Work Text:
Laura wakes up--really wakes up--when she's already got her hand fisted in the guy's t-shirt at the nape of his neck and is hauling him out of bed. He comes in a flail of arms and legs, naked except for the undershirt catching on her claws. She doesn't care. A moment ago (a lifetime ago) she was dreaming about having forgotten her calculus homework at home again. Last week it was a girl, and the dream was Dad on the phone, talking about rituals and lawn mowers.
"Get out," she growls. She blinks down at him, waking now in rapid stages. She's never seen him before. He's not a hunter, not a witch, not a wolf, not a threat. He sprawls on the floor like a spider on his back. She could crush him. She can feel Peter, thoughtless, muted by distance, echoing the feeling back at her, and she gives it the words he might have used, before: yes, sweetie. Lali, crush him. "Get dressed, and get out," she says, steel replacing the sleepy snarl in her voice.
"I--" he says, pulling on a pair of boxers without looking. Laura's pretty sure they're Der's. "But my--he--" The guy jams his feet into his shoes, sweeps his clothes up in one hand and a bunch of stuff off the cardboard box they're using as a nightstand into the other: keys, license, empty condom wrapper, billfold. He's grabbed Der's phone instead of his own.
"Do I look like I care," Laura says. She plucks the phone out of his hand and replaces it with what is presumably his own while she pushes him out of the bedroom, past the twist of blankets on the couch where she's been sleeping, out of the apartment. He can dress in the hall. He should thank her for letting him dress in the hall. The first time this happened, she'd put pack before practicalities and thrown the man through the motel window; they'd had to invent and play out a story for the manager and the police while Der shivered with fear of being caught and his mind shuddered in a panicked litany of mate alpha Kate alpha Laura Mom mate alpha. As if Laura didn't know.
Der shakes when he cries, and he never cries until he's lost in sleep and can't find his way back. He whimpers. The noises he makes drill through her in a way she never could have withstood before, when she didn't have to.
Laura burrows under the blankets until she finds him. She twists one hand in his hair and mouths his neck, teeth and lips and tongue against the stubble under his jaw. She wishes she'd thought to take her own shirt off, but she can't take her hands off him now, so she settles for stroking down his flank. Gradually, he uncurls just enough for her to haul him flush against her body, until her breasts press against his arm and her hip settles against his, and she can feel the tension down his leg all the way along her own, down to her toes.
"Hey," she says, when she realizes they're both growling. "Hey, I got you. I got you. Relax, baby, relax." It's what Mom used to say when she coaxed them out of teeth and claws as children. Laura's voice is nothing like Mom's, but she can almost get the inflection right.
And Der relaxes, in stages, curling up again, into her, a knee between her knees, his nose tucked against her and scenting her skin. His ear is still half-wolf, dusted with fur and tickling her chin. She bites it lightly, and he huffs. He's still asleep, but the change recedes.
She can feel them both, her pack, seeking her. They'll have to go back to California eventually. She needs to be closer to Peter, and wouldn't that be weird, but maybe not; not weirder than Der, anyway. She dimly remembers Mom stroking Peter's bare back on the couch in the living room the first time Aunt Sarah left him, remembers wanting to crawl into his lap and hold him, too. (She remembers Der admitting he'd made out on that couch--)
She has to pet the tension out of Der again, force herself to calm down so that he will. He relaxes under her touch and then tenses again wherever she's not touching. He's all muscle under her hands, and she doesn't know when that happened. She never really thought about Der, before, as anything but the boy who broke four of her ribs once with a tree branch and then just sat there and cried while Laura hurt so much she couldn't even change to run home. Of all their siblings, it was Alex who had been closest to Laura, not Der. Alex was the one who proofread all of her college application essays, who was the first to call her Lala and Lali because he hadn't been able to pronounce her name when she was born. But Laura belongs to Derek now, Der the dork ("Don't let me ever hear you call your brother that again, Lali," Dad scolded, constantly), Der who repeated first grade ("I'm not dumb, Lala, you're so dumb they called you lala, lalalalala," Der insisted so often that year that it's now implied whenever he so much as says, "Laura, I'm not--"), Der who needs her more than even Peter does. Laura puts the memories away in order to focus on Der. She puts the pain and fear and exhaustion into a box and locks it up. Peter, on the other side of the continent, settles quietly as if soothed by her calm.
"Relax," she says again, and feels Der catch onto her voice, feels the control seep back into his limbs, wonders if this is going to be one of those times he ends up angry at her and self-conscious of his naked body, or one of the ones that ends in denial, or one of the ones that ends in him clinging, for days on end, making it hard for her to leave him to go to work. "Stay with me, Der," Laura says. Find your anchor, Mom would have said, but they'd all used her as their anchor as kids, and Laura's not sure Der ever broke that habit.
"Laura," Der murmurs, squeezing her wrist. She sags against him. His fingers trail up and down her arm. Alongside the physical sensation is one that feels like healing. It doesn't work like that. No matter what it feels like, she knows he's not taking her turmoil into himself. It's okay.
"I hope that one was good in bed," Laura says, "because he wasn't much to look at." She won't tell him to stop, because Kate, because he won't, because he hasn't yet though it's been nearly two years, and maybe if he gets it all out of his system he'll feel better.
"At least I'm getting some," Der mutters. "Wanna share next time?"
"No," Laura says. "God, Der. That's disgusting."
"You're disgusting," he replies instantly, snuffling noisily at the pulse point by her ear, then throwing his head back onto the pillow too casually for it to be unintentional. His Adam's apple breaks the clean line of his throat.
Der swallows under her teeth when Laura sets them against his skin. His wild pulse makes her snarl. She should push him over and take him by the skin at the back of his neck, just under his hairline, shake him into quiescence. He smells like he's hers, magnolia and earthworms, and instinct says protect him, says mark him, says sink her teeth in and never let go.