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“Everyone stop,” Derek shouted. He really didn’t need to shout. The pack was all within earshot and attuned to the sound of his voice. But shouting was always a safe bet.
They all froze and turned towards his voice.
“I smell blood.”
Derek inhaled and the other wolves followed his example.
“Stiles,” he barked.
“It’s fine,” called Stiles from somewhere out of Derek’s range of vision.
He jerked his head at the pack and they all tagged along behind him as he followed the sent of Stiles’s blood. He found Stiles at the bottom of a small embankment, pushing himself gingerly to his feet against a large tree.
“What happened?”
Derek leapt lightly down the bank, moving much more like a ballet dancer than a muscled-out man-wolf. The rest of the pack scrambled after him with varying levels of grace.
“I’m fine,” panted Stiles, waving them off.
“You’re bleeding.”
“What happened?” asked Scott, spitting out the arrow he’d been holding in his mouth.
“Dude,” said Jackson, glaring at him.
“What?”
“Just still not used to you catching freaking arrows in your mouth.” He shook his head.
“Anyway,” said Scott. “What happened?”
“I just fell. It’s nothing.”
Derek, however, was not buying it. He strode over to Stiles and glared at him.
“What?” asked Stiles, fighting the urge to flinch away from that look.
“What. Happened.”
Stiles sighed and bent to pull up his pant leg. He nearly overbalanced and had to grab at Derek to steady himself. Derek caught his flailing hand and held him steady as he reveled the gash on his leg.
“Christ,” muttered Boyd.
“Sit,” Derek commanded, already half-helping, half-forcing Stiles back to the ground.
The pack had formed a lose semi-circle around the pair, all on the alert for more danger.
“Ow!” cried Stiles as Derek poked at the wound. “Just leave it, would you?”
Derek gave a low growl and reached for the hem of his shirt, ready to tear it into bandages.
“Honestly,” Allison muttered, stepped forward. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”
Derek glanced up at her.
“Do you know how to take care of injured humans?” she asked.
“Sorta,” Derek muttered. There’d been humans in his family growing up, but there had also been older people around to do the caretaking.
Allison dug in her pocket and pulled out her car keys, which she tossed to Isaac, who was fastest.
“Go back to my car and grab the first aid kit out of the trunk.”
Isaac had wolfed out and taken off before Stiles could even start insisting that they really didn’t need to worry about him.
“Erica, run and grab that bottle of water we left in the clearing?”
She nodded and took off as well.
Allison knelt down beside Stiles, brushing Derek aside like he was nothing.
“What happened?” she asked calmly.
“I was running and I fell down that hill thing. I guess I banged into a rock or something. My ankle doesn’t feel too great either.”
Allison gently touched the skin above his foot and he winced.
“Yeah, that feels like it’s swelling. You might have twisted it.”
“Man, Coach is gonna kill me.”
“At least he wants to play you this year,” Scott offered bracingly.
“Oh shut up, wolf-boy,” said Stiles through teeth gritted against pain.
“Okay,” said Allison. “When Erica and Isaac get back, I can patch you up. It doesn’t look like you’ll need stitches or anything.”
“Awesome,” he muttered. “How do you know all this anyway?”
“My dad taught me after—.” Her voice faltered the tiniest bit. “Everything in the spring.”
Stiles nodded, understanding she meant her mother’s death and her grandfather’s betrayal.
Derek hovered over Allison and Stiles while they waited.
“You should be more careful,” he said, making it sound more like an order than a concern.
“You shouldn’t make us run through the woods like we’re wolves too,” Stiles shot back.
“I’m not making you do anything.”
“Isn’t that like part of your job as the alpha?”
“Alright, alright,” cut in Allison. “Calm down, both of you. You’re just hyped up on adrenaline.”
She glared at them until they heard Erica returning.
“Got it!” She came to a quick halt outside their little semi-circle and returned to her fully human shape. The water bottle had teeth marks in its sides, but wasn’t punctured and she handed it over to Allison.
“Thanks.”
A minute or so later, Isaac returned as well, giving Allison the slightly drooled-on first aid kit.
“Alright,” she said, kneeling down in front of Stiles again. “Here we go.” She glanced up at Derek, who was still standing over them. “You want to give me some space to work here?”
He grunted and stepped back a little, though not all the way into the semi-circle with his pack.
Allison carefully poured water over the cut and began to clean it with anti-septic wipes.
“Ow,” Stiles complained, trying to jerk away.
“Don’t be such a baby. I thought you played lacrosse and hung out with werewolves.”
“Yeah, but that stings.”
She rolled her eyes and fished some individually wrapped gauze pads out of the bag. She covered the wound and instructed Stiles to hold the gauze in place, applying pressure to stop the bleeding. She then managed to get him out of his shoe and sock to look at his ankle.
“It’s really not a big deal,” Stiles kept muttering.
Once the bleeding seemed to have stopped for the most part, she replaced the gauze and secured it with medical tape.
“I can wrap your ankle too if you think you need it.”
“I’m fine,” he insisted, starting to get to his feet to test his ankle.
Stiles was often a good liar, but there was no getting around the way he buckled the second he put weight on his ankle. Allison caught him before Derek got there, which was impressive, and helped lower him back to the ground.
“It’s okay to be hurt, you know,” she said quietly.
Stiles just made a face.
Allison carefully encased his ankle in ace wrap, but it was clear that he wouldn’t be making it back to the jeep unassisted. Fortunately, he was surrounded by a lot of burley and eager-to-help werewolves.
“You gonna be okay?” asked Scott, quickly helping Allison get Stiles on his feet again.
“I’ll be fine.”
Scott glanced at Allison, looking for a less biased opinion.
“He’ll be fine,” she agreed. “As long as he lets himself heal.”
“Alright,” Derek said, raising his voice and immediately commanded the pack’s attention. “I think we’re done out here for today. Everyone get back to the house. You’re free to head out if you want to.” He turned to Allison, Scott, and Stiles. “I can get him.” He reached to physically pick up Stiles.
“Whoa!” he cried at once, fending Derek off with an arm. “I don’t need to be carried.”
“You can’t walk all the way back on your own.”
Stiles looked pleadingly at Allison, but she just shrugged.
“He’s right.”
“Oh come on. You do not have to carry me like I’m five.”
Derek raised an eyebrow.
“Scott, get back to the house. You need to shower before work.”
Scott seemed about to object, but a look from his alpha was enough to stop him and headed back towards the large farmhouse that Derek had bought to serve as pack HQ and home to him and Isaac.
“Hold him steady,” Derek told Allison.
Allison braced Stiles as he leaned on her and Derek bent down, presenting Stiles with his back.
“Uh-uh. Not happening,” Stiles said at once.
“I’m not leaving you here and you can’t walk. If you don’t want to be carried, get on my back.”
Stiles hesitated for a moment longer, heaved a huge sigh, and allowed Allison to help him scramble onto Derek’s back. Derek hefted his weight easily and straightened up.
“Let’s go,” he told the two humans in his pack.
Stiles grumbled quietly to himself all the way back to his jeep, where Derek left him to wait for Scott. Allison went over to her own car and stowed her first aid kit back in the trunk. Derek followed her and she jumped when she turned from closing the trunk and saw him standing there.
“You scared me,” she scolded.
He shrugged an apology, which she accepted with a small nod.
Derek looked at her for a moment. It wasn’t odd to have a human in his pack, but he had to admit that having the daughter of hunters, a girl who had, in fact, shot him at one point and tried to take down most of his pack at another, was a little weird. At first, he’d been opposed to Scott bringing her to the house, even after working with the Argents that summer to take down the alpha pack and Gerard, but in the end he’d relented and it had soon become apparent that Allison was a member of his pack. When he’d pointed this out to her, she’d been almost alarmingly pleased, but that had passed quickly and now she hung out and trained with them like everyone else. She worked on her archery and was passing on some of her knowledge of armed combat on to Stiles, who had no other means of defending himself – apart from what he called his “rapier wit” and Derek called his “wolf-repelling obnoxiousness.” Still, annoyingly chatty or not, Stiles was in his pack and that meant it was Derek’s job to protect him.
“Thanks for taking care of Stiles,” he said, only a little grudgingly. “Human first aid isn’t really my thing.”
“No problem.”
He nodded again and turned towards the house as Allison got into the car. He glanced back from the porch, but she was already heading down the driveway. Hunter or no, Derek couldn’t help being secretly glad she was in his pack and not just because she could take care of his fragile humans.
***
Derek was sulking. No one was playing with him. His father and uncle were building things in the basement and had sent Derek away because it “wasn’t safe” for him. His mother and aunt were cooking dinner with his older brother Arthur. Laura was trying to get her homework done while keeping an eye on his cousin Steven and sister Caroline, who was crawling around the far end of the playroom being excessively boring. Amy, the elder of his two cousins, had fallen asleep on the floor been carried up to her bed. Derek himself was in his wolf form, a black pup with ears that still flopped over at the tips, half-heartedly shredding a sock he’d found under the sofa.
“Ew, Derek,” called Laura, glancing up from her math book. “Put that down. You don’t know where it’s been.”
Derek spat out the remains of the sock and his sister rolled her eyes. He shivered and changed, shaking off his wolf form so he could talk.
“I’m bored,” he complained.
“Well, now you’re bored and naked,” she pointed out.
At five and a half, Derek was still working on naked as a concept. Given that he could still fully change into a wolf pup and that that form offered many more ways to have fun than his human one did, he didn’t hold much stock in clothing. His sister assured him that once he hit puberty and lost the ability to full change until he was once again “at peace with himself” (whatever that meant), that he would like wearing clothes, but Derek wasn’t buying it.
“I’m still bored.”
“Play with Caroline and Steven.”
“But they’re boring,” Derek moaned.
“Just play with them, okay? I have to do my homework.”
Derek sighed dramatically, but shifted back into his wolf form and trotted over to where Caroline and Steven were crawling across their blankets. He nudged his little sister with his wet noise and she giggled. She was still too little to shift yet, but their mother said she’d be able to soon – something about “developing a sense of self,” which meant absolutely nothing to Derek, who just knew he was still the smallest wolf in the pack.
He bowled her over with his pawing and nuzzling and she laughed and grabbed at his fur. He caught her leg in his teeth and felt her skin break. She squeaked and he let go. The little girl twisted around and watched her skin close up, cooing happily. Derek licked her face and she pushed him away playfully, still laughing. Steven caught hold of his tail and Derek good-naturedly rolled him into the game. They tussled – as much as two very small children and a wolf pup can tussle, the children laughing and Derek play growling. Steven pulled Derek’s ears and Derek grabbed the little boy’s arm in his mouth, eliciting a shrill cry from the child. Derek let go and nuzzled at his cousin’s face, but Steven kept crying.
“Derek!” exclaimed Laura, looking up from her work. “What did you do?”
His sister’s anger was clear and he cowered away from her, tail between his legs.
Laura quickly scooped up Steven, grabbed a tissue from the box on the side table, and pressed it to his bleeding arm. Caroline had also starting crying and, moments later, both children’s mothers appeared, quickly gathering up their respective children to quiet them. Derek looked around in confusion, still not sure what had gone wrong. He’d just been playing with them like Laura had told him to. His mother and sister were talking quietly as his aunt took the still-crying Steven upstairs. When they’d finished, his mother handed Caroline off to Laura and turned to him, dark eyes stern.
“Derek,” she said and he knew he was in trouble.
He tucked his tail a little further between his legs.
Samantha sighed and knelt down to speak to him.
“It’s alright,” she said. “I’m not mad. I just want to make sure you understand some things, alright?”
Derek nodded and shifted back into his human form. His mother gathered up his abandoned clothes and handed them to him. Derek tugged them on as she waited for him on one of the large, comfortable old couches in the playroom. Once he was dressed, Derek slouched over to her and climbed up onto the couch to be told off.
“Do you know what happened?” she asked. She didn’t sound angry, but Derek knew he’d done something wrong.
“We were playing, like Laura told me to.”
“Yes, but do you know what Steven got upset?”
Derek thought for a moment.
“Because I bit him?”
“Exactly.”
“But I bite Caroline all the time and she doesn’t care,” he pointed out.
“And what’s the difference between Caroline and Steven?”
“Caroline’s a girl?”
“What else?”
“Caroline’s my sister?”
His mother sighed.
Derek cast around and suddenly understood. He hung his head and muttered, “Steven’s not a wolf.”
“Right.”
“But Caroline can’t shift yet.”
“But she can heal. Steven can’t.”
“Oh.”
“I know you didn’t mean to hurt him, but you have to remember that Steven’s human and humans don’t heal like we do.”
Derek nodded.
“Steven’s part of our pack and what do packs do?”
“Protect each other,” said Derek, his voice dull with shame.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m not angry at you, Derek. It’s confusing having to play by different rules sometimes, but Steven’s younger than you so it’s your job to help protect him. You think you can do that?”
Derek looked up, face setting with determination.
“Yes.”
His mother smiled at him.
“And I know you’ll do a wonderful job.”