Work Text:
Two Years Later
The crack of a body crashing through a tree echoes through the woods.
Laura growls, ripping off her work gloves and tossing them to the ground. “Scott! I swear to god, if you don’t stop screwing around, I’m going to send you home and let your mother deal with you.”
Scott grins, eyes flashing beta gold. A few months after everything, Laura took the Stilinskis and the McCalls out to the preserve on a full moon. She shifted to wolf, preening as they pet her fur and gaped in amazement. She and Derek ran through the woods, threw back their heads and howled with nothing but joy.
They sat around the living room after, Stiles and Scott asking about a thousand questions each, until Derek tackled them off of the couch and onto the floor. She woke up the next morning, still in her fur, draped across Melissa and John’s feet as they slept. Scott, Stiles, and Derek sacked out on the floor, piled on top of one another. Something settled deep in her chest, a puzzle piece finally slotting into place. These people, these humans who took her in for no reason other than they cared - they were pack.
Scott accepted the bite at the end of his senior year. He takes to being a werewolf like he was born one.
Laura offered the bite to Stiles, too, but he turned her down from the start. Good thing, too. He’s turning out to be one hell of an emissary.
“He’s your problem now,” Melissa says, and John chuckles, kissing her on the cheek. Stiles makes a face, whining about public displays of affection. It’s all for show - Stiles threw actual confetti in the air the day he caught his father and Melissa making out on the couch.
“Aw, leave him, Laura, he’s having so much fun.” Allison grins, wiping the sweat from her brow with her wrist. She’s the matriarch of the Argent family now, as she was born to be. The two families made the truce Talia always hoped for, and Allison changed her family code to match. Nous protégèons ceux qui ne peuvent pas se protéger eux-mêmes - we protect those who can’t protect themselves.
Though even Talia would never have dared dream that a hunter would one day be a member of the Hale pack.
The truce extends to Chris and Victoria, much to Derek’s dismay. Victoria takes the whole thing in stride, as much of an ally as her daughter. Laura would protect Allison with her life, like any other pack member, has proven her loyalty time and time again. That commands the respect of a woman like Victoria Argent.
Laura never understood the mechanics of hearts in the eyes outside of cartoons, until she witnessed the way Allison and Scott look at each other. Chris throws regular tantrums over Allison spending so much time with werewolves, but the fact that she’s dating one drives him off the absolute deepest end. That fills Laura’s heart with an unholy joy.
“They started it,” Scott says, pointing to where Isaac and Erica lean against Laura’s car with identical shit-eating grins. Melissa took Isaac in earlier in the year. Scott noticed bruises on his arms during lacrosse practice that only ever got worse instead of fading. John reported Isaac’s sorry excuse for a father for abuse.
Laura didn’t bother hiding the werewolf thing, not when half of the town already knew. Hard to keep something like that hushed when there’s police footage of a girl launching herself across a room wearing fangs and claws. Jordan, Tara, and Deputy Sacks all kept their mouths shut about what happened with Kate, but in Beacon Hills, nothing stays a secret for very long.
Isaac asked Laura, quietly, if she would give him the bite. The day he turned eighteen, she did.
Erica and Boyd came to the pack by default. The three of them are attached at the ribcage - and sometimes at the mouths, a sight which Laura would love nothing more than to bleach from her brain for the rest of eternity. Where one goes, the other two inevitably follow, like enormous, obnoxious ducklings. Erica suffered from epilepsy since she was a child, and was in the hospital more than she was out. She begged Laura for the bite. The same night, Laura turned Boyd, too.
Lydia, on the other hand, walked right up to Laura in the woods one day while she was training the betas and asked when she was finally going to receive an invitation to join the pack. She smelled of orchids and ozone, like death incarnate. Appropriate, for a banshee. The Martin line has safeguarded Beacon Hills for as many generations as the Hales.
Allison introduced her best friend, while Lydia tossed her hair over her shoulder, and Laura kind of wanted to kiss her. That never really faded. They’ve been dancing around each other for ages, and Stiles is taking bets on who will break first.
She’s taking bets, too. On her brother and Stiles.
“Why don’t we take a break,” Laura says, wincing at the clanking of wood, nails, and tools banging against each other as they hit the ground. The pack tumbles into the woods. John and Melissa follow, saying they’re going to chaperone, but they’ll take at least a hundred pictures of the zany antics that will inevitably occur.
Laura plops herself down on the ground with a bottle of water, taking the moment of quiet to glance around. The foundation of the new house is almost built, the grass and wildflowers trimmed down where their old house once stood. The driver who bulldozed the wreckage asked why she would want to build on top of her family's ghosts, cringing away when Laura glared.
This place isn’t a graveyard; it’s too full of life.
Derek nudges her in the shoulder, a smile on his face, emanating contentment from the inside out.
“I’m glad we stayed,” he says, and Laura thinks of her home, her family, her pack, built on the bones of the old.
Beacon Hills is hers to protect now.
She smiles, soft and fond and full of hope. “Me too.”