Chapter Text
Erica is seventeen when she tries to climb rock wall.
It’s probably one of scariest experiences of her life thus far.
(Looking back, that’s a bit sad, considering what she’s been doing for the past couple years)
She doesn’t make it to the top, to say the least. No, she has a simple partial seizure halfway up, her right hand twitching and the taste of blood filling her mouth.
Erica Reyes is certain, in that moment, that she’s going to die in the next 30 seconds. She’s going to have a grand mal, fall off and crack her head open on the gym floor beneath her. Oh god. (Here, no one comes and catches her. Here, she is crying and gasping and hurting, but here she indebted to only one dark haired boy with red eyes.)
She still falls, because old Erica doesn’t have a lot of upper body strength in general, and there’s a scary bolt of pain that races up her arm when she lands on her wrist.
Erica sits there for a moment. She’s crying messily, staring at a wall she didn’t manage to climb and cradling a wrist that doesn’t quite feel broken. After a minute, she forces herself to her feet, because there’s no way in hell she’s going to call her parents. She doesn’t actually have a car, cause the state of California won’t give her a damn license, so she walks home and sneaks in the back door.
Erica wraps her wrist with the help of a YouTube video, and falls in love with the feeling of not needing anyone.
Derek Hale shows up at her door two days later. Which, honestly, is a little creepy, but Erica can’t bring herself to care.
No, he offers her something good enough that she doesn’t mind the light stalking. She knows, from the moment his eyes start glowing that she’s going to accept, because that’s fucking cool.
Cool doesn’t mean she’s going to be stupid about it, though. Erica’s gone through enough new medications, she’s knows to ask about the side effects.
And really, his presentation’s just not impressive enough for her to not raise an eyebrow.
“Why should I?” she asks, and he just looks blindsided.
After a second, Derek stutters and stumbles through something sort of resembling an explanation, and all Erica can think of is there’s no way he’s an adult. No way in hell.
(She’s right, of course, and there’s no real shock to the fact that Derek Hale is a twenty-going-on-twenty-one year old six months later.)
Still, she accepts.
(In this world, she doesn’t accept because she doesn’t want to feel helpless. No. In this world, she chooses to take it because she knows what it means to be capable, and she’s falling in love with it.)
The bite to her arm feels a lot like the time she pressed her arm against the glowing stove element by accident. Not exactly pain, not at the moment, but something unnatural and wrong and her entire mind is screaming at her to pull away to get away from this monster with red eyes.
Instead, she grits her teeth and holds still.
Derek looks at her with curious eyes, eyes that are just normal blue and don’t hold any of the danger that the red tint possesses.
There’s a question in those eyes.
She grins, dark and angry and happy, in response.
He nods.
She meets Isaac Lahey the next day.
She remembers him, because they’ve been in the same grade for seven years now and no matter what her parents say, Beacon Hills is not a large town by any means.
She was pretty sure he was smaller, though.
But no, Isaac absolutely towers over Erica. He hunches in on himself, though, skin and bones, with a terrified lightness that makes him seem so much smaller.
Derek tells her to watch him, to bring the blonde to him.
Erica assumes it’s going to be harder than to turns out to be.
Isaac’s father turns out to be a bastard.
He’s cruel, and small, and Erica would be just as happy if he were dead.
She considers, for a minute, just tearing him into itty-bitty pieces and having Isaac help her set the house on fire.
Apparently, not being afraid of having a seizure at any given time leaves lots of room for murderous rage.
She manages to restrain herself, though she spits at the man’s feet, shoving him to the floor and coming very, very close to kicking in his ribs. The only reason she doesn’t, really, is because Jackson Whittemore opens the door.
Which is awkward, in so many ways.
He has Isaac’s arm across his shoulder, and it looks like he’s the only thing holding the blond up. Behind them, Lydia Martin is shakily brandishing a baseball bat.
This is not how Erica pictured junior year.
Nevertheless, she turns on them and snarls because there’s something hot and angry inside her, something saying destroy whatever hurts her own.
(In another world, it’s not Erica who’s angry, it’s Isaac and a kanima and a body, but here Isaac is hers and wolves protect their own and Erica is nothing if not a wolf in sometimes-human clothes.)
“Holy shit,” Jackson breathes, and Erica takes a moment to evaluate.
Her claws are definitely out. Her eyes were almost certainly glowing gold. Her teeth were probably too long and her hair was thicker at the roots.
She looks wild, and she can see it in them.
But Isaac’s lips still quirk up in relief, and he lets his eyes bleed golden as he stumbles forward. She catches him as the taller boy trips, and she can feel his bones knitting back together beneath his skin, and oh, the scent of his blood is making her’s boil.
Isaac is still here, though, and that’s enough for now.
Jackson is a dick.
While it’s not the only thing she can say about him, it’s the first thing that comes to mind. It’s sort of his qualifying characteristic.
But he’s a loyal dick, and he’s a dick with a good heart, in the end. Above all that, he’s their dick. He’s still a kanima, to be fair, but jeez. Paralytic venom and a tail? That’s pretty cool.
Oh, and he’s a goddamn genius, too.
That’s an added bonus.
Allison Argent sort of comes to them, in a way.
Well, she doesn’t really come to them. Erica kind of trips over her.
She’s covered in blood, hiding in the girls’ locker room, shaking from pain, and she flinches every time a set of footsteps goes past the door. She’s not really coming to them so much as hiding from someone so much worse she’s willing to not hide from them.
Erica won’t lie, her first thought is to kill her. Slit her throat, decapitate her and bury the head, poison her, whatever it takes. This is an Argent their talking about.
(Here, no one is in puppy-love with Allison Argent. Lydia and Jackson leave her alone, for the most part, Isaac doesn’t even think about her, here, and Erica certainly doesn’t get near her. There’s no one to root for her.)
However.
Allison is fifteen, and Erica really, really doubts her ability to fake the fear rolling off this kid. She doubts Allison faking cracked ribs and knife wounds and the fever that may or may not be caused by the injuries she has. She doubts Allison’s dedicated enough to killing them to do this to herself.
(She knows someone who would do this to his own granddaughter, though, and that thought makes her sick.)
Allison Argent is a fifteen year old who looks like someone tried to kill her and Erica has a disturbing idea of just who her attempted murderer was, so she picks up this thin little girl, takes what pain she can, and talks Jackson into driving them to the hospital.
She stays, talks Isaac down from murdering Allison, talks Derek into letting her stand guard. She stays, and when Gerard Argent shows up, she growls and doesn’t even let Allison see this monster.
(Here, Gerard Argent still stabs a werewolf outside Beacon Hills General. But Erica is much less forgiving than Scott, and has much less to lose.
Here, Argent dares to stab the right hand of a Hale, and pays for it in full.
Here, he still stabs a wolf, but he comes away missing a granddaughter and half his chest cavity.)
And suddenly, Allison is her’s, too.
Erica is recently eighteen when the Alpha pack shows up.
(Here, Deucalion is just angry, angry at Gerard Argent, angry at Talia Hale for dying, angry at the pack he no longer even has. There is nothing for him to corrupt, this time, just a Hale to complete the tradition.)
With that, Erica finds herself kidnapped.
Kali goddamn bitch-slaps her, with a clawed fucking foot, and Erica wakes up in chains.
Isaac is on one side of her and Aiden on the other. Derek kneels in the center of the room.
Deucalion watches, passive, as Kali drags Erica to her alpha and forces her down onto her knees.
Derek cries.
Derek cries, and in the moment, she hates him for it. She hates him for his weakness, for the way Kali sneers down at him like he’s suddenly less than her.
“Kill her,” Kali snarls, and Derek sobs again.
Erica looks him in the eye, straight faced, because this is how she faces down bad news from the doctors and new prescriptions and a red-eyed monster’s teeth pressing into her arm.
Derek meets her gaze, shattered and crying, and tells her to kill him.
Not in words, exactly, just that aching feeling in her soul and the thought that is most definitely Derek’s.
(Here, there is no perfectly good boy who always finds a way out. There is no one to save them, no perfect plan to make Deucalion sorry or indebted. Here there’s just a broken, suicidal twenty-one year old with no real family left and a burning wish to keep whatever’s left of it alive.)
Erica closes her eyes and buries her claws into his throat.
Power races along her arms, crawls up her throat, and oh god she wants to puke because Derek’s blood is dripping down her arm.
She manages to avoid puking, though only barely, because she’s suddenly roaring, spinning around fast enough to graze Kali with her claws.
The wolf is screaming, begging to be released. For the first time, Erica lets it go. There’s some inhuman growl stuck in her throat as she launches herself at the female Alpha.
Ethan kills Ennis with the same sort of anger that she sees in Isaac, every now and then, and Erica is honest to god terrified of him right then. Erica buries her claws in Kali’s chest, the Alpha’s spark running through her and down her arms and then it's screaming inside her, begging for Deucalion's blood.
Erica lets it go.
Erica walks away, somehow, and there’s three alpha’s worth of power making her giddy. (Derek’s blood is burning under her skin, good but wrong, and Deucalion’s and Kali’s and Erica wonders if this is how Alphas go bad, drunk on the power of their enemies and their friends alike.)
Kali definitely turned her stomach into shreds before she died, if the warmth trickling down her legs and hips means anything, and Erica’s gonna need a new pair of jeans in the near future.
Jackson is holding her up and dragging the worst of the pain from the holes in side. Lydia is performing some miracle triage on the wolfsbane in Isaac’s arm, and Allison is helping Danny keep the twins upright.
There’s no question about where they’re supposed to be going, tired and bloody at four in the morning.
Erica wakes up the next morning at Lydia’s house, mostly healed, and Isaac’s curled up against her side.
(Here, there is no true alpha, but there is Erica. There’s an alpha who managed to kill Deucalion, and her pack is stronger for it.)
(Here, there is no Scott McCall, but there’s an Erica Reyes, and maybe that’s even better.)