Chapter Text
Sometimes when the house seems much too loud and much too full, he crawls through the broken steps and lies under the porch. Down there, the ground is cool and damp, it smells like earth and summer, and best of all he is alone, away from his cousins and away from Mama, who watches him train and frowns when he’s not fast enough.
Uncle Peter partnered him with Laura today, which he hates because he doesn’t like to see claw marks on her arms or bites that come from him, so mostly he just tries to run away. Uncle Peter calls him soft, a little runt who needs to toughen up. Mama growls at him but never tells him that he’s wrong.
Derek hides under the porch and pretends he can’t hear the other kids hissing his name and laughing. They call him soft. They say they’re lucky Laura was born first, otherwise they’d have a little puppy for an Alpha. They laugh at that a lot, the thought of it, little Derek for an Alpha.
Sometimes Laura comes to find him and lies beside him in the dirt. She grabs his hand in hers and calls them little shits, which makes him giggle because that’s a bad word and Laura isn’t meant to swear.
Underneath the porch, Laura is his sister. Outside, she is the Alpha heir and the oldest of the cousins, which means she holds her chin like she’s important and all grown up. But when it’s just the two of them she says shit and damn and lets him curl into her side like he did when he was small.
Sometimes she whispers secrets to him like he’s something special. Lying in the dark one hot August afternoon, she tells him how she’s scared she won’t be happy in Beacon Hills. She says she wants to run away, live in a big city where the lights stay on after nine and the sidewalks sparkle in the sun. He doesn’t tell her it’s impossible, that Mama would never let her, because under the porch she is not Alpha heir, she’s only Laura, so instead he tells her he’d follow her anywhere, and she grabs his hand in hers.
In September, they crawl under the porch. Derek whispers, I don’t want to go to school. I don’t want to be the Alpha, Laura whispers back. There’s nothing he can say to that, because at school they call him shy and girls point at him on the playground, but Laura has her life planned out like a road map, and he knows who has it worse. They lie there in silence, and Derek listens to her heartbeat, a steady one-two, one-two. He wonders when they’ll be too big to crawl through the hole in the broken steps. He hopes it’s not for years and years.
(Derek thinks about the porch a lot. He doesn’t think about the teasing or the training or his mom, but he thinks about his sister’s voice, the way it broke with fear and anger at the thought of being Alpha. He thinks about Laura when he kills his uncle, can hear her voice in his head, saying I just want to run away.)