Chapter Text
when the dust settles (let me fall)
i.
For a few moments, silence wraps around Eli as the illusion fades into the familiar spaces of the college stadium. The mere thought of getting up doesn’t even cross his mind. He can briefly hear everyone in the background moving, wrapping their arms around their friends and family, breathes of relief dropping like needles into the cold air of Beacon Hills. Then – a moment too late – it finally hits him.
Dad.
A sob breaks out of his mouth as his breath gets quicker. His father is gone. Taken. His dad’s been taken from him by the fire and he did nothing. Just sat there frozen like a poor excuse of a wolf that he is. Did his dad know? Did he know that Eli didn’t mean all the things he said? All the horrible things he said about wishing not to be like his family, so maybe… Just maybe. He wouldn’t end up like the rest of them did. Dead or gone.
Somebody puts their hand on his shoulder and the teenager raises his head. Scott. Scott, the Alpha. His Alpha? His father’s last words come back to him suddenly. Because Eli is a werewolf now. Always was, despite his worries and doubts. What really is a wolf who’s scared of his own fangs? Scott looks at him now, like he wants him to get up, keep moving. His gaze is warm and comforting.
“He's part of your pack now.”
It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like nothing, actually. Just meaningless words, one last try to make sure Eli is safe, taken care of. A part of something, somewhere he belongs. But they just feel like words that hold no meaning. That’s what Derek Hale always did. Took care of his own. Drove him to practice even though he was shit, put band-aids on cuts that would heal in half an hour and called him twice a day every single day on school trips. Like, if for a moment he didn’t have Eli in his eyesight, he could be in danger. That always irritated him. His friends didn’t have overprotective parents who needed check ins and wanted to know every detail about who they were meeting. But then again, his friends didn’t have fathers who lost their families to people they thought they could trust. Well, Eli doesn’t have that either. Not now.
There is a woman standing beside the Alpha. He recognizes her from school, from the auto shop. Allison. There is something about her eyes that seems softer now. Before, she straight up made him want to run and hide, his heart beating like it was going to jump out of his chest. Now she just looks lost. And young. So young, she could be his age. Eli realizes in that moment that his heart has not slowed down even for a moment. His hands are shaking. Cold. All of him is cold. It feels like he’s got a hole in his chest out of the sudden, a missing piece of him and he can’t breathe again.
“Eli?” Scott’s voice carries through the fog as he kneels in front of the werewolf. He sounds worried. “Eli, look at me.”
His eyes flash red. For a second Eli’s head snaps back up and his eyes open from where he shut them in a moment of panic. Unaware of it, he growls and jumps away from Scott, falling onto his ass in the wet grass. The dampness of the ground only makes him slide even further down and he turns, hiding his face in the field. Driven by instinct, Scott growls back softly, his wolf suddenly aware of the defiance of his new Beta. But then his mouth snaps shut and he looks ashamed, his hands clenching at his sides. Preventing the Alpha from reaching out again. Eli’s not his Beta yet. He hasn’t made the allegiance. Carefully, he looks to his friends.
Everyone is standing still further away from them, the humans uncertain of what just happened. But the weres, they look worried, probably after picking up the quiet growls between them from a few meters away. Allison shifts beside him, looking at Eli with doubt. For a moment, Scott thinks she might reach back for her daggers, if she decides Eli is unstable.
“Allison?” his voice shudders, nearly breaks. Scott realizes he’s unsure of what she might do, how much of herself she remembers. This is clearly a wolf who’s not in control of themselves.
At the same moment her hands clench around her daggers in caution, a commotion breaks out in the crowd. Scott’s head snaps up to look at his pack only to see Malia, breaking off from the group and running in their direction. If he focuses, he can smell her fear, her sadness andthey grow stronger with her every step. There are tears on her cheeks, he can smell the salt. She lands beside Eli and just before she slips and falls, she puts her hands on the Beta’s shoulder.
“Malia, don’t. He’s…”
“I know what he is. Get back.” She growls in defiance, fingers clenching in the material of Eli’s plaid. Her eyes are glowing a vibrant blue, a challenge to Scott to question her actions. The moment doesn’t last long and she shakes the boy, trying to bring him closer. “Eli. Fuck, kid, look at me.”
The boy shakes with another sob but he looks up, his hands falling from where he’s been hiding his face in them. There are streaks of mud and grass on his face and with surprising gentleness, Malia wipes some of them away. His body gives another shake and stops still, his hands reaching out to grip Malia by her arms. He comes aware slowly, the wolf in him sensing family. His blood.
“He’s gone.” He says softly, like his voice is about to fade away. A whine lets loose from between his lips as he feels around in his heart for a connection that’s missing. “I can’t feel him. I can’t feel him anymore.”
Eli leaps. Scott moves a few inches in caution before he realizes he’s not throwing himself at anyone in anger. Instead, he falls into Malia’s arms and her arms wrap around him, an instinct leading her to grip him tighter and push his head into her neck as she growls. The sound itself is heartbreaking. It’s not a growl of anger or irritation that Scott has grown familiar with in the time of his friendship – his relationship – with Malia. It’s something raw. Something that sounds like it’s been wrenched out of her very core by force.
It's sadness. It’s grief.
Scott looks away.
The pack is sitting around the living room in the McCall house, the early morning sun slowly streaming into the room from between the soft curtains hung in the window. Going back to Derek’s home felt wrong. Like stepping into a tomb. Lydia is clutching a coffee cup in her hands, desperately trying to get warm. She looks at everyone gathered in the small space, nearly all of them. And at the same time, barely any of them. No one here even looks like they’re here, body and soul. Scott’s mother is pouring tea into the rest of the cups but it doesn’t look like she’s completely aware of what she’s doing. Sat at the table with Lydia are Malia, Parrish, Scott and sheriff Stilinski. Peter ditched them, slipping into the darkness not long after they finally gathered each other into one group, without a word. Allison and Eli are sleeping in the rooms upstairs, having collapsed not long after their emotions got the best of them. Lydia frowns to herself at the thought of them both, for different reasons.
“What now?” She creaks, her voice getting adjusted back to speaking after the silence of the last few hours. Green eyes snap to the sheriff, hoping to see some kind of plan. But the man just looks worn down and broken, his sad gaze raising back to her. Melissa’s hands shake as she puts the empty pot on the table. “Allison will get better, I know it. I can feel it. She just needs time to get used to… All of this. But what about the boy?”
“His name is Eli.”
She knows. She knows the name of the boy sleeping quietly in Ms. McCall’s guest room upstairs. It’s hard not to, when every time she’s looked at him in the past day brought back the memories of Stiles showing her photos of an adorable little boy each time he came back from Beacon Hills over the years. It’s funny, how many characteristics he picked up from his favorite uncle. Even if Stiles wasn’t here all the time, in this hell of a town, he somehow got to experience all of it. The first steps, first teeth. There was enough baby pictures on his phone at some point that many of their friends started asking Lydia if maybe he had a kid that he stashed somewhere secretly. Now, that was stupid. Eli was no secret. The redhead has no idea why everyone keeps acting like he was, when most of them babysat the kid on occasion.
Scott’s mother sits down in front of her, fingers curling around her elbows. She has an air of worry around her, like she used to do when they were running straight into danger in high school. A kind of motherly energy that she brings everywhere with her. No one says a word and they sit in silence. It’s funny, how they somehow know how to go up against danger but find themselves at loss when it comes to putting their lives back together after.
“Did Derek leave a will?”
Malia growls at the words, suddenly getting up from her seat and moving by the window. She’s still shivering, even though Lydia is sure it’s not from the cold. Jordan snaps his mouth shut at her reaction, looking to the rest of them for support.
“No. At least, not any that I know of.” The sheriff explains softly, leaning back in his chair. “It was quiet, you know. No hunters, no one coming after him every damn second. Monroe was out of the picture and it was just peaceful for a bit, wasn’t it? So, no, he never said anything.”
Lydia looks down again, hanging her head. She starts to wonder where the young werewolf will go now. Surely, not back to that empty house, alone.
“Well, what about his mother?” Jackson chimes in from the couch in the living room.
“Eli doesn’t have a mother.” Malia snaps quickly, not even turning around to look at them. Something in the way she has no control over herself reminds Lydia of when she first turned back after the car crash. Like she doesn’t know how to deal with wanting to turn back into the coyote and run away. It’s a testament of how close she must’ve gotten to her cousin over the past couple of years.
“What do you mean he doesn’t have a mother? Everyone has one. Derek didn’t just pop him out himself, did he?” Jackson asks. “Because if he did, don’t tell me.”
Malia growls and Stilinski raises his hand slowly. For some reason, it’s that movement that makes her grow softer and sit back down. Jordan looks at her for a slip second with worry. Huh. That certainly wasn’t what Lydia expected to find when she came back.
“Eli’s mother is gone. She’s dead and that’s more than Derek would’ve wanted for me to tell any of you.”
“Why?” Jackson presses.
“I think he wanted me to take care of him.” Scott speaks up suddenly, after spending a good twenty minutes just staring into the space in front of him, like it would whisper all the answers to him if he looked hard enough. There are still streaks of dirt on his forehead and holes in his t-shirt from every wound. He hasn’t even changed into a fresh set of clothes yet with how focused he was on staying by Allison’s side until she fell asleep. Probably would’ve stayed there if not for Lydia’s nagging. Most of all he just looks tired and helpless. If Melissa blinks, he looks like he’s sixteen again. “But I can’t. I can’t even feel him.”
The lack of confidence in his voice makes Lydia frown. It’s like the moment it hit him that Derek was gone, no sign of him around, Scott’s strings were cut loose by some higher power. It seems strange, that Derek Hale would mean so much to him, but when she thinks longer about it, it becomes simple. Derek was always someone that Scott looked towards in moments of doubt and trouble, for strength and advice equally. Derek was a member of his pack, even when he kept leaving.
“But you felt Derek. You felt that he was your pack. So, what’s different now?” His mother looks at him gently and she looks like she wants to wrap her arms around him again.
“I can’t feel him. I can’t feel both of them.”
Somehow, out of all the things Scott could’ve said, Lydia thinks that’s possibly in the top three of worst options.
When the clock strikes eight o’clock, Scott starts wandering around the house to look for Malia, who slipped away from the room before they finished talking. Something in his mind tells him that she could be long gone, having slipped away through the back door and turned into a coyote not unlike any times before when emotions got the best of her. Still, something about her behavior on the field and in the kitchen tells him she’d rather stay close to Eli right now. He has to admit that following everyone’s bonds or relationships wasn’t high on his list of priorities over the past few years but even despite that; it’s clear that the Hales managed to form a bond so deep that he struggles to find another word for it besides family. They became a family again somewhere in time, with Derek coming back to Beacon Hills to raise his son and Malia being unable to leave for a reason. It was, after all, also one of the reasons that they drifted apart. Scott wanted an out, to leave and make a new life somewhere that didn’t hold so much pain in every corner and Malia simply wanted to stay. For various reasons.
When he finally finds her it’s in the doorway to the guest room, where she’s looking into it with a furrow on her forehead. The coyote’s head snaps to his, sensing his arrival. Scott can’t help but feel like an intruder even in his own home. He joins her quietly, making sure his steps are silent on the carpet. They stand there together for a moment just watching the sleeping boy. He can easily feel Malia in their pack bond, strong and energetic pulsing that’s slightly disturbed by the emotional turmoil that she must be now silently experiencing.
“I don’t want you to take him.” Malia says out of nowhere, breaking the peaceful moment. When Scott turns, she’s still not looking in his direction. “He belong here, like I do. It’s his home. It’s… his family is here.”
The Alpha nods. Breaking up the family they managed to create is just another reason on his list of why he wouldn’t feel right just loading Eli into his truck and driving back to Los Angeles. His thoughts wander to the heartbeat of another person sleeping in his old room, just a few doors down. It’s not something he ever thought he could have again. Allison. The love of his life, living and breathing. Not just the memory of a cold body in his arms, another casualty of Beacon Hills and it’s curse. Another name on the long list of people they lost. He thinks about what it must feel like for Malia, the possibility of having her cousin taken from her.
“I… I don’t think I could.”
Because what’s binding them together if he rules out the pack bond that he doesn’t even feel at the moment? It’s like he’s looking at Eli through a closed, cold steel door that he just can’t unlock. In normal circumstances, he would look for Derek in the room, searching for a guide to tell him what to do. His guide is gone now, swallowed by the flames. Scott’s been wondering all night, what he could’ve done to stop it, if he just found a way to unfreeze his body. If Derek didn’t prove to be stronger, faster than him. Somehow always better at being a werewolf even though Scott was meant to be the True Alpha. It seems like an empty title right now. His eyes drift to Malia and she finally looks back at him. Fear. That’s one of the emotions he picked up briefly earlier. Before he opens his mouth to continue, she stops him.
“When Derek came back with him, I felt lost. I didn’t know how to act around a newborn kid, how to hold him. But after some time passed, I could do it easily, because I realized Derek trusted me to take care of him. You know, that’s when we really started to get close. Bonding as a family, even though we were all a little fucked in the head.” She takes a breath and lets it out slowly. “Fifteen years. Other people used to come and go, just visiting but I was always there for them. Like Derek was for me. Do you know he gave me the loft?”
“Yeah.”
“He said it was close to the woods, an open space but really high, so I should feel safe. And I did. I had something of mine where I could hide but I still shift and run in the woods. He understood what I needed. And it was true but really; the best I felt, the safest was beside them.”
Family always meant pack for the Hales. The two words could as well hold the same meaning. Because pack became family and family was pack. When Scott was first bitten, he didn’t quite understand that. He didn’t understand Derek’s choices then but he sees sense in most of them now. One could look at your family and your pack and feel the same kind of bond. Maybe it wasn’t like that to other packs, like the Alphas with Deucalion. For them being a pack meant being powerful. Finding strength in the numbers. Along the way, Scott started to understand why Derek mourned Erica and Boyd like his own kin. Why he protected Scott like his little brother.
The werewolf nods. If the bond finally appears, he will do his best to guide him through all the hardships but Eli’s a Hale. But taking him away from Malia and others who care about him the most seems cruel and Scott doesn’t want to be cruel. Not after what the boy just went through, having to watch his father die in a way he feared most.
It’s around twelve that Eli wakes up and for a single minute, he’s expecting his dad to barge into his room telling him that breakfast’s done and he’ going to be late for school. When he registers the smell of the house around him, he realizes that’s not the case. This time the tears don’t fall. They just burn at the edge of his eyes and refuse to fall. He turns onto his side, curling into himself. The overwhelming smell of antiseptic, flowers and warmth is familiar but Eli doesn’t find comfort in it. It lacks something and for the very first time in his life, the wolf understands that he misses his father’s smell. A gasp leaves his mouth, lost in the sounds of the house around him. Everyone is awake and scattered downstairs, unaware of his little existential crisis.
God, how dumb was he. Trying to deny being a wolf when he can actually recall smelling people for comfort since he was a toddler. Sure, it made things easier to ignore it. Because if he’s going around scenting people, at least that’s not seeing his fangs and passing out. That sounds like something Malia would find pretty pathetic. Actually, if he thinks about it, there was a time uncle Peter kept talking about how adorable he was in his incompetence. Eli’s thoughts wander away from him slowly. If only he figured it out sooner. Maybe there was a way he could’ve stopped his dad from dying. Jumped up and pushed him away in the right moment, just before the explosion, instead of just lying there frozen.
A door slams and Eli rises. He can hear muffled screams downstairs and in a blink of an eye he scrambles out of bed, nearly falling over the sheets. As he runs through the corridor and down the stair, he can practically feel the anger and… And sadness? It’s overwhelming, the scent of it burning the hair in his nostrils. As he tumbles down and sees the newcomers he stops in his tracks.
There in the living room, stands Cora Hale, flanked by uncle Peter and one more person. He can’t tell who that might be at first but somehow the figure is familiar.
“You’re standing here and telling me there is nothing you could’ve done but you’re alive. Your precious high school girlfriend is back and my brother is fucking gone. Tell me, McCall, was that worth it? Was it fucking worth it for him to go when he was finally happy again?!”
Her fists push into Scott’s chest but he doesn’t buck away. One after another, they collide with his chest. Everyone gets to their feet and Eli notices that there are more people in the room than the night before. They must’ve arrived when he slept. If he could just focus, he would probably name them all like characters in his favorite movies. But he can’t keep his eyes away from the newcomers.
“If you want someone to blame, blame me.” The Alpha sound tired as he wraps his finger around Cora’s wrists, finally pulling them away. He doesn’t seem angry. Judging by the dark bags under his eyes, Eli wonders if he even slept. “But trust me, it won’t be more than I already blame myself. He was a brother to me, too.”
Cora frees her hands from his grasp easily, nearly jumping away. Eli notices that her cheeks are stained from tears, eyes red like she hasn’t stopped crying in a while. A soft breath sounds from behind him and he turns to see the woman named Allison there, probably woken up by the commotion as well. Her hair is ruffled, like she’s been tossing and turning in her sleep, her clothes a few sizes too big. He nearly slips from the landing because he wasn’t expecting to see her, didn’t even hear her coming after him. She looks focused suddenly as she grips his arm so he doesn’t fall. They look at each other for a second. When she steps back it’s like they reached some kind of understanding.
“Eli.”
Cora runs up the stairs, wrapping around him. The impact of nearly knocks the teenager down but he steadies himself by raising his arms and leaning on her. The scent of family – the scent of pack – surrounds him again. It’s like he can breathe again after being underwater, familiar to when Malia hugged him in the field.
Everyone turns to them, aware that they’re not alone anymore. Eli raises his eyes to scan the crowd again and gasps softly. It’s suddenly clear why the figure of the third person seemed so familiar to him. He remembers those brown, gentle eyes from his childhood although when he saw them last, there weren’t any laughter lines to match. But that’s clearly Stiles Stilinski, the rightful owner of a certain car he likes to drive around. Eli can feel his eyes glowing in response to his presence, a feeling he remembers from his childhood, one he’s still getting used to. Stiles’s back straightens in response as his eyes widen. It’s clear from the expression on his face that the wheels in his head are already turning at the speed of light.
“I can’t feel him.”
“Yeah, well, you said that already. What I want to know is how the hell that suddenly happened, because you felt them both alright before.” Stiles spreads his arms, looking at his best friend with a frustrated huff. He bumps his knee to Scott’s, a silent reassurance.
People kept coming and going in the last few hours, busy with getting in touch with everyone and arranging a funeral. A funeral. Of all the things that Stiles expected to be back in Beacon Hills for, he certainly wasn’t expecting it to be saying goodbye to Derek Hale. But there he is, apparently hours too late and sitting with Scott on the porch. Parrish and Malia are in the kitchen and if he turns he can see them leaning over the counter, speaking in hushed voices. Scott turns to look at him, equally frustrated by the conversation and raises his eyebrows. Even though they’ve been avoiding the subject with Eli in the room, everyone keeps wondering what’s going to happen now. Scott’s certainly not qualified to actually take care of a kid half his age, taking care of puppies doesn’t make anyone ready for a child. At least not the last time Stiles checked.
“They just slipped away. One moment we were fighting him together as a pack and then just…” he spreads his hands, like he’s trying to mimic the bond just vanishing away. “Man, I don’t know, okay? I felt it before. But when Derek died and we were standing on that field later it wasn’t there anymore. Derek was gone from the bond, so was Eli. It’s like he’s still pack, in a way. But I’m not his Alpha, he doesn’t recognize me as one. I don’t know what changed.”
“Well, there is no other Alpha here, Scotty.” Stiles puts his chin on his folded hands. “No one else could’ve flashed their eyes at him and just swiped him away from us.”
There is a crash in the house after his words, glass hitting the tile and both of them turn their heads as Parrish and Malia run out of the house in a hurry. The hellhound is breathing heavily, his eyes snapping from one of them to the other.
“It was Derek. His eyes… They turned red when he died.”