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It’s more crevice than cave, but Derek makes them stop anyway. When she tries to argue, he tells her that her heart rate is depressed, sounding pissed off about it, although that could just be how loud he has to talk to be heard.
Her limbs are stupid and uncoordinated, so it takes longer than it should to get down and crawl as far as she can inside. The stone hollows out the roar of the hail, like a seashell held up to her ear.
Derek hasn’t followed. She scrambles awkwardly around, filled with the sudden, irrational certainty that he’s ditched her, but no; he’s crouched just beyond the overhang, shrugging out of his leather jacket and stripping off the dark blue henley beneath. The hair under his arms is the same startling ink-black as that on his head, and she catches a flash of what looks like a tattoo on his back before he’s only a silhouette, outlined in soft grey light as he climbs inside.
It’s an awkward fit, even with their bodies touching, and she shifts, trying to make room for him. For a brief moment, the wind changes, blowing hail just far enough inside to catch Derek across the shoulders. He doesn’t react, but Allison flinches from it, shuddering and rubbing at her bare forearms, wishing she hadn’t lost her coat in the river.
“Quit moving around,” Derek snaps.
“I was just -- you’re still --”
He shakes his head. “I’m fine.” Visible steam is coming off of the bare expanse of his back, the bunched muscles in his arms as he wrings out the shirt. When he shrugs it back on, his side presses briefly against her hand, and his flesh is so hot against hers that at first she thinks it’s cold, the way it burns.
She expects him to put the jacket back on, too, but instead he twists around in the small space and pulls it around her shoulders. Her nose is overwhelmed by the stink of wet leather, but it’s a layer, at least, and a welcome change from the sensation of being pelted all over by ice. She closes her eyes, leans her head back against the stone and gives in to the violent shivers wracking her body.
Derek jostles her. “Don’t go to sleep.”
“Not planning on it,” she says, voice distant, and forces her eyes open. She has to blink a few times to focus her vision.
With a displeased sound, Derek gets an arm around her and pulls her in. Before she quite knows what’s happening, she’s tucked against his side. She tenses instinctively, shivers tamping down briefly into a muted, full-body vibration, the absolute ease with which he just handled her weight a reminder of their relative strength.
This seems to be all he means to do, though, and after a moment, Allison unlocks her joints and lets her head settle where it wants to, in the curve of his shoulder. Derek relaxes briefly to accomodate the small change in position, and then stiffens up again. Realizing that he’s as uncomfortable with the closeness of their bodies as she is takes a little of the edge off of her uneasiness.
“Don’t sleep,” Derek says sharply.
Irritably, Allison replies, “I just said I wasn’t going to,” but halfway through the sentence she realizes that her eyes have fallen closed and her thoughts begun to lose cohesion, turning elusive and colorful. She blinks, wondering if he heard it in her breathing or her heart rate, maybe smelled it on her somehow, the gradual tip from sluggishness into REM. She gives a gross-sounding sniffle and clears her throat, shifts her arm to a better position between their bodies. “Thanks for pulling me out of the water. I don’t think I said that yet.”
Derek’s shoulder flexes briefly under her head. A shrug, she thinks.
“How far do you think it is to the highway?”
“Five miles, at least. Probably closer to ten. Can't see for sure with the weather in the way.”
“Yeah.” Allison processes the estimation, sets it against her current walking speed. “Maybe you should --”
“Not a chance.”
“You don’t know what I --”
“Let me guess, your idea is for me to run it and come back with help.”
“You’re faster,” Allison defends. “It’s a good idea.”
“Sure. I think my favorite part is where I get to explain to Scott how I left you in the woods where you died all alone.”
Allison is surprised into laughing, and the conversation lapses, leaving them cocooned in a white-noise silence. Aside from the steady expansion and contraction of his ribcage, Derek is very still, but Allison finds her wandering thoughts snapped back to his presence every time he shifts even slightly, the heat and mass of his body, the thick fug of bruise-black history between them. It’s a disorienting sensation, the snap, similar in sensation to a falling dream, and her limbs twitch the same way.
By the fourth or fifth time she cycles back around to I’m halfway in Derek Hale’s lap, there’s a little sensation returning to her face and her shivering is beginning to ease. She wipes her dripping nose as discreetly as she can on the collar of her wet shirt and says, “How about an information exchange?”
“Now?”
“What, are you hiding a waterproof DS? What else are we going to do? Maybe I don’t have anything you need, I don’t know, but as for me, I’m harboring some serious doubts about the quality of my education.”
Derek is silent for a moment before saying warily, “What kind of information are we talking about?”
“Um.” At this point, the questions Allison has could form their own Wikipedia subcategory. She snatches one at random. “How quickly does the change take place? Like if someone was dying, could you turn them into a werewolf and save them? Not --” like Gerard, she doesn’t finish. “I mean if they were bleeding out, or, or bitten by a snake or something.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Would you try?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“Whether I wanted them to live,” Derek says acidly. After a moment, he adds, “Other things. Whether they consented.”
“What if they were already unconscious?”
“The bite is meant to be willingly given and willingly accepted.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not always what happens.”
A little shudder goes through Derek. “If you’ve forgotten what made Peter into what he is now, I’d be more than happy to remind you.”
Allison was actually thinking about Gerard again, about Derek’s limbs sprawled across the floor of the warehouse and the look on his face, how she’d seen him outside, afterward, wiping his mouth over and over where he didn’t think anyone could see, but since they’re on the subject already, she says, “I know that. He still attacked a nice kid and messed up his life. Not to mention murdered his own --”
“Shut your fucking mouth.” The small space reverberates with the the inhuman snarl beneath the words. Allison goes very still, the whole of her awareness caught on the minute tremble of his body, staring blindly out at the hail.
Derek takes a shaking breath, then another. “You don’t talk about my sister.”
Allison exhales slowly, wondering how this conversation got so awful so fast. “Okay, I won’t. I’m sorry. But none of us can afford to ignore an active threat, and unless something’s changed, that’s what your uncle is.”
Derek makes a short, thin sound in his throat, something that could just as easily be negation or agreement.
“Are we going to have to kill him?” The word ‘again’ hangs in the air between them.
“I don’t know.” Derek’s eyes are closed when Allison looks sideways. The skin below his lashes is stained pale violet with fatigue, and either the shadows are particularly unforgiving here, or the cut of his cheekbone is sharper than it used to be. She doesn’t remember him pushing his hair off of his forehead, but it stands in wild tufts above his face.
She swallows and looks away. “I haven’t forgotten. It’s in my mind all the time. What she did, what my family does--”
Through his teeth, Derek says, “If you think I of all people care to hear your confession--”
“Maybe I’m just sick of everybody bullshitting each other.”
“You are so far out of your depth if you think a little hunter and monster sharing session is going to help anything.”
“I don’t agree. I think a lot of the things we’ve been involved in could have gone better if people had been honest.” Derek’s snort blows warm air down inside the collar of the leather jacket, a strange intimacy. She shivers and looks down at the muddy cuffs of her jeans. “And I don’t think you’re a monster.”
“Very progressive of you.” There is absolutely no genuine warmth in the comment. “Anybody show you the trophy collection yet? Your family’s supposed to have one of the biggest around.”
A sick bubble comes up in Allison’s gut. The way he shaped the phrase makes her pretty sure she’s never wanted to ask a question less, but she says, “Trophy collection?”
“Teeth, claws, that kind of thing. There are ways to keep a werewolf in form after death. We mostly do it for family. Hunters do it so they can skin an alpha and cure the pelt, keep it to show off.” He pauses, like he’s giving Allison an opportunity to respond. When she doesn’t, he continues. “Laura and I helped an Oregon pack bury a collection a few years back. Some of the pelts were real small. Turns out what they’d do is round up a whole pack, one with kids, and make the little ones --”
“Stop,” Allison interrupts, voice unsteady. The back of her throat feels sticky and loathsome.
“Why?” The word comes out of him compact and deadly, a projectile. “I thought we were being honest.”
“I didn’t mean like this. Can’t we have a conversation without -- trying to hurt each other.”
Derek’s laughter sounds like it rips him up inside. “There’s nothing you could do to hurt me.”
Allison curls her numb fingers into her palms.
Eventually, she starts to squirm, working her leg out from its position in the Tetris puzzle of their bodies. She tries not to feel intimidated by Derek's flatly hostile glance. “Sorry. I think my foot fell asleep.”
“You think?”
“Well, I can’t really feel them.”
The corners of Derek’s mouth tighten. “You should have said something.”
He actually sounds annoyed. Allison nearly snaps at him, but manages to keep her tone relatively civil. “I didn’t see the point in complaining.”
Derek nudges her upright and scoops her boots into his lap. Once she figures out what he’s doing, she tries to help, working on the left while Derek does the right, but her folded legs are in the way, her fine motor control is shot, and the laces are water-swollen, full of mud. Derek brushes her fingers aside and picks at the knot with the tips of his claws, ends up having to slice through it before he can ease the boots off of her feet. Allison tucks her useless hands beneath her knees, clenched hard between the muscles of her thighs and calves. Her wet socks leave faint river-silt patterns on her pale feet when Derek peels them away.
There's only a vague pressure when he squeezes her toes, all nuance lost to the chill, and she shakes her head at his questioning expression. There’s no real reason to resist, but still, she has to tell herself not to try to pull away as he tucks her feet up as best he can beneath the hem of his shirt, against the hard planes of his belly.
She stares at it, at the pale skin and the little sliver of his happy trail visible between his jeans and her ankle and thinks, that’s where the wires were. That’s where --
“Give me your hands,” Derek says, not looking at her.
When she does, he folds them between his own palms, chafes them a little, gingerly, mouth flattened into an angry line, like maybe he doesn’t often touch people he needs to be cautious of. Maybe it’s just her he doesn’t feel comfortable touching. She watches the tendons flexing in his wrists and thinks about Lichtenberg figures and puncture wounds, wonders briefly how many ugly scars Derek’s body might bear if he weren’t a werewolf, before she realizes that the answer is probably none.
She tries to imagine it, that he’s nothing more than a man who gave her a ride home from a party once, back when she only knew about human monsters.
The memory is still clear. The way he offered her an elbow with both hands still in the pockets of his leather jacket, the noise and music of the house fading behind them as they walked. The little thrill beneath her breastbone when he stopped beside a sleek black muscle car and opened the passenger door for her. How, even as she ducked inside, a scrolling marquee in her mind was running DANGER, THIS IS WHAT YOU SHOULD NEVER, EVER DO, but the outrage of being ditched and the bad-boy courtliness of Scott’s hot older friend, not to mention probably dumb old teenage insubordination, had her floating on giddy fearlessness, so that the shush of smooth black leather against the backs of her thighs felt like liberty.
Five minutes later the leather was slick with nervous sweat and the marquee had started running THIS IS HOW YOU DIE, even though Derek drove conscientiously and had made no move toward her. Had, in fact, barely even glanced at her after getting in, just asked for her address and pulled it up on an app, then put the phone in the center console where she could easily watch the car following each turn and know that he was taking her home.
At a red light, she got up the guts to look at him full-on. The halogen streetlight filtered through the tinted windshield blacked out his eye sockets, made the natural down-turn of his mouth seem forbidding, and she looked away again, heart rabbiting, said brightly, “So, how do you know Scott?” --
-- and in the overhang, range-calloused hands contained in his, Allison flexes her toes against Derek’s belly and says, “Did you really date Scott’s babysitter?”
Bewilderment sits comically on Derek’s face, it turns out, and Allison feels an awkward grimace twist her mouth briefly as she tries not to smile.
“That’s what you said the first time we met,” she explains. “At the party.”
The confusion clears, and Derek looks down again. “Right.”
“Guess not, though.”
A headshake, quick and efficient.
“Too bad. I was gonna ask if you had any embarrassing stories about him.”
Derek’s eyes flick up. “Who says I don’t?”
Allison doesn’t try to suppress this smile, just lets it bloom and fade. Before she thinks better of it, she tells him, “When you drove me home that time, I was kind of afraid of you.”
“I know,” he says, and releases her hands.
She tucks them against her sides, forearms crossed tightly over her belly, and watches him looking out at the hail. Studying his turned-away face, the restrained tension of his shape, she tries again, thinks, just a human, just a guy. A habit from the stretch of time just after prom night, something she’d do with Scott while he tapped a pencil against his textbook or went down on her: focus on convincing herself as completely as she could that he was ordinary and werewolves were only make believe. It worked, sort of, or at least induced a weird mental twilight zone where the perception of Scott as entirely human was superimposed over the knowledge that he wasn’t.
She can’t get there with Derek. Maybe it’s just that she had practice seeing Scott as a regular kid before finding out, but she thinks it’s more than that. When she learned the truth about Derek, a thing within her, tucked down away from the shock and the horror and the rational disbelief, a basal, primeval thing, said, yes. Of course, yes.
Werewolf is something that happened to Scott. It’s what Derek is.
She doesn’t realize that she’s shivering again until he brings her in closer, folds her against the shelter of his side. When she’s settled, he gathers her bare feet and encloses her toes within his hands.
They’re quiet.
Some time later, Allison comes out of a light doze, one ear full of the muffled, oceanic thud of Derek’s pulse. His body radiates heat through the damp cotton, and smells like something warm and herbal, like the head shops she used to wander through in Portland. She was dreaming about them.
“Hail’s gone,” Derek says, chest resonant against her jaw.
Allison opens her eyes, tries to focus. As soon as the words arrange themselves into a meaningful concept, she lifts her head and looks out. Just rain now, fine and quiet. “For good, or is it going to start up again?”
Derek’s shrug unbalances her, forcing her to sit up. “Either way, we have about two hours until sunset.” Which means their options are start walking now, start walking while the temperature nosedives, or stay the night in this cramped little hollow.
Derek offers Allison her wet socks. With the sensation returned to her feet, she can feel every blister and raw spot as she pulls them on, hissing at the worst of it despite herself. She almost makes a joke about asking for the bite just to get rid of them, but it probably wouldn’t go over well. Once her boots are on, Derek reattaches the cut shoelace with a bend knot and threads it back through the eyelets. Allison could do it herself, but she watches without saying anything, unwilling to disturb the fragile quiet between them.
When he’s done lacing the boots on, she flexes her ankles to test the tightness, then glances out and shudders a little, arms goosepimpled in anticipation of uncurling from their shared body heat. “Not going to suck any less because you procrastinate,” she mutters, and shifts up onto her knees, joints popping.
Derek’s hand comes up between her shoulder blades, pressure light, less a constraint than a polite request for her to linger. She pauses, glancing at him curiously.
“If it comes to it, I’ll carry you.” Derek looks uncomfortable and serious, the odd hybrid color of his eyes muddy in the shadows.
“Sounds embarrassing.” Allison’s smile sits nervously on her face. She’s not sure whether she means for herself, or for him, or both of them.
Derek takes his hand back. “I’m just -- you’re going to get out of here fine.”
She nods, and backs out awkwardly until she can stand up. It feels just about exactly as wretched as she expects when the delicate, icy drops hit her face, but at least now she has the shield of Derek’s jacket, shoulders to hips. She tucks her fingers up inside the sleeves and watches him come out behind her, thinking how unfair it is that he makes it look graceful when she’s pretty sure she did a good impression of a hedgehog emerging from hibernation.
“I know you probably don’t give a shit about my apologies,” Allison says, when he’s all the way free, palms still flat on the earth. “But I’m doing it anyway, because--. I’m sorry about a lot of -- mostly everything I did when I was telling myself you killed my mother.”
Derek rises smoothly from his crouch and wipes his hands on his jeans. “I did kill her.”
Allison’s heart is pounding. After a moment, she manages to say, “No, you didn’t.”
“I bit her. By hunter standards, it’s the same thing.”
“I’m not a fucking hunter,” Allison says.
Even after everything, Derek’s eyes are still hard to meet, but she does. After a moment, he tips his head, once, and breaks the contact.
They walk.