles frowns.
“What, so they just decided to pick up a pitchfork and start hunting on their own? Why?”
“It happens,” Deaton says darkly.
“They find out about us and they get scared,” Isaac guesses.
“Like Alison,” Scott agrees and Derek can’t help but roll his eyes.
It always comes back to that girl with him.
“What information did they try to extract from you?” Deton asks, while shining a light into Derek’s eyes “I assume they weren’t just keeping you alive and torturing you for the fun of it.”
Derek shrugs.
“Information about werewolves. Our weaknesses, how we transform, where to find us. They kept asking about where my pack was.”
“And you didn’t tell them anything?”
Derek sneers.
“Of course not.”
It’s not him who says that, surprising all of them. It’s Stiles, looking just as indignant as Derek feels.
“Derek’s one stubborn werewolf. And he wouldn’t do that to us.”
Derek's throat clicks as he attempts to swallow past the dryness.
—
In the end, Derek ends up going home with Stiles.
The group decides they don’t want Derek left alone in his vulnerable state, mostly thanks to Stiles arguing that point. At first, Scott says he’ll stay at Derek’s with him for the night but Stiles, still pressed up against Derek’s side to help him stay upright, feels the way he tenses at the thought of staying back at the warehouse.
Too difficult to secure, nowhere comfortable to rest and recuperate, empty of the pack that left him behind…
It takes some convincing—even despite coming to save him Scott reeks of distrust and worry in a way that stings deeply—but they agree to let Stiles take him in. After all:
“What’s more secure than the Sheriff’s place? My dad is working today anyway.”
Derek wants to bury his nose back in Stiles’ hair and bask in the gratefulness he feels, to ingrain Stiles’ scent in his mind as one of safety. He doesn’t think that would be welcome or appropriate though, so he refrains.
They drop Isaac and Scott at Scott’s place and then Stiles drives them to his, where he promptly herds Derek into the shower.
He sits, trying to enjoy the spray of warm water. It is nice, but that just means the stress finally has room to crash back upon him. He doesn’t actually know how he’s held it together this long, actually.
Derek takes a deep breath, another, and then lets himself be overtaken by silent, choking sobs. Tears stream down his face, streaking through the blood and sweat and grime, mixing with the shower water. His chest heaves, body curled in on itself as he just sits there on the floor of the tub until the tears have run their course and he is able to reach for the soap and start to scrub.
—
When he emerges, clad only in a pair of the Sheriff’s sweats that Stiles must have stolen from the laundry, Stiles is sitting on his bed, scuffing his foot against the floor and holding a mug of hot chocolate in each hand.
Derek clears his throat awkwardly and Stiles’ head snaps up. He lets out a sigh of relief, and Derek has to presume he looks a little less worse for wear now that he’s cleaned up.
“I made drinks,” Stiles says, waggling one enticingly at Derek.
When Derek sits down on the mattress beside him and takes the offered mug, Stiles seems to finally notice the state of his hands. He winces, putting his own mug down on the floor and reaching out to take Derek’s free hand.
It’s not until he’s holding it that he freezes, looking up at Derek as if just realising he just grabbed his injured hand and is now holding it—Derek’s heart does a strange little pitter-patter at the contact—but doesn’t let go. Derek breaks the eye contact but nods to give him permission.
Stiles’ touch is careful, almost heartbreakingly gentle. He traces the sides of his fingers, careful over where they are swollen and sore.
“They didn’t want me to be able to break out,” he explains. “Or attack them.”
The hands holding his release him, clench into angry fists, and then settle.
“Assholes,” he says, picking his mug back up.
Derek clinks theirs together in agreement, echoing the sentiment.
They sit in unusually companionable silence as Derek downs his drink. It’s practically heavenly. It puts the stale jeep water to shame.
“Will they heal?” Stiles eventually asks.
Derek nods.
“I reset them in the shower. I just need food, drink, and rest.”
Stiles nods back.
“Okay, good. We can manage with that. You probably heard but I already ordered pizzas. I got you a pepperoni. And a meat lovers. And a vegetarian ‘cause a growing werewolf should probably eat his veggies. I know protein is important, but you still need vitamins, man. I’m sure they must be important for werewolf healing. Not that I’ve tested it…”
Derek lets Stiles’ rambling wash over him. It’s even nicer than the shower. Only, this time, Derek doesn’t cry.
—
Derek only eats half a pizza before his stomach cramps, too used to the hunger from the past weeks. Stiles promises that the leftovers are all his tomorrow, whenever he feels up to eating more. Derek nods.
He just sits there as Stiles talks, and then as Stiles explains what took them so long in tracking him down. He’s full of apologies and explanations, but Derek doesn’t need them. He doesn’t blame them for taking so long.
“It’s fine,” Derek says. “I’m used to it. It’s what I’m good at.”
Stiles purses his lips unhappily.
—
When Stiles trails off from his quiet chatting, jaw cracking on a yawn, Derek prompts him to go to bed. Stiles nods, and Derek is prepared to curl up in the corner and leave Stiles to it when he’s dragged up and unceremoniously dumped on the mattress.
“Just so you’re aware,” Stiles warns him. “I’m a snuggler. We will be snuggling. It happens, Scott can attest to that.”
Derek nods, unsure of what to say.
This isn’t what he’s used to. He doesn’t normally have pack to curl up with in safety after something like this. Usually he winds up alone, in an unheated makeshift den, teeth grit has he holds himself together. He doesn’t know what to do with this, with Stiles’ kindness.
He thought Stiles hated him, wouldn’t blame him if he did, but Stiles just pokes him in an unbruised stretch of skin until Derek shimmies over to the wall to make room for him. He does it like it’s easy, like it’s something they’ve done before even though he knows it isn’t, acting like there’s no history of animosity between them at all.
He smiles at Derek, a small, new thing. Something that makes Derek dare to hope that the feeling of pack he’d gotten—when Stiles put himself between a wounded Derek and a hunter, when Derek found his betas defending him, when they took him to Deaton to make sure he was alright—might not be so temporary after all.
Finally, slowly, he lets his body relax. The trembling finally settles. He allows his eyes to droop closed.
They blink back open when a warm body curls up carefully against his own, a head settling over his chest as if to listen to his heart. When he makes a questioning noise the body squirms.
“I told you,” he says. “I’m a snuggler. I’m just preempting it. That's what I’m good at; being prepared.”
Derek hears Stiles’ heart blip on the lie and a smile curls at the corners of his mouth. Deciding now it’s probably not quite so unwelcome, Derek drops his nose to Stiles’ hair. He smells of contentment and Stiles and pack.
“I’ve got you, sourwolf,” Stiles murmurs before they drift off to sleep.
For the first time in a long time, even before this most recent kidnapping fiasco, Derek is able to rest.