Chapter Text
snow;
you saved my life he says. i owe you everything.
you don't, i say, you don't owe me squat, let's just get going, let's just get gone, but he's relentless
keeps saying, i owe you, says your shoes are filling with your own damn
blood, you must want something, just tell me and it's yours.
You meet him in a forest, breathless and bloody, screams ringing in your ears. He's ten; blue eyes and snarling fangs and tears on his cheeks and you, you're fourteen, crossbow raised and ready to fire.
-
"We'll get outta here someday," you drawl, cigarette hanging loosely from the hand you're not using to anchor him to you.
He sits up, plucks the cigarette from your grip and takes a drag, "You've got a wife."
When he kisses you his mouth tastes like ash and the bourbon you stole from your father's house when you were young enough to think things like that mattered, to think your small acts of rebellion changed anything. I'd leave her for you in a heartbeat, you want to hiss against his mouth, I'd leave her if you asked.
You wouldn't and he won't but you're caught up in fantasies of running off with this pale feral boy right up until he brings his hands up to cup your face, lets the cigarette fall onto your bare chest. You jerk away instinctively and he smirks in a way that tells you it wasn't as accidental as his gentle hands brushing it away and soothing your burn will make it out to be.
You don't mention it.
-
Here is how it happens the first time:
You're drunk - beyond drunk you're fucking wasted - and he catches your eye across the room. Long limbed, dark haired, blue eyed, this is the kind of boy you spent your youth dreaming about, you've never been a writer, never had the talent or the desire, but you could write waxing fucking novels about the precise way he quirks up his mouth in a smile when your eyes meet his.
You take him back to your sleazy motel room and fuck him hard and fast and you're not even a little surprised by the fact he's gone the next morning.
He leaves you a phone number, scrawled across the back of the shitty room service menu and a bite mark on your shoulder. You tell yourself you'll never call but you keep it in your wallet between the picture of your sister and the picture of your fiancé anyway.
(Later you'll find out his name and you'll run your hands across the raised white scars in their neat little row and thank your lucky stars it wasn't deeper.
Later you'll find out his age.
You'll still call him the next time you're in Beacon Hills, the next time you're so far past sober it seems like a good idea. You'll fall asleep beside a boy, a monster, you'll fall asleep and every day you'll wonder if this is the time he decides to tear your throat out with his teeth.
You deserve it after all.)
-
You meet him in a forest, breathless and bloody, screams ringing in your ears. He's ten; blue eyes and snarling fangs and tears on his cheeks and you, you're fourteen, crossbow raised and ready to fire.
You stare at each other for a very long time.
-
Here's the thing:
You love Victoria.
You love Victoria more than you ever thought was possible (in a few years though, in a few years you'll have a little girl, a life that came from you and her and is all dark hair and soft brown eyes and bubbling giggles and what you'll feel for her will eclipse everything you've ever felt before.) Victoria is all fire and smirks and wit. She's all knife-sharp and gears turning and quick and clever eyes that never miss a beat. She's Peter, you think (or rather, he's her) she's Peter on a tighter leash, Peter held together by discipline and training, by family and honour and the lack of a wild beast scratching through her veins.
(And Victoria can be a monster - can slip into the kind of blood soaked determination that made Chris flinch every time his father's eyes turned steely - but she's the monster that has to be monstrous, not the monster that doesn't know how to be anything other.)
Here's the thing:
You hate her too.
You hate her because she's hunting. She's the life that left you raw and ragged, that took your baby sister and twisted and twisted and twisted til she snapped, til she was someone you didn't recognise. And you hate her because you know that your child, your fucking inevitable child, will go through every shitty situation you did. She'll be a leader or he'll be a soldier, either way they'll live fast, love hard, die bloody.
What a fucking legacy.
(Here's the thing, though, the worst fucking thing:
You kind of love Peter too. In the kind of truly, madly, deeply way that you thought was reserved solely for those shitty coming of age dramas and Shakespeare plays. The kind of way that leaves your blood itchy and has you waking up half hard and panting most nights. And there are days where you'll play out scenarios where it's just him and you, you and him, you'd live fast and loose, pass through cities and countries and never stay in one place too long but it'd never work out and here's why:
You love that boy in ways that make you crazy but it's not in the way you love Victoria, you don't daydream about the feeling of his hair slipping through your fingers or the way the early morning sunlight plays across his skin, you daydream about taking him apart piece by fucking piece and you daydream about him loving it.
And you keep waiting for this third rate romeo and juliet shit to wear itself out but it never fucking seems too.)
-
You're twenty-one when you get married, twenty-one when that little blue plus shows up on a stick and you're ecstatic, really you are.
And you always sort of thought you'd cut this out once everything with you and Victoria was officially, partly because you've never thought of yourself as the kind of scumbag to keep someone on the side and partly because he's still a fucking kid but you don't because you're a fucking mess. So you stride into Beacon Hills and stand beside your father while he talks things over with Talia Hale and sures up their accords and all the while you wonder whether Talia can smell her brother on you, whether he comes stinking of you.
(And you're not the kind of asshole that takes pride in things like that but fuck the thoughts not exactly unpleasant.)
-
Becoming a dad, though, that changes things.
You find yourself dragging him home from bars when he's had too much (because wolves might not get drunk but there are draughts that witches sell that do the job well enough) and you find yourself carding your hand through his hair while he sleeps and making sure he's wrapped up warm and it's sickening.
There's something desperate in his eyes that the father in you wants to tear out, wants to shake loose and just make it stop but you can't because you know he'd never let you.
(And you leave it there to fester, to morph, to rot him from the inside out and when he finally bares his teeth like the monster you've always known he could be you bite back the guilt in favour of anger, in favour of gun powder and crafted silver.)
-
You meet him in a forest (it's your first hunt) breathless and bloody, screams ringing in your ears. He's ten (already a monster - you saw what his mother did to those hikers, you saw the way they were ripped open - eyes empty and still); blue eyes and snarling fangs and tears on his cheeks and you, you're fourteen, crossbow raised and ready to fire.
(You're going to be a hero, you're going to save people, you're going to hunt monsters just like your dad.)
You stare at each other for a very long time.
-
You end it the day Allison turns five.
He calls you, jittery and mumbling, "You said you'd run away with me, you said you'd leave your wife."
Your daughter is laughing with delight, covered with chocolate cake. Your wife is looking at you with eyes that never miss a thing and you've pretended to yourself all these years that she doesn't know, that if she did know she'd have strung you up from the nearest tree without so much as a second thought but she knows something. You can't escape that.
"No," you say. "I can't do that."
The silence stretches so long you're beginning to think you made up this phone call but then his voice is back, words all rushed together, "I need to see you." and it's as close as he'll ever get to an admission of love and you know that, and a few years ago you'd be on your way before he could even hang up.
You say no and there's a sharp intake of breath and then a dial tone.
You keep the phone pressed to your ear for a few moments. We're poison to each other, you wanted to say, We're not meant to be.
You put down the receiver and go back to your family (and later your wife kisses across that little row of scars on your shoulder more tenderly than she ever has before and a second later she sinks her teeth in and you understand loud and clear, mine.)
-
His house burns to the ground and your sister was holding the match.
His family dies and you visit him in a wide, empty hospital room and wonder whether things would be different if you'd never called him back.
-
You meet him in a forest (it's your first hunt) breathless and bloody, screams ringing in your ears. He's ten (already a monster - you saw what his mother did to those hikers, you saw the way they were ripped open - eyes empty and still); blue eyes and snarling fangs and tears on his cheeks and you, you're fourteen, crossbow raised and ready to fire.
(You're going to be a hero, you're going to save people, you're going to hunt monsters just like your dad.)
You stare at each other for a very long time and you realise you don't think you can do this. You don't think you can shoot a kid. You don't think you can shoot anyone.
-
It's the first time you've seen him in years and he lets your name drip from his mouth like he's savouring every syllable and you're both grown now (well you, you were always grown and he might be older but there's not much left of that boy you fell for all those years ago, not anymore.)
He hates you with an intensity that you could drown in, he blames you for this, for him, for Kate and maybe if you'd stuck around he'd have turned out half decent, maybe.
He pushes that bar through your gut almost tenderly and he's smirking, eyes bright, skin flushed. He presses your foreheads together and you always knew this is how it'd end.
You always thought it'd be you doing the killing though.
You half want him to kiss you, half want him to just get it over with because you're tired, you're so damn tired. You've lost everything and you know this is all just the part of your brain that isn't quite fully formed, that needs affectionate, that needs touch the part of your brain that's clinging to the fact that at least there's still him.
-
You survive.
You survive and he survives and you've never planned on this eventuality and now you're standing a few feet away from him, there's glass between you and he won't meet your eyes. You're expecting a Hannibal Lector joke and you don't know why, he hasn't been that boy, who quipped and smirked and made your stomach do summersaults for a very long time.
Or maybe he never was that boy, maybe that boy was just a lie.
Maybe that's an easier thing to believe.
The doctor he's locked up with looks at you like he knows everything that happened between the two of you and it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand on end.
You should leave, you know that. You should leave and get after your sister, you should leave because there's nothing left here for you but you can't. Your feet won't obey, won't shift and no matter how much you want to never see this stupid little town again you just can't leave.
You stand for a few more minutes and head back to your empty apartment, fall into to a restless sleep about pale skin and red hair and Alison's laugh.
You go back every day for a week and you're not sure why or what you're looking for but on the sixth day Peter looks up at you and says, "I don't know what you want from me," and he's a kid again in that moment, that kid you took, twisted up (or maybe untwisted.)
And you've never known what you wanted from Peter Hale, you've never known why you kept going back to him, why he couldn't just be another body to fuck on long trips.
Maybe you felt responsible. It was you who spotted that article in the paper when you were fourteen. It was you who showed it to your father. It was your hunt to plan, your chance to prove yourself. You've gone over it for it years, the execution of Maria and Edward Hale, it was a mess but it was necessary. Those hikers deserved justice.
You stare at him and he stares at you and you want to tell him everything, you want to tell him every single thought that's hurricaning it's way through your mind but the words pile up against each other and you should hate him but you don't, you're not sure you ever did so you close your eyes and shake your head.
"I don't know either."
i swear, i end up feeling empty, like you've taken something out of me, and i have
to search my body for scars, thinking, did he find that one last tender place to sink his
teeth in?