Work Text:
“Laura was an amazing fighter."
Stiles’ whole body jerked as Derek’s voice suddenly rose out of the dark. Not only was it the first words he’d said since they’d been thrown into their windowless cell, but Derek had never, not once, volunteered any information about Laura without prompting. Stiles didn’t know what to say, desperate as he was to learn anything at all about Derek, he didn’t want to interrupt with the wrong thing and stop Derek from sharing.
“She was the only one who could come close to beating our Mom. Right before the fire, she’d even managed to pin her down once. We snuck out that night and got drunk celebrating – none of us had ever seen Talia hit the dirt in a fight before.”
“Not even by Peter?”
Derek scoffed, “Peter? Laura had been beating him since she was 13. Peter fights dirty, smart but dirty. Laura was worse, there really wasn’t any line she wasn’t willing to cross to win and she was smarter, faster and relentless. One time, she and Talia were sparring and Laura had lost so many times -she was dead on her feet and making wild mistakes, but she just wouldn’t stop. She kept getting back up and going again..and again..and again.”
Derek paused his story, not like he was stopping but like he was reliving the memory. Finally, he chuckled to himself, “Eventually, Mom just knocked her out so that she could go start dinner. My dad was so annoyed with both of them. Mom just told him that Laura was his daughter, and she got her stubbornness from him, so he could carry her inside and deal with her when she woke up. Laura woke up swinging and gave him a black eye. He ignored them both for the rest of the night until they ganged up on him and forced him to admit that they were his favorite people in the whole wide world and take all of us for ice cream. I never knew how they could make him do whatever they wanted - my dad really was the most stubborn person I’d ever met, except for maybe Laura – but he gave in to my mom and Laura every time. Whenever my brothers or I would try it, he’d just scoff and tell us to get a grip. It was true though, Laura was everybody’s favorite.”
“Even yours?”
“Especially mine. Long before we knew for sure that she was the next in line to be Alpha, she was my Alpha. My mom would always tell the story about the day they brought me home from the hospital and a 2-year-old Laura announced to the entire pack – this is Derek and he is MINE! God, she used to get me into so much trouble. If someone told one of us that we couldn’t do something, you could bet that the next thing we’d be doing was proving them that indeed we could do that exact thing – even if we shouldn’t – like climbing the tallest tree in the preserve when Laura was 6 and I was 4. We made it to the top and promptly fell. We both broke almost every bone in our bodies and it took days for us to heal and hurt like hell -even with the pain drain.”
“That time, my dad did the yelling. Didn’t we know how dangerous it was? How irresponsible? We could have died, blah blah blah. Laura just waited him out and told him that we wouldn’t fall next time. And she was right. As soon as the two of us could, we were back up in that tree. We didn’t fall that time or any other time after that. Laura was reckless, but she never made the same mistake twice.”
“That sounds amazing – not the falling part – but having a sibling like that.”
“It was. I was never afraid. If anyone tried to mess with me – adjusting to school took me a bit of time – Laura would terrorize them until they realized it was just a better idea to leave the Hale kids alone. We thought we could do anything – and we tried. Poor Peter.”
Stiles made a disbelieving noise – even though he was better now, Peter was still a total dick.
“I know. But you didn’t know him before the fire. He was a lot of like he is now but without the evil self-absorption. We fucking loved him. Which didn’t stop us from terrorizing him. Peter has always loved fancy cars. He was so proud of his first sports car. He’d bought it as soon as he got his license on his 16th birthday. Laura learned how to hotwire a car at 12 and immediately taught me how to do it. Your dad once caught us trying to drive it on one of the backroads in the Preserve. He immediately took away the keys and escorted us home for punishment. I did overhear him tell Talia that I’d been driving pretty well for a 10-year-old.”
Stiles hadn’t known that his dad had known Derek and Laura before the Hale fire. He was glad that Derek had a positive pre-fire memory of his father and wondering if that explained the weird camaraderie the two men had. Noah had started calling Derek “son” not long after he’d found out about werewolves and realized that Derek was just a “misunderstood, slightly misguided creature of the night” instead of a deranged killer that murdered his own sister. Stiles had thought that transition had happened a bit too quickly. If his dad had been catching the delinquent duo for years before the fire, he was probably relieved to discover that at least part of it was still alive to cause trouble another day.
“Once we knew that Laura would be the next Alpha – “
“I thought it always went to the oldest child?”
“Not always. Anyway, Laura wasn’t the oldest. That was my brother, Damian. “
Stiles had known that there were five Hale kids in total, Laura, Derek and Cora plus Damian, and Misha but he’d always assumed Laura was the oldest since she’d become the Alpha.
“Wasn’t Damian mad that Laura was next-in-line for Alpha?”
Derek laughed again, a sound so fond that it broke a little piece of Stile’s heart. “Damian? God no, he was so relieved. You’ve never seen a werewolf less suited to be Alpha.”
“Why?”
“He was worse than Scott about seeing only the best in people. Damian was always the kid rescuing spiders and putting them outside, bringing home injured birds, orphans and strays. He’d just started his first year of med school when the fire happened. He would have given anyone the shirt off his back. He’d have been useless at werewolf politics. We’d have lost Beacon Hills as soon as another Alpha indicated an interest in it. My mom used to say that Damian was the reason that Laura and I were such devils – something had to balance out that much goodness. Later, she used to tell us that we would need to save Damian from himself, or someone would take advantage of him. Ironic huh, that in the end it was me that Kate chose?”
“That wasn’t your fault.”
“I know that now. I wonder if Laura hadn’t been away at college if she would have noticed what was happening with Paige and then Kate. But thinking about that takes me to a pretty dark place.”
“So, tell me something happy, tell me something else that Laura taught you.”
Derek didn’t say anything for a few seconds, tilting his head like he was listening to something that Stiles couldn’t hear. Then he began to smirk, a look that Stiles was more than familiar with.
“She used to say that almost everybody plays the rules, not always the same rules, but some kind of rules, even the bad guys.” Derek paused to crack his neck from side to side. The door to their cell started to push inward and Stiles found himself annoyed by the interruption.
Drawing Derek’s attention back to him “So, then what did she say?”
Just then, the door pushed open just enough for Derek to reach through and grab their captor by the throat and drag him into the cell. Before Stiles could blink, Derek had smashed the hunter against the cell wall twice and left him in a crumpled pile on the ground.
Derek stepped over the hunter’s unconscious (hopefully) body and smiled.
“She said, don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t play by the rules. Don’t wait for them to strike first, don’t wait to find out what they want. Don’t even make your own rules. Just play your own game. Nobody ever expects it…not even the bad guys.”
Derek reached down to pull Stiles up and Stiles decided two things in that moment – 1) he wished he could have met Laura Hale and 2) smug reminiscence was a good look on Derek.