Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I timed it perfectly.

I waited until I could hear two heartbeats—ones I could probably pick out of a crowd without even trying, even after ten years apart—and a few strangers thudding nearby.

Was it right to want an audience for this first reunion? No.

Did I care? Also no.

Peter Hale still wore the same cologne he had when I was fifteen and crushing hard on the forbidden uncle of the boy I’d been linked to so early, it felt like we were practically family.

Dior Homme.

A scent I may or may not have sought out at every fragrance counter since the last time I smelled it on his warm skin.

And Derek? Still loyal to Diesel Fuel for Life, apparently.

Which I absolutely haven’t leaned toward like a bloodhound every time someone walked past me wearing it these last ten years.

My hands clenched, my steps nearly faltered. I could’ve blamed the stilettos I wore for this happy occasion , but clothing is armor—and I never walk into battle looking unprepared for the first strike.

Nope. Not me.

I tossed my hair over one shoulder, a smirk curling on lips painted dark red—like war paint, like a promise.

It grew as Peter shifted—subtle, but not to me. From relaxed nonchalance to straight-spined, chin tilting up, catching a hint of my scent.

Did he smell righteous anger come home to roost? Or just the trace of Elizabeth Arden’s Pretty —my so-called signature scent, according to my pack's long-standing teasing?

Derek?

His shift was even smaller. But to me, it might as well have been a neon sign flashing oh shit in blinking red.

The way his pulse skipped. The sharp inhale. That swallow—like he’d already tasted the thousand-page indictment of all the wrongs he’d done.

Now that the Hales knew I was here, I didn’t bother muffling the click of my heels anymore.
When I let the first sharp tap land unrestrained, it sliced through the space like a blade.

Every head turned.

Aside from breathing and hearts beating in a steady band of rhythm, no other sound filled the room.

No fidgeting.
No whispered “Who is that?”
No unnecessary soundtrack.

Just silence.

The kind that knew change was coming—and braced for the fallout.

And me?
I embraced it.
The silence.
The eyes.
The way both Hales looked at me like I was the ghost of every past mistake and regret—wrapped in packaging they couldn’t have conjured up even in their deepest, darkest, wettest dreams.

I waited until I was close enough to bathe in the colognes I once would’ve happily drowned in.
Waited until the silence thickened.

Waited until the people around them—pack members, friends, lovers (I didn’t know, and I didn’t care)—started squirming under the weight of it.

Silence seasoned with tension and grilled to a fine pitch of discomfort.

And when it hit that fever pitch—the wolves hanging on the edge of fight, never flight—I finally spoke.

“Hello, Derek.”
I tilted my head and winked. “And Peter.”

Before either could unleash whatever weak-ass greeting they’d prepped, I added, with a slow, deliberate smirk:

“Did you miss me?”

Then I turned—no waiting, no dramatic pause. Just walked away with the same measured stride I came in on.
They knew I was back.

Now they could deal with the consequences.

Chapter Text

That first hit of Elizabeth Arden’s Pretty made me stand up straighter. Then came the subtle, steady thrum of her pulse. And finally, that first, deliberate click of her heel against the bare floor as she made her grand reintroduction—or lobbed an emotionally-charged stick of dynamite into the middle of a post-battle celebration just to say, “Hey, miss me?”

The last time I saw her, she was fifteen. Tiny. A chaotic little ball of "Oh shit, hide the knives" energy.

From her untamable curls to her dainty—but absolutely capable of making you retaste your last three meals—feet.

Those pale green eyes could fix on you with adoration or with a “you said what to me, and now you think I’m going to smile and nod?” glare.

And yes, I hurt her. Pre-fire. Pre-coma. Pre- Derek tries to play hero and screws it up so catastrophically that our deaths are probably going to show up smelling like heaven with the face of an angel who moonlights as a war criminal.

But she’d been fifteen , and I prefer designer shirts to prison orange.

So seeing those same eyes flash—then go glassy—only for her spine to straighten and her gaze to land on me like I was delusional and unworthy? Great. Fantastic. Just the cherry on top of a coma that already sucked.

Funny, isn’t it?

It took some seriously fucked-up cosmic alignment for me to claw my way out of that coma—but I’m convinced a hint of her perfume would’ve done the job in ten seconds. I’d have sat up, caught up on current events, maybe begged for forgiveness.

Dodged that bullet, thanks to Beacon Hills nurses smelling of antiseptic and misplaced optimism.

But hearing my name on her lips— those lips, dark as sin and twice as dangerous—before she turned and walked away like her curls had been trained in the art of taunting?

That was a reckoning I was absolutely not prepared for.

Ten years since I last saw her.

And she went from “you’re a worm, I’m a robin, may the odds be in your favor” to “look what you could’ve had, but you feared prison like a little bitch.”

And while I would’ve loved to go sit in a dark corner and smolder in peace—Derek already has a patent on that particular coping strategy—I had to endure the peanut gallery we call a pack trying to dissect what just happened with all the grace and accuracy of toddlers on a sugar high wielding dull hatchets.

There was one moment— one shining light —that made it almost worth it.

Compared to Stiles ranting like someone slipped LSD into his Red Bull, or Scott doing his whole “I’m like Derek, but I won’t bite unless asked nicely” routine, my daughter’s addition was shockingly on brand and only mildly horrifying.

“Can we keep her?”

Malia.

My sweet, chaotic bundle of “I don’t recall making you, but genetics says otherwise.”

When we all just stared at her, clearly processing the question “did you seriously just ask if a goddess of vengeance can be adopted like a stray?” , she must’ve read the silence as “please go on.”

“Peter,”  

Of course she had to use me as her launch point.

“Can she be my mommy?”

...Okay. As questions go, that one was— 

Dear God.

Creating Malia with Rhiannon?

Those curves. Naked. Writhing. Skin shining with sweat in the firelight—

Nope.

I swallowed hard—hopefully with subtlety—and answered her, my gaze pinned to the dumbass across from me who’d personally detonated this entire mess.

“Malia,” I said, voice even, eyes locked on Derek like a sniper, “if she were your mother, I’d remember creating you.”

Then, sharper:

“In vivid detail.”

Let that sit on those brooding shoulders, Derek.

Chapter Text

Trying to focus after a ghost from your past struts into your home —not just your territory, but your actual sanctuary—fresh off what you thought was a hard-earned victory?

Impossible.

First came her voice—low, deliberate.

“Hello, Derek.”

Spoken with lips that, in a better world, would’ve been kissed at an altar after sacred vows.

Then that winked “Peter,” —cheeky, cutting, and a reminder that our future was never just two wolves. Not from where I stood.

And finally—locking eyes like she was launching a missile—

“Did you miss me?”

Then she turned.

Heels like weapons.

Hips like a pendulum.

And walked away as if she hadn’t just kicked over the table, flipped the whole board, and dared anyone to stop her.

I wasn't about to open my damn mouth and say, “Hey, that was a terrible faux pas,” since I had quite literally torn up our marriage pact and tossed it into a fireplace in front of her face when we were fifteen.

Fifteen.

And when her eyes had gone glassy with tears she refused to let fall? That was the price. The reckoning. My penance was watching her become the kind of woman whose return didn’t just rattle walls—it cracked foundations.

Over the years, I told myself—and her father —that it was to spare her from the curse of being a Hale.

But seeing her now?

How she’d grown, changed, hardened?

She was living, walking, vengeance.

She was why storms are named after women .

It took every ounce of control I had left not to rage, not to howl, not to command silence.

I wanted everyone gone.

I wanted space. Peace.

But demanding that? That would’ve been too telling.

So I stood in the middle of the chaos and took it—because I earned it.

Stiles, like a verbally incontinent hamster on a broken wheel, launched into his “who, what, how” spiral that somehow got even Peter pacing.

Scott gave me The Look—all quiet worry and Alpha instinct. He didn’t say a word, but I knew that stare. It asked: Is this a threat?

She wasn’t.

But I didn’t say that either.

And then...Malia.

“Can we keep her?”

The grenade that silenced the room.

And when no one answered—because how could you?—she barreled on like a coyote with a vendetta.

“Peter, can she be my mommy?”

If she weren’t my cousin, and if I didn’t already expect Peter to say something obscene, I might have stomped out of my own house and begged the lightning to take me.

“Malia, I promise you,” Peter said, with his laser gaze locked onto mine, his tone smug and syrupy.

“If she were your mother, I’d remember creating you—with vivid detail.”

I was going to kill him.

That? That would be the moment.

The match to the gasoline.

And of course— of course —he had to wink.

That smirk of his? That was Peter Hale on his world tour of “Let me stir the pot until it explodes.”

And somewhere out there—close enough to hear, close enough to know —she was laughing her ass off about it.

Chapter Text

I didn’t go far. Where would the fun be in that? Just sitting on a huge juicy pile of tension wrapped in vagueness in the middle of a pack of wolves, then going home to binge-watch Bridgerton ?

Nope. Definitely not a “pop some popcorn, click on the latest smutty period drama, and wait for the chaos I unleashed to come find me” kind of girl. Or at least, not anymore.

Once upon a time, when I was a very young and innocent girl, that would’ve been the kind of normal I yearned for—until the Hales happened. One Hale in particular. Since the elder Hale was a constant witness to every slight and insult my poor fragile sunshine self had to endure, he was primed for a slice of the woman it carved me into.

Shaking off the past was getting easier—and that helped. Because reveling in the grenade of “just enough to stir the pot” introductions I’d tossed into the Hales’ new life was way better without the spiral of pain and longing that made up my past.

Perched on a windowsill in the building next to Derek’s new home, I bit my lip in glee, listening to the cacophony of voices—harsh demands, soft respect, and everything in between.

I barely stifled a snort at the young feminine voice dropping her own bomb:

“Can we keep her?”

Silence.

Followed by:

“Peter, can she be my mommy?”

I nearly fell off my ledge.

Peter, snarky as always, shot back:

“Malia, I promise you, if she were your mother, I’d remember creating you with vivid detail.”

Yeah, that was as graphically gratifying as it was mortifying. And I refused to feel even a flicker of pleasure at how he made the idea of having procreative sex with me sound memorable.

That was when I stopped listening—not because I wasn’t enjoying being seen and heard, even if I’d spoken less than ten words—but because there was one voice that hadn’t said a single word.

Derek Hale. Internalizing, as always.

Hopping down with the grace only a blood-born wolf could manage in heels, I narrowed my eyes, plotting my next moves as I strolled back to my house. After all, this wasn’t going to work if I didn’t have both players on the board.

Dad was waiting when I got home. Of course he was. Even as a grown-ass woman who could theoretically rule the world, my dad would always be the Alpha making sure his little girl got home safe and sound. I wonder how he spent his time when I was away at school—and then stayed away—because Beacon Hills had always felt about as homey as a padded room in the loony bin.

“You smell like…”

Bad decisions and regret, I thought.

But he said, “The Hales.”

Was that disappointment I saw flicker across his face? Or hope? They both looked pretty damn similar these days.

“Kind of weird how they never change colognes, right?” I shrugged past him, pulling open the fridge and glaring behind the door. “Did Rosa make—”

My eyes landed on a familiar container, and I sighed with contentment.

“Found it.”

Placing the plastic bowl on the huge marble island, I waited for Dad to stop hovering and unload his list of questions and concerns. Not gonna lie, didn’t miss this part of being “home” either.

I grabbed a bowl from the usual cabinet, then moved to the drawer holding serving spoons, next to the one with utensils. Ladling out some of Rosa’s hearty, fragrant stew—which I’d missed when she’d served dinner, but even reheated—it felt like a tiny taste of normal.

Dad was still waiting, carefully plotting how to navigate this conversation without losing a toe—or an eye.

Tossing my spoon into the air and catching it, I caught his eye and grinned.

“Did you know Alistar showed me how to pop a person’s eye out with a spoon?”

It worked.

With an eye-roll worthy of my past angsty teenage self, he sighed—part exasperation, part laugh.

“Of course he did.”

He grabbed a stool at the island and settled in, leaning forward on the marble.

“Why did you go?”

“Away to school? Paris for an epic spring break?” He waited me out.

I might’ve physically been absent for the past ten years, but he knew me better than most.

“To Disney World?”

My food dinged the microwave, offering a reprieve. I took a deep breath, my back turned.

Even if he heard it, clocking every pulse and tick that screamed “too impulsive” or “bad choices ahead” was something he wouldn’t find in me this time.

“I think you’re going to have to be more specific, Dad,” I said, turning to face him, his patient parental look making me want to scream. “I’ve traveled a lot. ”

“You have so much of your mom just leaking out of you,” he said, his voice reverent in a way he rarely used now.

“Okay, smart ass, why did you go to the Hales? ”

I took my time. Something he expected, so I didn’t have to spill all my Hale-framed secrets. Mostly because he already knew them, in stark and painful detail.

I hopped onto the stool next to him, dipping my spoon into the stew that might’ve been amazing fresh but was damn good reheated.

A few bites, a few moments to remind myself not every Beacon Hills memory was soaked in angst.

How Mom had always tried to wrangle my curls into something less tornado and more tame.

How Dad’s eyes twinkled as he listened to my wild ideas about being pack Alpha, protecting us from unseen threats.

How Rosa pulled me onto her lap, shaking her head at my daily bruises but reminding me how important I was—not just as a wolf, but as a person.

Setting down my spoon, I met Dad’s gaze.

“I went to let the Hales know I was back.”

That was that.

He stared, waiting to see if I’d say more. When I didn’t, he nodded.

“And were they overjoyed to see my prodigal daughter in her full glory?”

“TBD,” I said, hopping off my stool and moving to clean the few dishes I made with my late dinner.

“Let me know if you find out before I do.”

My back was to him, hands under the warm faucet spray, rinsing away what was left of Rosa’s stew.

“As if Peter or Derek Hale would dare, ” he muttered, gruff and final.

Then he was beside me, leaning over to press a kiss to the top of my head.

“Though I suppose I should send Derek a thank you card,” he said, dry pain in his throat.
“Saved you real heartache when he called it off.”

He stepped away, leaving me to my thoughts.

As I rinsed the spoon, I wondered if Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham was right—would it hurt more to cut out my own heart with a spoon? Or to have it handed back like it wasn’t even worth the effort?

Chapter Text

OK, I took a brief brooding moment of angst. It’s not like Derek or Peter have that market cornered — and if they do, they can sue me.

Once I had my Sheriff of Nottingham trauma spiral under control, I retreated to my rooms. Which, admittedly, are every young girl, teenager, and woman’s wet dream.

Door hidden behind a bookcase? Check. Spiral staircase leading to a circular tower room? Check. A closet Carrie Bradshaw would envy? Check. The bed that looks like trees dipped in bronze, leaves and all, with a mattress I’d have killed for during some of my less luxurious travels? Check. And a library that ranges from How to Curse Your Enemies — probably a joke book from one of the girls I grew up with — to Butcher and Blackbird.

Slipping out of my heels, tossing them vaguely toward my closet, I grabbed the remote that controls damn near everything and hit the button to fill the room with music. Halestorm’s “I Get Off” played just this side of comfortably loud, the perfect background noise as I opened my ensuite bathroom door and started a bath in the clawfoot tub.

While the bath filled, I wandered into the closet and pulled out some relaxing “plot my next move” loungewear. By the time I had a tank, shorts, and panties, the bath was almost full—just at that perfect “I could drown, but thankfully my foot can tap the plug” level.

Once I’d shucked my “fuck you, Hales” outfit and slipped into the bath that would prep me for any afterlife time I might spend in Hell, I let my head fall back against the rim and debated my next move.

Peter reacted. Peter reacted all over the reaction scale for Peter Hale reactions. From the first whiff of me to the “vivid details” he’d remember if he and I had made a baby named Malia, I knew he got the pop quiz.

Derek. That’s where I needed to focus. And not in a “let’s send Derek a nice fruit basket with a ‘thanks for ruining my daughter’s life in ways I don’t actually understand’ note” kind of way, which is definitely where Dad might be leaning. Ironic, really—my dad and Derek, both thinking the dismissal of our “arrangement” was some sort of saving grace when it was a cursed thing.

How do you penetrate the impenetrable? As tempting as the spoon idea is, I think not. Not when my travels have finally told me he might actually be necessary to fix what he broke.

Brute force is a no. So is a verbal grenade—unless I can toss it with the right order of grunts, like Morse code. My eyes landed on my bookshelf through the open bathroom door. What was that series he gave me to read when we were twelve? I knew it was still there because destroying or tossing books is literal sacrilege to me. Closing my eyes and letting my head fall back, I tried something I never did—poke back into the vault of Derek Hale Memories.

“Don’t laugh,” he said, as if I’d ever laugh at something Derek Hale said or did, but he waited for verbal confirmation that I wasn’t about to start. “I have a book—or a series—I want to give you to read.” Not quite what I’d expected after he told me not to laugh.

“OK?” I was curious. Bookworm since birth, I was definitely interested in whatever Derek wanted to offer.

“It’s really good,” he said. I bit back a snarky I hope you don’t share bad books comment and waited, since he sounded oddly sincere. “I like it, but it’s not really—” Not really? He left me hanging long enough to fill in the blanks. Word-based? Age-appropriate? (Honestly hoping for this one—the idea of Derek handing me something that made his little wolf rear up and howl? Hot.) “It’s kind of girly.” Oh. Um. OK.

“What’s a girly book?” Seriously? Did books have genders? “I mean, is it—” Yep, he managed something my parents would definitely want his secret recipe for: making me speechless.

His brow furrowed like he was trying to figure out what made a book girly—the book or series he was talking about—and coming up completely empty. Same, Derek. Same.

Finally, clearly done trying to articulate anything, he shoved a stack of books into my hands and gave me a terse “try ’em” before getting away like I’d started the whole thing.

I was dry and dressed, pulling the blinding white set from my bookshelf: Modern Faery Tales by Holly Black. I’d read them. Devoured them. These rich, glorious books Derek shoved at me like, “Take these and figure out my overly complex teenage boy mind.” All they told me then, was what I knew now: Derek was more than surface deep, with more layers than that onion Shrek argued about with Donkey.

Step one: find my fucking laptop. Step two: prepare to show Derek Hale that two can lob the “here, you figure it out” game via books.

Chapter Text

Here’s the thing about getting all the pieces onto a theoretical, minefield-like gameboard: you need help, even if you don’t want it.

Ordering my second salvo — but first, directed only at Derek — was the easy part. The hard part? Figuring out if it was working without marching up to the warehouse like the Big Bad Wolf asking, “Can I blow your house down?”

Nope. I needed someone on the inside. That meant finding the strongest weak link.

Malia, the female who wanted to keep me, seemed like the simple, fast solution. But I could sense a gremlin of doom lurking under that surface — uncontrollable and untrainable in the time I had.

Trickier still were the other two options from my seriously too-covert-to-be-taken-remotely-serious recon: teenagers. Males. Which reminded me, aside from Derek and like three others, I hadn’t willingly hung out with teenagers since I was one.

One was a nearly-new bitten wolf; the other, his manic friend. Wolf or ADHD off the meds? Too many meds? Goldmine of chaos either way.

The marginally easier part? Who I literally ran into — slammed into, with all the grace of a newborn calf missing a leg. And I hadn’t seen him once during my super secret spy mission. Unknown. Perfectly suited.

“OH MY GOD,” he sounded three beats away from a panic attack after hitting me harder than a linebacker protecting a quarterback. “Are you alright? Did I—” His eyes went so wide I actually hoped I could dredge up my CPR training. “You’re the—” Could a person glitch? Blue screen of death? Gone but not forgotten? Hopefully rebootable?

“Well,” I stretched the word into four syllables and watched his stare at my lips like I was either granting mercy or sentencing him to unfathomable pain. “There MIGHT be a bruise.” Hardly—I’d been taking hits since before I could wipe my own ass, but this kid didn’t need to know that.

“Oh,” his hands shot up like he could wave away bruises by sheer will. “Um, can I—”

“You can.” Smiling gently, I grabbed one of his frantically flapping hands before it could take out an eye—his or mine—and squeezed it calm. “What’s your name?”

Liam Dunbar. Sweet, innocent, anxious little wolf. And quite willing to deliver a gift to Derek, once I assured him it wouldn’t physically harm him. Then I asked him to deliver something back to me.

“Sure, Miss—” but I brushed off his third attempt at getting my name.

“Liam,” his mouth slack, then silent. “Just call me,” I tucked a card with my number into his jeans pocket, but before his eyes could vacate his body at whatever naked implications ran through his brain, “and tell me how Derek likes his present.”

“How he likes his present?” He blinked like he was rebooting his brain again.

I handed him the bland, boring brown paper gift bag. No frills. Just the scent of my perfume and the promise of three brown paper-wrapped rectangles inside.

“Yes, Liam. How he likes this .” I tapped the bag with a single dark nail to drive the point home, doubting his retention. “Deliver.” One tap. Maybe one at a time, easy, no extra words, no directions.

“Observe.” Another tap, reminding him to watch Derek’s reactions.

“Report.” A tap to his pocket made him jump like I’d cattle-prodded him.

“Understand?”

“Yes, yep, absolutely.” Narrowing my eyes, I was surprised when Liam mirrored my taps perfectly: “Deliver. Observe. Report.”

“Good boy, Liam.” I didn’t pat his cheek—I’m not that damn old—but it was close. “Thank you.” I turned and walked away, stifling laughter as I heard his ragged breath purging behind me.

What to do while I waited for my first— please god of vengeful chaos, don’t let Liam short circuit —report on how Derek was enjoying the gifts I so humbly bestowed?

If I wanted to pack my closet until the fire marshal issued “there are too many Louboutins, Dior, and Burberry to keep Beacon Hills safe” warnings, I could go shopping. But after Paris, did I really want to wander around a mall?

No. No, I did not.

Movies? Was there ever anything worth buying a ticket to see and then overpaying for snacks?

Pass.

I could work out. If I wanted to feel the misery of running without something chasing me—or me chasing it—not fun.

Nope.

I could read. But then I’d stew about how my phone wasn’t dinging or ringing with a “Derek’s got steam coming from his ears, should I worry?” message.

Not ideal.

Wait. Did that little place at the edge of town with the super retro vibes still exist? The one where I had my first and last official date with Derek when I was 15?

Running down the stairs and counting it as cardio so technically I worked out, I bellowed like the mad cow I sometimes channeled so I wouldn’t have to stand still and listen hard to figure out where Dad was hiding.

He, ever the mature paternal unit and Alpha badass, chose not to bellow back. Instead, he took his sweet time coming to me, silent. I was still rolling my eyes when he arrived—such a power play wasted on a kid who knew all his “look at me, I’m in charge” moves.

“You rang?” Snorting at his restraint and perfect Lurch impression, I grinned up at my mountain of a father.

“Is Penny’s Diner still a thing?” His eyebrow raised like his forehead owed it money. “I want a huge juicy, totally greasy burger and a massive basket of fries—” eyes closing as if I could taste it. “Ooo, with brown gravy just slathering those fries, and a chocolate—no vanilla—no—”

His laughter dragged me from the daydream of the most artery-clogging meal a human could survive—another blessing from werewolf gods: I could eat dog food and not die.

“Yep, still a thing.” Thank fuck for at least one redeeming feature of Beacon Hills. “Want some company?”

Tricky question. Tricker answer. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to spend time with Dad. Or have dinner with him—though my meals had been leftovers since I announced I was back to stay, at least for a bit. But I wasn’t in the mood for “I wish you’d stayed” paired with “we could’ve figured it out together,” sprinkled with “it’s all the Hales’ fault—especially Derek—but if I see Peter—” served with a heavy side of resentment.

I hesitated a beat too long and he sighed. Disappointment coiled off him heavier than my perfume probably spread through Derek’s personal space.

“Sure. Grab your keys and wallet. You’re buying.”

Slipped right the fuck out of my mouth before his slowly lowering expectations could crush me.

“Meet you at the truck,” he said, his smile growing, the tension gone.

I called that a win.

Chapter Text

What’s worse than having a ghost pop in, wave at you like, “I’m back, bitches. I have matches. Hope your shit’s flame retardant,” then walk away like she didn’t just drop a wolf-sized crap on your life you have no clue how to clean up? Trust me — it still feels like I smell like shit.

What’s worse is the silence after. The absence. The absolute nothing.

Boom. Mess. Disappear. Like the hottest magician ever, but you know you didn’t dream it because Stiles keeps asking, “So, what’s her name? Her address? Is she single? Does she like human boys?”

Growling “NO” doesn’t work, by the way. I’ve done it so much I sound like a broken record.

And then I smell it — that one scent that used to make my head snap back to find it when Laura and I lived in NYC. Pretty by Elizabeth Arden — sweet, floral, with a little flower pressed into the cap thingy, which I knew because I once went to Macy’s and almost bought a bottle just to get an easy fix. But I didn’t. Because pushing her away, giving her up, keeping her safe after I’d made too many mistakes to deserve her (I should write a list: Paige, Kate, Fire) was the only thing I could do.

I didn’t deserve a chance with her. Her mom was at our house that night — thank God she hadn’t been with her — and her dad had gone to check on a sick wolf’s family. The thought that she could have been left alone — or worse, that she would have been — made my stomach clench, even ten years later. Not like I could retroactively change it.

But here, in my home, her perfume hits heavier than when she stood across from me, looking like a goddess, crackling with power and that teasing edge that was always just her.

Liam creeps past me once, twice, and on the third time I’ve had enough — mostly because the scent seems to be coming from him.

“Liam?” He freezes like a rabbit caught in a wolf’s headlights. “Is there a reason you’re tip-toe pacing a ditch into my floor?”

He hesitates, and a huge part of me wants to stand up and crowd him, but I don’t, because there’s something... off about him. Like he’s seen God, been touched by Him, and realized he was totally unprepared for the encounter.

“So, um, there was this lady,” he starts. I uncross my legs and sit back. “She, um, wanted me to give you—” Then he shoves a brown paper bag at me, barely giving me time to grab it before darting to the door with a parting, “She swore it wasn’t dangerous.”

Blinking at the rapid-fire exchange, the scent of Pretty hits me like a freight train, pulling me back to the bag Liam tossed like a bomb he didn’t want to defuse.

Opening it, I find three brown paper-wrapped rectangles — books, clearly — but they smell like condensed Rhiannon. I’m tempted to leave them wrapped, tuck them in a drawer in Peter’s room, and book it faster than Liam did.

Why did they have to smell so fucking good? Like magic, happiness, a healthy dose of trauma, and undeniably her.

Fuck. I have to open them. It’s a gift — but clearly a challenge, too. And knowing my luck, she had Liam plant a minicam to see if I’m as huge a coward as she obviously thinks.

She’d marked the books with a black marker: 1, 2, 3. That’s the order I opened them.

The first was Jane Eyre, with a thick piece of cardstock sticking out of the cover.

“You gave me Modern Faery Tales to show me a side of you you weren’t willing to tell me about. Here’s my trilogy, Derek.”

I couldn’t believe she remembered.

The second was Sense and Sensibility. OK, I’m sensing a theme: classical literature.

The third package I opened, betting on The Picture of Dorian Gray or Frankenstein, surprised me — a dark blue cover with gold images and the title Fierce Fairytales: Poems and Stories to Stir Your Soul.

Modern poetry? What?

Do I read them in order? Pick one at random? There’s no instruction manual or set of rules.

Fuck me. Seriously?

Chapter Text

Cornering Liam was less a strategic move and more of a cosmic accident—he basically barreled blindly toward wherever Derek wasn’t and collided headfirst into me. So maybe “cornering” isn’t quite right. More like: being bowled over by a small, anxious baby wolf who reeked of Rhiannon and looked like he hadn’t fully recovered from the encounter.

“Liam,” I said, watching him stare up like I was Caesar presiding over a gladiator battle, waiting for the thumbs up or down. “You look rather—” He flinched like a gazelle caught in headlights, aware he was hopelessly outmatched by a pride of lions on his tail. “Frantic.”

Her scent clung to him, like she’d rubbed off just to make a point. But who was the intended target—Derek, me, or poor Liam? “Did you make a new friend?”

Liam’s eyes darted around like he wanted to scream, Let me go, please! “Um, there’s a—” He struggled to finish the sentence. “Look, man, she’s gorgeous, smells like a goddess, and asked me to do her a favor after I nearly ran her over by not paying attention.”

My eyebrow rose. Liam Dunbar, stocky powerhouse, bumps into Rhiannon Morrigan and she lets him do her a favor? That girl had definitely grown into something—though what exactly, I wasn’t sure yet. “Favor?”

Intrigued and wanting to cut out the middleman, I gave Liam my full attention and watched him squirm. “Is the favor over and done?”

“Part of it,” he said, calmer now. “I still have to do—” His lips snapped shut like she’d cast a spell on him. Not that she could; she was a wolf, not a witch.

“You still have to do what, Liam?” I sharpened my gaze. He flinched. “Maybe I can help?”

His hand went to his pocket, and a faint waft of her perfume hit my nose like a drug. “What’s in your pocket?” His eyes went wide. I smiled. “Come on, Liam, let me see.” Otherwise, I was ready to pickpocket him as he tried to slide past, but compliance was preferable.

With the full sulkiness only a teenager could master, Liam pulled out a small card. “She wants me to tell her how Derek likes his gifts,” he said, voice petulant and sullen. The card, with her handwriting—precise and beautiful but missing her name—made my smile grow. “But she wants me to do it.”

“I swear, Liam,” I said, tugging the card from his grip without tearing it, “she’d rather hear it from me.”

I dismissed Liam, who looked both relieved and annoyed, then tapped the card on my lip, inhaling her scent like a fix. What kind of presents did she get Derek? And why didn’t she send me anything?

Chapter Text

Penny’s Diner looked like I’d been dropped into a black-and-white sitcom that someone colorized way too early—and the color scheme was all kinds of wrong: black, white, red, and chrome. Real diner vibes, if you asked anyone who liked that vintage, slightly off-kilter aesthetic.

We slid into a booth, the pleather squeaking beneath us like nails on a chalkboard—only way more fun. I probably looked totally out of place—Penny’s wasn’t exactly the kind of joint where red-soled pumps and butter-soft, tight black leather pants with a matching jacket fit in. Well, not in this decade anyway. But I didn’t care. I grabbed the plastic-coated menu like it was a winning lottery ticket and scanned it as if I didn’t already know my order by heart.

Dad was watching me, not the menu. I ignored it. Not here. Not now. I was in my happy place.

When the waitress came, I recited my order like a prayer, a wish, and a challenge wrapped in enough grease to kill a bear. “A double cheeseburger, no veggies—I mean no lettuce, onion, tomato, or anything that would make a cameo in a salad or a juice bar. A little ketchup, a hint of mustard, a basket of fries drowning in brown gravy—like Noah needs to build an ark to survive the flood levels of gravy—and a chocolate milkshake, no cherry, but heavy on whipped cream. Also, a cherry Coke.”

Dad was snorting by the time I finished. He just told the open-mouthed waitress, who was staring at my tiny frame like she was wondering where all that food was going, to make it two.

We made polite, if shallow, small talk until the food arrived. Okay, I’d have to be blind, deaf, and lacking several other senses not to notice the rubbernecking other diners were doing. Our buffet of grease was clearly a freak show worthy of their attention.

I dug in like I hadn’t had a real meal since I grew teeth. Probably made a few indecent noises too—not that anyone could hear over the symphony of squealing pleather and shuffling asses. Didn’t care. Would’ve bitten anyone who reached for a crumb or a sip. And not just a warning nip, either—I’d season this feast of the gods with blood and maybe a little flesh, no regrets.

“Are we in an eating contest?” Dad asked, waiting until I looked up long enough to gulp down a glass of Coke.

Raising an eyebrow, I nearly choked when I noticed the fork in his hand. “What?” he asked, as if my very looking at the fork was an insult.

“You have a fork,” I said, pointing at it like it was some archaic torture device.

“That guy over there is eating with one,” Dad nodded toward a guy with a salad. Because, apparently, salads in diners are proof of normalcy.

“And he’s eating a salad ,” I spat the word like it was a garage full of bad decisions. “So excuse me if that just proves you’re being ridiculous.”

Shrugging, I went back to devouring my food with the grace of a child who’d never seen a table, chairs, plates, forks—or other humans.

Dad’s huff of laughter was followed by the clink of metal on tabletop. I glanced at him. He was embracing the lay of the land—me as his trusty tour guide.

“I’ll take the chocolate silk pie. Two pieces. Extra whipped cream. And another cherry Coke, please,” I ordered. The waitress looked a little green, like she was trying to process the completely empty plates and baskets she was carrying back to us, plus the empty milkshake glasses (two for each of us), and the fact that she had to refill my Coke again . Dad echoed the order, and I saw it clearly: this was exactly what diners felt like when Shaggy and Scooby showed up.

“What?” Dad watched me again, like I was a complicated riddle he’d been trying to solve for twenty-five years. Which, honestly? Same.

“Trying to decide if I’m the Scooby to your Shaggy or vice versa,” I said. His eyes closed as he shook his head, shoulders quaking with quiet laughter. “You gonna ask all those probing, painful questions you’ve been saving up?”

His eyes, when they opened, were tight. “I won’t if it ends this,” he nodded between us, meaning the silly little bubble we were in. “I want to, but not if you disappear again.”

“I didn’t disappear. Not really. Not entirely. You’re being dramatic,” I said, knowing full well where that flair came from. “I called, emailed, messaged, FaceTimed you.”

“You weren’t here,” came the real issue. I wasn’t here—in Beacon Hills with him. “After your mom—”

Oh, fuck. Luckily, two distractions hit at once: the waitress arriving with pie and Coke, and my phone dinging.

Saved by the ding.

Unknown Number: If you want to know how Derek is taking your little scent bomb with a side of classical literature and a poetic palate cleanser, you could have just asked ME to deliver it instead of sending a poor, baffled, possibly crush-drunk child. I thought you were more strategic than that, Rhiannon.

Ah, Peter. Should’ve known my perfume was like LSD-laden catnip to him.

While Dad ate his pie, asking if forks were allowed for this course, I slid a spoon toward him and considered how to answer Peter. Picking up my own spoon, I dug in, weighing what would keep the Hales exactly where I wanted them on the board.

I didn’t answer while we ate.

I didn’t text my manifesto of “oh really, Peter” while Dad drove us home, pointing out all the little changes Beacon Hills had managed while I was gone.

I didn’t answer before or after I tore off my clothes and took a hot shower.

I waited. I pondered. And yes—I plotted.

Dad didn’t corner me with the “So, you know that time your mom died, your fiancé dumped you like a hot potato, his uncle reminded you you were cute but not jail-worthy, and you ran off to an elite private school then traveled the globe like a raccoon on a trashcan full of hotdogs?” talk.

He gave me breathing room, lest my inner raccoon go on another international rampage.

I was grateful for the reprieve. It gave me time to craft the perfect response to Peter’s “Here’s how we’ll play this game, but I’m the gamemaster” text.

ME :
Oh, Peter, if I’d wanted you to play puppet master with my toys, I’d have handwrapped them in glitter and silk, and delivered them with a bow and a set of calligraphied instructions.

I prefer the unknown in this particular game, and you—well, you lack the subtlety that Liam possesses.

Plus, unlike your mature and discerning eye, Liam can see past the subterfuge. I hope you didn’t take my contact info from him—I’d hate to have to bump into him again just to hear his staggered voice repeat my instructions like a love song.

Now be a good Hale and let Liam do his duty.

Peter, usually so calculating and cunning, didn’t wait long to answer. Maybe he was losing his edge with advanced age.

Peter:
*Rhiannon, as the mature and discerning Hale here, allow me to clarify:

• If I find Liam with even a hint of your scent that didn’t come from a perfume counter spritz, he’ll have to die.
  
  

• If you think he’ll ever get your contact info from me willingly, I’d be dead first.
  
  

• If he ‘bumps’ into your body with any portion of his—refer to number 1.
  
  

• And I think you and I both know I’ll never be a ‘good’ Hale.*
  
  

Not gonna lie—I snorted. Which was almost tragic because I was eating with Dad, in the dining room, with pack members present.

Every head turned my way.

As if choking on a bite of chicken that practically melted in my mouth wasn’t hard enough, now I had to explain why I almost died over “a baby could swallow it without harm” food.

“Sorry,” I coughed, more than necessary, then landed on, “Friend from Paris sent me a dumb baguette joke.”

Good news: no one asked what it was. French humor scares them worse than any supernatural threat.

Bad news: Dad looked at me like he was adding another question to his endless list.

Unlike Peter, I had patience—and duties.

I came home, and as future Alpha of the Morrigan pack, I had a lot to learn. Or relearn.

Dad’s running of the pack was natural, and he was a little impressed I’d grown past my eight-year-old idea of “off with their heads” as an answer to any issue.

I had to prove I wasn’t soft. That I hadn’t lost my predator edge by eating at Penny’s every night and neglecting my training.

Look, I might hate cardio, but I do it—when I have to.

Plus, Alistar, my trainer at the private school, specialized in “here’s a pencil and fifty ways to kill someone with it.”

I almost wanted to thank Liam for that linebacker hit—it reminded me how to shift balance, take a hit, then move through it, making the other person feel the pressure, and I made some wolves gasp when I did it—in stilettos.

Dad called a hard “Hell no” when one of his bigger, teddy bear types asked for a “spoon eye scooping” demonstration. Sad—I wanted to prove myself.

Since I didn’t get to add “Train the Morrigan Pack in the Ancient and Noble Art of Spoon Warfare,” I dragged up Peter’s text and pondered my response.

First, I hated him threatening Liam. That poor struggle pup did nothing wrong. Charging me like a concussed football player actually helped.

So Liam was off-limits.

Maybe Peter could do the Derek observation reports, but threatening that twitchy kid? Like watching a huge guy kick a three-legged puppy. Wrong.

Second, I needed to say clearly, vaguely but concisely, that while I needed him in the game, he wasn’t allowed to lead.

I didn’t mind if he “won,” but I wasn’t handing him the rulebook and a Sharpie.

Those were the big two.

ME:
Oh, Peter, wishful god of wrath and razor wire, I hoped we’d play nicely.

But you’ve already gone straight for the teeth.

Let me clarify: Liam is off-limits. Not a request.

That’s me laying the law like a queen who’ll absolutely go Mad Hatter on her chessboard if you start punting pawns.

Second, okay—maybe I was wishful when I promoted you to a “good” Hale.

Let’s downgrade that to “essential.” But don’t confuse essential with in charge.You’re here to stir the pot, not season it to taste.

Now sit, Hale. You’ll get your turn. Maybe. 🐺🍽️

And FYI: Next time you try to intimidate a puppy, don’t sound jealous of his leash. Embarrassing.

Hitting send never felt so satisfying.

Chapter Text

I re-read Sense and Sensibility and Jane Eyre , deliberately saving the poetry book for last—the one soaked in her scent, the clear priority. After all, which literary timebomb would hit me hardest?

Fierce Fairytales by Nikita Gill. Beautiful cover, deceptive as all hell—like the poems inside, tearing apart those tired princess-in-distress stories girls got sold in Grimm’s best. 

The first read-through felt like a manual: How to decode the girl you swore you’d save but utterly failed . The second, I slowed down, catching glimpses of the Rhiannon I’d known growing up — and the fragile idea of us, maybe permanent this time.

The third time, I found it: the poem that was her.

The Rhiannon who’d burned back into my world, draped in chaos like Chanel, her scent a halo of armor around that unbreakable heart. Stilettos sharp enough to crush—or level us. My call. 

“Take Back Your Fairytale” - Nikita Gill

Await no princes to save you

Through their lips touching yours

Whilst you are in unwilling slumber.

Meet each other in the womb

Of your enchanted dreams,

Snow White and Sleeping Beauty.

Rely on no man to save you,

He will awaken you to a new prison

And take you, for this is the hunger of men.

Darkling magic is coursing through those veins, 

Turn it into kindling, my resourceful girls,

Find one another in the fog realm,

wake each other up instead.  

If I weren’t holding a book with a poet’s name stamped on it—this lyrical throat punch—I’d swear Rhiannon wrote it. Using the ashes from the fire where I burned our marriage pact, mixed with the blood she must’ve wanted to spill from my veins.

This wasn’t just a poem. Not just a “girl power” rallying cry. It was her screaming from the rooftops that I’d fucked up—massively—trying to save her from me, from the Hale name, from the curse I thought it carried. That name hovering over her like a storm cloud of danger and pain. But she took it. Walked away with glassy eyes that wouldn’t let me see her tears, spine ramrod straight. Then forged herself back with fire—using the pain I caused to steel every inch of her new strength.

This wasn’t about fixing something I broke. This was the reckoning showing up at my door, shaking dark curls like a damn storm and smirking, “You thought you saved me.” Those green eyes—always flashing, now blazing—cutting through the years I hid behind silence. “You thought I ran away for ten years to lick invisible wounds, waiting to cry those tears I’d never let you see? No. I rose. I moved forward. And now I’m back—to remind you what you had and threw away.”

I swallowed hard, taste bitter like ash in my throat. I wasn’t a savior. I was the goddamn cage. And she wasn’t broken—she was fire. The kind you don’t tame, only learn to respect... or burn trying.

I couldn’t, not yet - because my memory drew up another poem, another this is her now hit to my solar plexus.

“Fire” - Nikita Gill 

Remember what you must do

When they undervalue you,

When they think

Your softness is your weakness,

When they treat your kindness 

Like it is their advantage.

You awaken 

Every dragon,

Every wolf, 

Every monster

That sleeps inside of you

And you remind them

What hell looks like 

When it wears the skin

Of a gentle human.

Managing to shut the book carefully, almost reverently when a huge part of me wanted to throw it across the room so hard it would leave an imprint of its scalpel like precision of flaying me open in the brick - but I couldn’t do that. Not when its pages weren’t just layered with the very scent of Rhiannon, but it held a piece of her that I wasn’t sure I would ever be allowed to access again. She gave me this. A piece of who she is now, bookended with a gothic romance that had me questioning if she was casting me as Mr. Rochester to her Jane, or if she was telling me she was the forgotten wife in the attic? And a tale of two sisters who had two different, distinctively so, views of love and what made true connection. 

She’d handed me her trilogy like I had - once upon a time - and trusted me not to laugh, just as I’d practically begged her not to do to me. Jokes on her, I couldn’t have laughed if I tried. This wasn’t just a window into her soul. This was a “you made me, forged me into this, as if you had a set of instructions and a goal you didn’t run past me, but it’s ok, I’m making it work” reality and gut check. And all I could do was assume she’d changed her number the moment I said “thank you, no” to our future—probably right when that first flicker of flame touched the paper that once bound us.

No, if I wanted to respond I’d have to do it in person. Face to face with those eyes of hers blazing a path of glory and redemption right through me. 

Chapter Text

RHIANNON, CHAOS WOLF OF MY DIRTIEST DREAMS: 

Oh, Peter, wishful god of wrath and razor wire, I hoped we’d play nicely.

But you’ve already gone straight for the teeth.

Let me clarify: Liam is off-limits. Not a request.

That’s me laying the law like a queen who’ll absolutely go Mad Hatter on her chessboard if you start punting pawns.

Second, okay—maybe I was wishful when I promoted you to a “good” Hale.

Let’s downgrade that to “essential.” But don’t confuse essential with in charge. You’re here to stir the pot, not season it to taste.

Now sit, Hale. You’ll get your turn. Maybe. 🐺🍽️

And FYI: Next time you try to intimidate a puppy, don’t sound jealous of his leash. Embarrassing.

Staring at her response to my text sent a surge of something rushed through me that had become unfamiliar in the past ten years - and yes, I knew that most of that time was spent comatose, but still.  

Was she flirting via threats and power plays? Jesus God and all the Prophets. If I’d only been kept away from her before by the idea of a prison sentence, now that she was a goddamn adult? All bets were OFF. 

My fingers teased the keyboard as my mind raced through a thousand replies—dismissing them one by one—when I heard it: a sound so faint that, if I weren’t blessed with superior hearing and a nose that could pick out the exact vineyard behind a bottle of 2016 Petrus, I might have missed it. Was that... a crack in the fragile hold my nephew still had on his sanity and brooding existence—the hold he’d clung to since Rhiannon sauntered back into our lives and asked if we missed her?

Pressing pause on offering my reply in my banter - emojis and threats included - with Rhiannon, I followed my ears and nose to where Derek sat in a lump that screamed “I’m processing ideas and feelings I am not prepared to admit exist in the realm of my emotional constipation and savior complex”.  

“Do you want to talk about it?” Leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, I waited - and waited.  “Or not?” Eyebrow arching, trying to see if I could get some reaction from him or if I’d be sending a “Congrats on cracking the brooding fortress of unhandled trauma and bad decisions named Derek Hale” message instead of a “I’ll break Liam like a twig just to prove you’re not the boss of me, my queen” comeback to Rhiannon.

When he still said nothing but managed an almost sharp glare, I took a chance and pushed off the doorframe, stepping closer.

“Did you open your gift?”

His glance said yes, but I wanted confirmation. Details. I wanted to know what had made my nephew look like he’d just walked through a funhouse of warped mirrors—except the one that cut straight to his reflection, no distortions.

Mostly so I could report back to Rhiannon accurately, of course.

He grunted. Because why use words when a vague mountain troll noise would do?

“Could you try saying something that actually uses your vocal cords? Beyond a noise I could interpret as ‘stomach hurts, send help,’ or ‘I think I have gas,’ or ‘emotionally constipated and it’s killing me’?”

His glare grew a little hotter, which actually helped. Alright, Derek Hale was still alive and mostly functional. Add that to the untyped, official ‘You didn’t break him, but it was close’ report I’d be sending to the puppet master with wine-stained lips and heels sharp enough to tantalize or murder.

“Spill.” I nodded toward his corner of doom and gloom. “What did she send you that made you go from ‘partially nonverbal’ to ‘I should learn ASL so I can communicate’ mode?”

If I didn’t know better, I’d think he’d age regressed with the eye roll and deep long suffering sigh he hit me with - but I did, and knew he hadn’t, so I waited.  

“She sent me books.” Oh, look at that — he could do more than grunt. Cue proud uncle moment, complete with a mental parade and a participation trophy. 

I waited while he stewed. I had nothing—no comeback—because I had zero clue what kind of books the woman sent to make Derek—rarely overly talkative—retreat so far inward that I half-expected to be trolling the early childhood section of some painfully bright, soul-sucking department store, debating between a deck of sight words or a wipeable alphabet workbook as his next birthday gift.

Another eye roll and heavy handed sigh came before he opened his mouth and I got a gift better than his scent bomb of pain and suffering. This woman was a goddamn mastermind and I had been flirting with her over the possibilities of me attempting to murder Liam if she rubbed against him like she was marking her territory.

“ Sense and Sensibility, ” he barked like Jane Austen herself had crawled out of the grave to personally insult him.

“ Jane Eyre ,”—dear god, had Mr. Rochester and the crazy wife in the attic ganged up on him mentally? He took a breath like he was about to confess it had been him—and not Kate Argent’s arsonists—who set the fire that threw everything into chaos.

“And Fierce Fairytales .” That one I didn’t know, but honestly? How bad could something about Cinderella and her missing shoe really be?

Which, how very unlike me, slipped out before I could arm it better to hit the target the way I wanted— but Derek looked at me like I’d just announced I was the village idiot in his land of pain and suffering.

“‘Cinderella and her missing shoe?’” He stared off into the distance like he was having a full-on existential crisis about midnight curfews and glass slippers. 

“As if that’s the worst one—”

And then, as if I’d casually strolled into an alternate dimension that was half Twilight Zone and half Rhiannon wrote the script and didn’t give me a copy - 

Derek. Hale. My nephew who wore his trauma like a shield. A man who literally self sabotaged every single good thing or idea the world could possibly hand him. An Alpha wolf who I’d personally watched go full wolf transformation without hesitation because someone almost threatened someone he cared about. Just softly recited a poem as if he’d read it a thousand times and each word made him bleed - openly.  

“Before she became fire, she was water.

Quenching the thirst of every dying creature.

She gave and she gave

until she turned from sea to desert.

But instead of dying of the heat,

the sadness, the heartache,

she took all of her pain

and from her own ashes she became fire.” (Nikita Gill, “From the Ashes She Became”)

I stared. My mouth might have dropped open a bit. Inside my brain had one thought and one thought alone -

Rhiannon Morrigan has my nephew spewing poems like they’re prophetic spells, and I have no clue how to handle the madness.

Jesus. Was I...impressed? Turned on? Emotionally compromised? No, not that. Never that. I had a reputation to maintain, and I’d just lost a staring contest with a goddamn poem.

Chapter Text

PETER, AKA WOLF DADDY:

Color me impressed, Rhiannon.

Not only did you have Liam—sweet, doomed pup with the coordination of a newborn lamb headed for slaughter and aware of it—hand-deliver a package so saturated with your perfume that there’s not a square inch of this warehouse-turned-therapy-den that escaped its assault…

BUT.

You’ve also got my emotionally constipated nephew—yes, that Derek Hale, Sour Wolf himself—spouting poetry that hits like a prophetic curse and smells faintly of emotional growth.

Honestly? Should I kneel? Salute? Offer up my favorite leather jacket in tribute?

My queen of madness and hearts… you’re terrifying. And I think I’m in love.

The snort escapes before I can stop it—sharp, involuntary.

Dad’s head snaps up from his dinner plate like a shark scenting blood.

I barely get the chance to prep a second round of baguette-Frenchie humor before his eyes narrow. Damn, that tactic had worked so well before. But now?

He chews the bite of steak he just forked into his mouth while locking eyes with me—like he’s trying to pin me in place with sheer intensity and x-ray through me to the nonsense that caused that noise.

Lately, that sound has been triggering a full-blown internal improv set starring croissants, distractions, and carb-based denials. Clear indicators that my bullshit reserves are at full capacity.

Not gonna lie—I’m halfway bracing for him to drop something like, “Your eyes aren’t brown. But you’re full of shit.”

Instead?

He just keeps eating. Calmly cutting into his steak, chewing, watching me like one of those butterfly collectors—just waiting to find the perfect spot to push the pin in.

And hold me still.

“Not hungry?” he asks. His voice slices through the silence. So sharp, it almost makes me blink. Almost.

Because if the snort was the blood his inner shark scented… a blink would be the chum.

I pick up my fork and knife—set aside earlier to read Peter’s text and possible confession of love—and don’t even glance down as I cut my next bite. My gaze stays locked on his.

“You’re nowhere near the steak,” he says, without looking down. The scrape of my knife against porcelain is painfully obvious.

“So. Want to tell me—bread-based meme-lording aside—what exactly made a wolf snort like a pig at the dinner table?”

OK, wow, Dad just compared me to a pig - which, fair, given that I’ve now snorted loudly, during meals, and once with a pack-wide audience that included choking on what amounted to baby food.  

Either I confess—at least partially—to the absolute chaos of “I have an issue, and I’m now using the idiot whose noble intentions created it, and throwing in his uncle because if I’m a hot mess, he’s the spicy disaster to season it to perfection”…

or,

I deflect.

And make Dad deeply uncomfortable for ever asking. 

Does anyone actually doubt which one I’m choosing?

Come on.

Flip back to chapter one of my saga—title: “Here to make chaos and chew gum, and I’m all outta gum.”

“It was a text.”

His eyebrow rose in the international gesture for “no shit, Sherlock,” nudging me toward literally any excuse not sponsored by Captain Obvious.

“From Alistair.”

Dad slid the spoon closer to his plate, tucking it under like he was locking away any reaction that might tip his hand.

“He was wondering if I wanted to meet up and do some refresher training.”

I watched it flow cinematically across Dad’s face.

My former private combat trainer from school wants to meet—and retrain me in the gentle art of turning forks, pens, and perfume bottles into emasculating, vision-impairing statements.

Preferably before the poor bastard finishes monologuing.

Dinner finished without further interrogation about my ability to morph into a swine via a ding on my cell phone.  Which allowed me to process Peter’s text and how I would respond to it.

First - and I know it came last in his little you almost, maybe broke Derek, but in a definitely growth prompting way report - do I acknowledge his backhanded love confession or pretend it was an extra emoji or misplaced exclamation point? 

The problem with engaging in a battle of banter, wit, and casual threats with someone like Peter Hale?

He’s not unarmed. Damn it.

Options—I thrived on options.

And right now? I was leaning toward leaving his little emotional landmine on “read” and tuning out with either a Hamilton rewatch or a full Scream franchise descent, with only bathroom and hydration breaks to keep me technically alive.

I was mentally weighing the odds between replying to Peter with a simple “k,” then deep-diving into how Billy Loomis is the reason I now have an unhealthy attraction to hot psychopaths—and he’s not even sorry for it—

OR
 

cueing up Lin-Manuel’s rap-perfect tragedy, scream-singing like I was the one who held Alexander Hamilton as he died.
(Not Lin-Manuel. I’d go feral if someone harmed a single hair on that man’s genius head.)

Windows open. Doors too.

Let the whole neighborhood—and every wolf in earshot—experience my secondhand agony. 

Misery loves an audience.

Chapter Text

A shift happened. I wasn’t cognizant of when it fully engaged, but I noticed at some point the entire warehouse wasn’t quite as “this is us now” so much as the entire building was holding its breath like it knew something was coming and was bracing itself and the people coming and going from it for whatever it was.  

Blindness wouldn’t have made the smugness coiling off of Peter like waves. It almost matched the mental preparation I could see Scott making to face off against an unseen force - except “unseen” wasn’t the truth, I knew he was still including Rhiannon’s name in the “threat” column which I needed to correct, and soon.

I also knew that I’d have to be the least self aware human/werewolf in the known world to ignore that I wasn’t just witness to this shift but an integral part in it.  

And it came wrapped in brown paper, tucked into a non-descript brown gift bag, but the smell of her perfume and the obvious challenge she was issuing to me should have warned me: Proceed with Caution, this is gonna hurt.

I’d given up on dissecting what she’d wanted me to learn from “Sense and Sensibility” or “Jane Eyre” because honestly? Brooding, self sacrificing male lead, kind of tipped me off a touch what her point was there.  But that book of modern poetry disguised as female empowerment? That was her manifesto in a blue and gold package - “Fierce Fairytales” by Nikita Gill - I almost wondered if Rhiannon and the poet had met during her ten years away, on some casual girl’s only vacation, sipping mimosas and swapping “oh you think your ex was an asshole, let me tell you about mine” war stories.  

And knowing Rhiannon, and what I’d done, hers had won the “Asshole of the Year” award. She probably got free drinks, meals, and her suite comped.  

“Oh, so your ex accidentally hit your dog with his car and almost set the neighbor’s cat on fire because he didn’t know how outdoor grills work?” 

Rhiannon’s voice came to me as clear as a bell in this imaginary meeting of the “men are clueless, but we put up with them for the entertainment that we can drag out of the memories of putting up with them” minds in some place tropical, so she could wear that bikini she wore to go swimming in a river when we were 14 and is still burnt into my frontal lobe, but this time she has the curves she sauntered in here with to bitch slap me with her return to Beacon Hills. 

“Mine ripped up our marriage pact,” rolls eyes, but her spine goes stiff, which actually works to soften this sharp imagined memory, because that perfect posture makes her breasts look like a fucking buffet and I’m starving. “In front of my face.” There are a few faceless gasps from these imaginary gal pals I created, “we were fifteen,” her shoulder shrugs and it makes her breasts bounce, just enough to make me want to rewind and wonder why the fuck this is both arousing and fucked up, and my mind created it? “He thought he was ‘saving me’,” another eye roll and that look girls give one another that screams ‘ridiculous pups and their silly ideas’.  “Then he threw it in a lit fireplace and told me it was ‘for the best’.”  

That fucking pact. I’d thought I WAS saving her from the clear curse of being chained to me, not just my fucking name and a lineage of pain and blood, but that was the catalyst and here came the reckoning wearing black leather with red lace stilettos and a blood red tank top going “you did this, now what are you going to do for an encore?”

And as I sat there and tried to think of a way to meet her, face to face, and tell her I did see her - more clearly than I had ever in my entire life seen another human or wolf before. That I found her glorious, not just beautiful, but strong and sure. That I had fucked up on such an epic scale that I probably created casualties that we’d never truly know about, but there were there, hovering and waiting.  That I heard her - not just her silence, or her clipped words - no I heard what she wasn’t saying. 

“You fucked up, but you’re not irredeemable, if you were, I wouldn’t have given you an invitation to learn and grow,” but with a warning, because Rhiannon was nothing if not thorough. “Don’t fuck up, again.”  

My mind was debating between a casual “oh, I had no clue you’d be here” bump somewhere in Beacon Hills (which I’d use Liam and his apparent connection to her to facilitate) or I could just walk up to the front door of a house I hadn’t dared visit since ripping that contract up and tossing it into her dad’s office fireplace while she stared at me like she was breaking, but would never let her see the pieces.  

“If that’s PETER MOTHERFUCKING HALE that’s making you snort like a swine dressed in designer clothes, I swear to fucking CHRIST, Rhiannon!”  

I’m not going to lie - I jumped and partially transformed from that crack that came from a distance, since I KNEW Calvin Morrigan would rather eat his own shoe than come near Peter or me willingly - and I’m neither embarrassed nor ashamed for it.  That Alpha terrified me from the moment his gaze landed on me during a Hale - Morrigan playdate when Rhiannon and I were five and she kissed my cheek. It read, “break her heart or push her away because ‘ew cooties’ and I’ll haunt your nightmares forever, kid”. Spoiler: I didn’t neither at five years old and he still visited my nightmares.  

And then, once my pulse returned from “fight it, kill it, or run so hard your legs give out” mode - it hit me like a freight train:

Peter was in contact with Rhiannon.

He had made her laugh so hard she snorted.

And Calvin Morrigan knew it, and renamed Peter.  

Why did I get books and a reminder of my past fuckups and yet, Peter got her fucking laughter? If we’d gotten to pick our presents from a gift-giving Rhiannon, I would have picked what he got.

Chapter Text

I shouldn’t have picked “Hamilton” for my binge-watch, for peek leave Peter on read energy.

I am wolf-woman (woman-wolf? Make a mental note to workshop that later) enough to admit it. 

Sitting in an igloo of blankets, feeling like a polar bear with too many emotions and not enough headspace to logically manage them, I’d cranked the air up to Dante’s Infernal level of cold - no need making my igloo more uncomfortable than my feelings were making it - and contemplating why my entire heart felt shattered in secondhand heartbreak that somehow out dramatized Eliza’s reaction?

My voice broke harder than hers when she was singing her pain and grief, people. And I was flapping.  

Now, the deflecting at all costs part of my brain would happily have chalked this up to “you watched Lin-Manuel die, that’s a tragedy no matter what he’s playing, and that makes it OK and understandable”. 

Which, fair, he’s a genius and his death will be met - by me - with the same unhinged intensity Elvis’ fans met his death. Even if he went out via fried sandwich, a diet of mostly uppers and downers chased by alcohol, on the toilet like the King they worshiped outside his animal print castle. 

I just feel my future grief for Lin-Manuel  is marginally more justified.

Unfortunately, EMOTIONS have entered the chat aka my brain.  And since hell is cold and lonely, therefore silent, they won the floor. And then tossed more truth bombs my way than I have ever come armed with - in my life and entire history of planning and plotting, respect - and I try to look away, but how do you actively ignore your own brain? Asking for a traumatized wolf-girl, me, I’m the traumatized wolf-girl (girl-wolf? Adding that to my wordplay workshop/guide to self identity and finding the perfect way to do it).

Derek. Fucking. Hale. He’s my Alexander Hamilton. And I want to throw myself out the goddamn window at the realization.  

Now? 

At this very moment in my life and issues.

This is the moment my brain decides to wake up and go, “Look, we helped you create the plan, but we think it's time to look in the mirror and take a moment to acknowledge the WHY of it all.”  

Well fuck me running up hill with a rusty pitchfork and a lit match.  (I’m hoping I get impaled by the pitchfork, and the match is to set my own hair on fire.)

My brain isn’t done. Why would it be? I opened the door with Hamilton (cracked it slightly) and that motherfucker just shoved it open wide and said “we doing this, now”.  

And Peter? Well, let us assure you, if you’d gone with that “Scream” marathon, we would have outed your need for him first, but not nearly as subtly as we’re handing you the real deal on Derek, so princess wolfpops, you were fucked regardless.  Hint: Billy Loomis and those full page posters you ripped from every teenie bopper magazine from the moment Skeet Ulrich swaggered into Hollywood - you know, the one you have tucked -

Nope, you’re not going to shame me for my “memory box”, brain, keep moving.  

So here I am, in my igloo of solitude, being slapped in my face by my brain’s version of a dick of truth and I can’t do what I normally do - I can’t just deflect with humor, with pop culture or with sarcasm and dry wit. 

Nope, this is a fucking reckoning I didn’t precision plan with a soundtrack heavy on Halestorm and Taylor Swift.  And now that it’s in my face and staring me down with a “dare you to blink first” challenge, I realize I can’t do it. I can’t just ignore it all and pretend I’m playing a casual game of “you fucked up, now I’m here to poke you anytime I think you’re on the verge of forgetting.” 

But I own my own trauma and path to working through it - otherwise I’d be creating an account with whatever the latest and greatest virtual therapy offering just hit the internet. So I do what I do best, I plot my course of attack:

First - a shower or bath. I don’t know if I actually stink or if my olfactory senses are just making me think I do - emotional overload hijacked my senses and all I got was maybe body odor?

Next - dress, not to impress, but to address.  

Last - face the dragon. Not Derek. Not Peter. Dad. Because I HAD to know if he knew, and if he did, then his insistence on how both Hales (mostly Derek, because that ripped contract was in his hands, not Peter’s) did me a favor would cut deeper than what that rip had unleashed.  

I probably looked like the little girl he’d watched charge into any situation with the subtlety of a bull on crack - all horns, no questions or fear of consequences. The loose and comfy denim overalls, the long sleeved tight t-shirt - the hem of the overalls cuffed so my ankles were bare, and my feet as bare as when I’d run headlong into whatever madness my brain concocted and filed under “this is going to be epic and fun, but there will be blood and bruises”.  

Hair up in a ponytail, I knew as soon as Dad’s eyes locked on my face and he went pale that he was seeing me at 15, shattered but standing.  

“Rhi -” but I held up a trembling hand.

Taking a deep breath, ragged but fortifying, I shook my head and begged him for his silence without a word. When he didn’t speak I took it as acceptance.  “Did you know?” His forehead furrowed and his eyes went into a squint as if he were trying to recall if we were in the middle of a conversation and he skipped out of the beginning.  “Did you know about the clauses in the marriage pact?” Now he looked baffled, like I’d just taken a Hale shaped poo on his desk and said “behold, miracles”.  

“Clauses?” Literally confused beyond any point in his life. “It was a marriage pact, like the one I had with your mom. The same, I imagine that Talia had with her husband.” He said it without the usually “let’s tiptoe around your mom and her best friend, who happened to have been your former intended’s mom and how we lost both in the same tragedy” tone that said “I am trying to not light whatever fire under your ass that made you bolt like a colt the last time we acknowledged this shit”.  

“Rhiannon, when your mom and Talia came to me with the idea that you and Derek should basically close the circle on their friendship and found family ideals, we all decided simple was best. It wasn’t about trapping the two of you, it was about the potential of our children growing our packs and our families, so if there were clauses, then I assure you, I had no idea.”  

That made sense - both from what I’d gleaned during my travels and from what I knew about my dad and mom - and yes, Talia Hale too.  

“Why are you asking this now?” Dad’s Alpha senses were tingling and I was too emotionally overloaded to get off the tragedy train. “What were these clauses and -” he took his own breath, like he knew he was ripping a bandaid off that would yank most of my hair out with it. “How do you know they existed, since Derek destroyed the pact?” 

I flinched and so did he, but I didn’t faint or cry, so at least some of my dignity stayed firmly intact.  Sighing, I pulled up a chair and sat down, because this shit was about to get very real and very exhausting very fast. 

“You wanted to know why I left,” Dad didn’t settle. He braced—like he’d been waiting for this since the day I took that boarding school offer, since I graduated, since my heels touched this damn walkway again.

“I left because I was heartbroken -” truth, and simple.  “I stayed away and traveled because of something that happened my senior year,” and he shifted like his brain was already making plans to kill someone who might have done something that made coming home a “nope” option.  

“Calm down,” rolling my eyes to attempt to kill some of the growing tension and failing miserably, “No one did traumatizing bad touch to your little girl, Dad,” and that was it, actually, because I was going to have to have THE TALK with my dad in a very upside down way 

“Have you ever watched the horror movie “Teeth”?”  Internally: I have the subtlety of a brick to teeth.

His eyes snapped shut in a “I’m a father and I don’t want to know why my daughter just segwayed from ‘no one assaulted me to asking for my critique on a horror movie about a girl whose vagina bites men’s - nope I can’t’” sign that made me fear I was literally shutting down my huge, warm Alpha poppa.  

“My lady parts don’t have teeth,” mercy? Hopefully, but at least it made his eyes reopen with only a slight reluctance.  “But they also don’t work properly.” Great, I just told him my plumbing is broken with the elegance of Mario slapping Toad like he always knew he was worse than Bowswer (Toad totally told him that he was being cucked by Peach, and Mario couldn’t handle the truth).  

“They aren’t fully functional?” We’re literally talking about my vagina like it’s a car that stopped revving, and I don’t actually hate it. Like, yes, my theoretical motor is locked, and I need a very particular set of mechanics to fix it.  “And this has something to do with clauses that I didn’t know about?”  

Truth time, this shit freaked me out in a way that took me MONTHS to process and I was about to ask my dad, poor man who had growled a few cubs out of partial transformation without a blink, to wrap his head around it like yesterday.  

“After graduation -” I would not be giving my DAD the trials and tribulations of an 18 year old me TRYING to get past the make out portion of the evening to rapidly worsening failures. Hint: I had a VIP membership issued to me from Adam and Eve, enough packages that I picked up from post offices and front desks at hotels that the blushes when the handler handed them over became just a part of the landscape of my life. Also, there were no loopholes to the “Hale male” portion of my nightmare. That means, even though I never felt the least bit bicurious, I went THERE.  But I was not going to throw that onto the oriental carpet and deal with that “you’re my daughter, WHY would you tell me that?” mess.  

“I realized that I couldn’t come home knowing that I’m a biological failure, so I went to places that had higher populations of Emissaries and other supernaturally inclined persons. Paris was one of the first, non-mythologically based - accounts of werewolves and I wanted to see if anyone had records.” 

They did, I learned that any contract that had to have the type of archaic language that wolf pack marriage pacts were built around had to be basically copy/pasted into the archives. Those archives are in Greece, where the myths started about our kind, like how the Vatican takes up space in Rome, because Jesus owned that place like a bitch after his three day post death revival.  

“And you learned?” Dad looked shell shocked already, which again, fair.  

My throat closed, like the words I’d dragged across continents still didn’t want to come out. Like saying it would make it true, and if it was true—then maybe I was never meant to come home whole.

OK, how do you gently explain to your dad that his constant “I should send Derek a thank you card” feels about ripping up a pact that supposedly saved your heart, but didn’t just break it, it also made your lady parts snap shut like a venus flytrap finding a juicy fly while the “invader” you chose for it bumped against desert dryness and asked “I thought you were into this?”  

I’m sure YOU might have casually tiptoed around it, but we’re talking about how I did it, and I’m not exactly the queen of ease into anything.

“I learned that someone, somehow, slipped a ‘touched by a non-Hale your coochie locks up like Fort Knox and only those Hale men have the key’ clause and a ‘destruction of this pact in physical form just makes it stick’ sidenote that is a bit - life altering.”  

He blinked. And then blinked some more. 

And I wasn’t sure if I broke him with my pussy being like a damn vault or if it was the “I’ve been congratulating Derek on doing a good thing - not to his face, because he still hurt my baby girl - and that outward ‘you dodged a bullet when that boy dismantled the gun’ show around her hurt her as badly” truth bomb that had me fearing I just made Dad into a blue screen of death and I might be competently ready to take on his Alpha role in our pack, but let’s be honest, I was a fucking mess and would probably be murdered in my sleep for handing out designer outfits as new uniforms.  

I started counting his blinks, and I’d just hit 500 when he rebooted.  

“Someone put a what clause and a line note about what now?” Don’t make me do it, don’t make me repeat that fucking madness, but then he blinked two more times and sighed.  “Do you have any fucking clue about WHO did this?”  Ah, there we go, I could slide away from “Dior, but make it capable of surviving a vicious attack” Pinterest board for when I slid into my Alpha heels.  

“Yep,” I did have an idea, but it wasn’t one with a face, just a set of initials.  “Do the initials ‘GA’ or ‘KA’ mean anything to you? Because they were found on the edges of the copy of the pact, like someone was signing their work”  He was shaking his head while his entire being screamed “not yet, but I will.”  

“They aren’t a wolf that’s with an acknowledged and documented pack -” Dad looked at me and I saw it - he was impressed that I had just zeroed in on my own issue, but wanted to find the source, that didn’t have Hale as a surname.  “I thought if these people fucked with a marital pact, they were probably willing to fuck around elsewhere -” now he knew, I deep dived into supernatural chronicles like it was my job. “Nothing that I could find matched.”   

“So you’re back to -” please God above and Satan below let that eye flick to my crotch be a hallucination, for my sanity and the livelihood of the furniture in his office.  “Um, fulfill the obligations of the clauses?”  

Congratulations, we’ve moved from my velvet folds being promoted from Christine cursed car vibes to contractually necessary to move beyond this trauma - next up, we’ll discuss best positions, but only use legalese. 

“I’m back to see if staying locked in nada is better than giving two more emotionally shuttered wolves than me a chance to prove they aren’t still shackled to their inability to go from point a to point b in a relationship without making me take a mental poll if I should slap the taste from their mouths or kiss them.”  

“TWO?!” OK, maybe oops is in order, but he had to know, I mean unless all dads are just fucking BLIND when it comes to their daughters’ interest in the opposite sex - which human dads? Sure, it makes sense. But my dad is a goddamn Alpha who has EXTRA everything that a human parent has, so color me shocked that he’s been sitting in a corner with his eyes closed and his fingers in his ears while his mouth is howling “lalalala” to ignore the two Hale shaped shadows that have been wrapped around me since I understood how to put “hot” and “male” together.  

“Derek, I guess,” grudgingly was a word designed for how my dad sounded, as in, it was specifically created for his own private and personal use for any mention of Derek Hale, forever and always. “I understand, BUT -” 

Should I call one of the guys Dad usually keeps close for protection - yes, we are supernatural predators, but we have guards who are too, I don’t make the rules, I just live inside of the dome surrounded by them - because that vein in his throat and the one on his forehead are throbbing in a very open to observation way.  

“PETER MOTHERFUCKING HALE?!” 

OK, maybe the signs that my dad was less than a silent member in Peter Hale’s non-existent fan club were there, but they’d never been more than his “that’s an a person shaped as an asshole” and maybe a huge dose of Chris Evans and his viral “I don’t wike it” interview. Like the glares, and the “he wouldn’t dare” slipping out at the mere mention of the Hales.  

Yikes, doubt I have to call anyone to keep Dad from erupting and having an aneurism since, behold that fucking howl.  

I exited after I did everything but wrap Dad in a weighted emotional support blanket and a cup of tea that was laced with “calming the storm that reality and truth hits you with” herbs.  

Promising that Peter NEVER groomed, touched, or licked me - 

“Seriously, I mocked him because he didn’t flirt with a prison sentence to taste my jail bait ass,” which ok, hindsight wasn’t great for getting Dad’s pulse under control, but I suck at comforting fragile masculinity.  

“And you know, he’s allowed to do all of those, maybe not the grooming, unless we’re talking like hair brushing and shared baths -” 

He was very close to doing the blink thing again and watching Dad reboot wasn’t really something I cared to witness again. So I left his office and went upstairs to dismantle my igloo - read: make my bed and clean up my room, possibly spray something to excise the lingering scent of truth, consequences, and feelings - when my phone lit up with a new message.

PETER, AKA DADDY WOLF: 

Did I just hear my name - with a new middle name - break the sound barrier? And then as a sequel have your FATHER text me with this:

“We need to have a chat.” 

This is a threat, isn’t it? Why did Derek get books, Liam get to look like he saw god and tasted the glory, and I’m getting the most threatening six words to ever see pop across my phone screen under the contact I saved as “THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE GOOD”?!

And, just like his texts had managed to do during two dinners, I snorted - but this time the only witnesses were my pillows, so I’m claiming that as a victory. Or I would have if Dad’s voice didn’t growl up through two floors with this gem :

“If that’s PETER MOTHERFUCKING HALE that’s making you snort like a swine dressed in designer clothes, I swear to fucking CHRIST, Rhiannon!”  

Chapter Text

Waiting was a punishment for every crime I ever considered plotting. Particularly when I was waiting for HER to respond. Rhiannon Morrigan had put me, Peter Hale, on READ for exactly 12 hours, three minutes and 5, no make that 6 seconds. 

I’d baited the hook. I offered fealty. I offered worship. I offered my favorite leather jacket. 

And OK, I slipped and mentioned that I might be in love - testing the waters with the tiniest part of skin I was willing to get wet, or so I thought - and I got NOTHING back.

No: Thank you, next.

No: Really, Peter, are you already in love and ready to worship me? You haven’t even sent me your still beating heart.  Yet.

Nope, I got nothing, nada, zilch, zip. And my phone wasn’t dead. I kept checking, to make sure. And I hadn’t missed a notification, I checked.  

I nearly dropped it when I got a notification. As if my hands were tossing the manifestation of my - but then I saw the contact name and swallowed so hard that I thought someone would come into my room and see if I’d brought snacks to share.  

THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE GOOD (Formerly saved under the contact name of: RHIANNON’S REAL FATHER; IS PLOTTING MY MURDER):

We need to have a chat.

The way my soul vacated my body was both memorable and traumatizing. Then it came back so it could remind me that I was fucked, only to pat me on the back and whisper, “you poor bastard”.  

RHIANNON, CHAOS WOLF OF MY DIRTIEST DREAMS (Wait, could Calvin Morrigan know that’s how she’s saved in my contacts, should I change it to “Rhiannon Morrigan Owner of My Heart, Lungs, and Soul - With My Utmost And Fully Clothed Respect?)

Did I just hear my name - with a new middle name - break the sound barrier? And then as a sequel have your FATHER text me with this:

“We need to have a chat.” 

This is a threat, isn’t it? Why did Derek get books, Liam get to look like he saw god and tasted the glory, and I’m getting the most threatening six words to ever see pop across my phone screen under the contact I saved as “THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE GOOD”?!

I broke the silence first, but for fuck’s sake, my soul is GONE from the mere ass clenching terror those six words caused me. And I was trying to NOT recall every single time I witnessed Rhiannon’s “accidental - obviously NOT accidental” towel drops with the bathroom door WIDE OPEN, when she would stay over - under the excuse of “sleepovers with Laura and Cora”. 

And how I am but a fucking man, with a goddamn predatory beast as a genetically powerup so EXCUSE ME, but how could I NOT look?! And wondering if Calvin Morrigan had clocked each one, from ten miles away, with super Alpha Dad senses and fucking wall penetrating binoculars and now I was about to be hit with the real reckoning? 

Every meeting, even casual with Calvin after each “did I forget to close the door AND leave the shower curtain open? Again?” episode that I’d had with Rhiannon during her “if I tease hard enough, he’ll Lolita me to happiness” era had been painfully brutal, but one sided. Or so I’d thought. Now I was trying to return to those casual “ah, Peter, glad you could join us for dinner” moments and view it through the eyes of an Alpha who thought the uncle of the boy his daughter was slotted to marry was a fucking pervert with a white van and “candy” to lure her in.  

Did my eyes do that thing that I can’t seem to control even though I KNOW how it looks - you know the one? Where they decide to take a thorough tour of a body, from toes to curls and someone FEELS it?  Usually the person my eyes are visually mapping like a horny cartographer, but maybe Calvin is that Alpha that just FEELS it all.  

Maybe that’s why the bottle of scotch - single malt, limited batch - had been met with a slight nod and a miniscule lift of his left eyebrow. He assumed I was trading scotch for feeling up his daughter with my eyes.  

And - as if that weren’t bad enough - the follow up after seeing that she’d READ my text:  

“If that’s PETER MOTHERFUCKING HALE that’s making you snort like a swine dressed in designer clothes, I swear to fucking CHRIST, Rhiannon!

My fingers stalled on the barely written “Should I write my will first -” text to the man and it was like HE KNEW. 

Soul came back, shuddered, and then checked out with nary a backward glance. I have seen my Death’s face - and it’s Calvin Morrigan. I had choices - salute Calvin Reeper with a sardonic grin, accept my fate, write my obituary so the tone suits me or run and hide behind a bigger wolf - or a wolf/human shield, wonder if Liam would volunteer? He started this - barrelling into Rhiannon like a wolf without brakes, then doing her a favor and putting her contact information in the palm of my hand (OK I ripped it from his fingers, but it counts).   

My finger was hovering over a block button I’d never actually press - I’d lost ten years of my life to a coma, but waking up and finding out she’d left down? That was a pain I didn’t want to experience again - not without someone setting three quarters of my body on fire and causing my mind to retreat so far into my skin suit that I could hibernate through the loss again. Doing that willingly? Not in a lifetime.  

I was staring at my phone, willing it to tell me what to do and her text notification came at the same time Derek knocked on the open door frame of my room. 

RHIANNON, CHAOS WOLF OF MY DIRTIEST DREAMS:

He won’t kill you, but he will make you wish for death. 

Tell Derek that I’d like to see you both, together, soon.

Please?

And as if I wanted to remember that Derek and Rhiannon were the same age, and once destined for the altar, he channeled her text:

“I think we should talk about -” he waved his hand in a subtle, but obvious THIS gesture, and I knew he meant Rhiannon, Calvin’s ability to break the sound barrier with my name as the cheat code, and the reality that - unlike before the fire and the aftermath - this time I wasn’t just a spectator in their story, I was a lead character. 

Chapter Text

I asked, nicely, for Dad to hold off on his interrogation of Peter. 

He glared. 

He opened his mouth, and shut it, three times.

He took a deep breath.

Then he asked me, “why?”

“Because neither he nor Derek know what ripping that contract did -”

“But there might have been a clause that MADE you want him,” Ah, right, the hovering fear of more clauses to traumatize me via Hale pheromones.

Shaking my head, I curled into the same chair where I’d sat while telling him that my feminine flower was more venus flytrap than dripping with sensual honey. “It didn’t have a hint of love or lust spell -” I felt stupid even saying those words, but it wasn’t the first time I had to. “When I was looking for the why behind my -” I still refused to graphically describe my sexual anorexia to my DAD, “tragic condition of perpetual innocence.” Great, now I sounded like a fucking Disney cleansed version of my mess. “Right after learning that having a Hale shaped invader would be the only way my battlements could be breached,” Dad flinched, I felt proud that I hadn’t said ‘cock’ once. 

“And right before I asked if we could nail down who tagged their work like Banksky in the margins, I asked if the reason that I kept doing towel drops while visiting the Hale’s family home was because I’d been whammied by the lingering odor of that - kind of double down on my pain.” 

And this time, Dad’s eyes weren’t flinching because I was being inappropriately descriptive, but because that was the core of it - I was in pain.

“There’s no -” he took a breath, steadying himself to wade into uncomfortable waters, but wanting me to see that he was trying, and he was right beside me - both as my dad and as my fiercest warrior.  “You’re saying there’s no clause that says this is somehow amplified from teenage crush, to obsession?” 

Shaking my head again, I sighed and let my head fall back, but didn’t drop our eye contact. This was serious, and I wanted him to see that I knew that and I was taking it seriously - that I have since the moment I started looking for the reason that I couldn’t just move on.  

“The records have keepers,” his head tipped, a small nod. “The keepers aren’t just Emissaries, there are Omega wolves, Sirens, pretty sure there was at least one succubus and two incubi.” Dad waited, letting me explain why I was certain that there wasn’t something that maybe wasn’t written into the pact, but maybe still held the strings tying me to the Hales. 

“Apparently those type of spells or curses -” because let’s be honest, forcing someone to FEEL what they don’t actually feel is a fucking curse.  “They have their own scent, it lingers, it can’t be covered or washed away, and even the strongest cloaking spells can’t hide it.” I watched him start to accept that whatever I felt for the Hales, whatever kept me from being completely prepared to use their keys and then push them both off a cliff, wasn’t something that was part of losing my own free will. 

“The only thing any of them smelled on me was tension, rage, and a heavy dose of my perfume - and my own personal fragrance, not Obsession for Hales circa 20 years ago, contract date.”  

Which, honestly, is my signature scent these days—burned bridges and expensive floral notes.

Dad gave me the time I asked for—the breath between me telling Derek and Peter what ripping up that marital pact unleashed, and his own moment to sit Peter down - 

OK, I’m going to do a silent prayer whichever god might be wheeling to take the wheel and redirect Dad from full on “you’re a pervert who should buy a white fan and just own your truth” lecture to Peter Hale and maybe “look, perhaps both of us have been reading one another and our intentions toward Rhiannon through poorly tinted goggles, let’s have a chat.” 

And maybe I’ll light a candle - or a church full of them - just to manifest that a little bit more. 

Chapter Text

I hadn’t expected Peter to be precisely willing to sit down and discuss Rhiannon like the mature adult he kept reminding the entire pack that he was, but he followed me to the kitchen - neutral territory for a topic we both knew wasn’t the slightest bit neutral.

I had Fierce Fairytales in my hand, as if Nikita Gill had written a bible that I couldn’t sit down and walk away from - or like a tome of protection, a reminder that I could admit that I’d screwed up and that I wanted to address that, own it, and maybe move on from it.

“If this is about Calvin’s -” I shook my head, while it was jarring to know that Rhiannon’s father was aware that Peter was in contact with her and wasn’t the least bit alright with that knowledge, it wasn’t what made this face to face moment necessary. 

“I’ll leave the explanations for why Calvin Morrigan just broke sound barriers to call her a pig in designer clothes and you the reason behind that fashion disaster up to you to explain to the pack,” I bit back a grin at the vision of it. “Though I want ring side seats when you do that lecture with Malia and Stiles, they’re going to have questions, it’s going to get graphic.”  

The sigh my uncle let out was worth the warning, it was like releasing a pressure valve that also set the tone for what was going to be a fucking tough discussion.

Rhiannon. 

How my grand gesture of “you’re free” blew up in my face with spectacular results.

and how, somehow, she hadn’t just set fire to the warehouse—metaphorically, but barely—after knocking us out with a lethal mix of her perfume and sheer presence. She handed us blueprints. Not to fix it, not really. But to maybe build something where we didn’t need higher walls.

“Do you know why I did it?” I meant to ease into this, maybe ask him why or how he was still in contact with her, but my mouth clearly didn’t get that memo.  His eyes snapped to my face and his expression read ‘duh’.  

“Because you self sabotage in a way that would make that monk that set himself on fire seem subtle?” Yeah, that’s what I thought, everyone - Peter, since everyone else was dead who knew me “best” - would think.  

Huffing out a laugh without a hint of humor to it, I shook my head. “That should be my epitaph, but no, that’s not why I did it.”  Not the entire reason, not really.  “Remember Paige?” He swallowed, and I took it as the affirmation it was.  “I looked at this completely innocent human girl, and thought ‘what if I could pick someone different, someone entirely NOT Rhiannon’ -” 

Paige had been so different from Rhiannon, but with hints of her. She was quiet and passive. She saw my attention as some kind of blessing.  But she read like her life would end if she didn’t absorb at least three books a week. Paige was tall, willowy, and blonde. If I could have sat down and created Rhiannon’s complete opposite - Paige would have been the creation.  

“She picked up on it,” Paige, I didn’t think I talked about Rhiannon that much, but she heard it clearly. “She told me, after she went and asked Marcus for the ‘gift’ and was wracked with the pain that made her beg me to kill her, to make it stop, she told me that she wanted to be what SHE was to me.”  I’d done it, of course, given her mercy and given myself more guilt.  “Paige told me that she knew she’d never be as breathtaking as Rhiannon was to me…”

“but she’d thought if she was powerful - wolf powerful - like her, maybe I’d see her as the equal I saw Rhiannon being.” 

“I gave her mercy. And gave myself something worse.”

Peter stood across the island from me. He was looking at me like he’d never seen me, not really, before this very moment. His mouth opened, his arm started reaching across the empty surface separating us, but I moved back - leaning against the countertop behind me. 

Not yet. 

He couldn’t just turn back into the uncle he’d been when I was little and he talked me down from tears when I fell down or when I didn’t meet a goal I’d set myself. Not until I told him everything. He was my rehearsal for when I would tell her. When I’d look Rhiannon in the eye and tell her just how fucking broken I was.  

“Derek,” he flinched like I was dismissing him or blocking him from trying, but I shook my head.

“That’s not the only thing, not even the worst thing I did, Peter, so -” he swallowed and stood taller, preparing himself for the real blow that he knew was coming.  

“You know that I played a part -” God, that was such a diminishing way to describe how I fucking ruined everyone’s lives with one fucking decision. “You know that Paige’s death put me in a bad headspace -” the understatement of my life. 

“That I went from ‘let me try to taste something the exact opposite from what my future holds’ to literally playing with actual fire -” the fire, that was the conclusion of my poor decisions, but what I was going to unload? That was the combustibles that started it - SHE was the combustibles that started it.  

“Kate Argent,” that name, would I ever say it and not feel like I was standing in the middle of the fucking fire - one that I wasn’t home to witness - with the flames still building, promising to finally burn me alive?  “You know it’s funny,” it wasn’t, not even a little bit, “hunters see us as some kind of unnatural monstrosity that can’t be allowed to exist, but she had a predatory way of sensing vulnerability in a teenage boy that makes her more monstrous than any of us -” staring at Peter - my uncle who killed my sister to gain her Alpha spark - “could ever try to be.”  

I’d thought that Paige was Rhiannon’s opposite? I was fucking delusional. Paige was as observant as Rhiannon. She was just as impulsive and just as drawn to showing me that she wasn’t a footnote in my story. And oddly enough she was the reason I met Rhiannon’s actual complete opposite. 

Rhiannon may look like a walking, talking sexual fantasy come to life - but she still isn’t weaponizing her sexuality like it’s just one more weapon in her arsenal - kept next to the crossbows, but above the shotguns.  

Kate Argent? She uses her sexuality with more precision than she can shoot a wolfsbane soaked arrow.  She scented my pain, she tasted my guilt, and she used it all to groom me into a sex toy with inside knowledge - 

She used me. To get her kicks from underage orgasms I thought were affection. And to get the layout of the house, the patterns of my family, the cracks in our security. She didn’t need claws or fire to destroy me.

She burned down my world with what I gave her in bed.

She killed my mother, my sister, most of my family’s pack, AND Rhiannon’s mom - with intel she got from pillowtalk with me.  

“I started this,” gesturing between us, the entire island still separating us, “thinking I was going to ask you how you do it -” his brow furrowed, eyes narrowed, confusion leaking from his normally smug pores.  “How do you make her laugh? After I basically ruined our lives?” 

Chapter Text

When my nephew - who at some point in our relationship, shifted from a little boy that I would have thrown myself in front of so he would never have to feel the slightest hint of failure to a man who I saw as competition - asks me a seemingly simple question, but it comes after he opened up his own rib cage and showed me what was actually the ingredients in his trauma and guilt stew, how precisely am I supposed to answer?

“How do you make her laugh?” With the addendum, “After I basically ruined our lives?”  

God. The pain in that, the vulnerability.

And I didn’t have my usual urge to push it. To poke it and mock it.  To make his pain the center of my entertainment.

Why?

Because I didn’t see Derek with those harsh angles that years and age have given him. I didn’t see the dark Disney prince that made me want to let my Disney villain out in retaliation.  

I saw the little boy who would ask me, eyes huge like I was his hero and protector rolled into one magical being, how I kept my wolf side under control. I saw the, slightly older, child who asked me for help picking flowers for Rhiannon, not because he wanted to (there were eye rolls, to PROVE he totally didn’t WANT to) but because he knew girls liked flowers and added a shrug for emphasis.  My mind conjured up the teenager, eyes narrowing because he caught her dropping her towel in front of me, and suddenly I wasn’t just his hero - I was an asshole that his future might see as a temptation.  

And that’s why I didn’t just go my usual route of - well of ME.

“I don’t know,” and I had no clue why the truth came so easily, other than because Derek had been so openly vulnerable and somehow that was the key to allowing my own to slip out.  “I have no clue how I can make her snort -” her father’s words, still echoing in my ears, not mine. “And I swear to God, Derek, I didn’t mean -”

He shook his head, and for once it wasn’t in a way that spoke volumes on how fucking over me he was.  “I know you didn’t,” and I could HEAR that he meant it.  “Rhiannon isn’t exactly the type of woman - or girl - that just tiptoes around what she wants, Peter.” No, no she wasn’t.  “And I made a choice for her, I ripped that option of hearing what she wanted away -” a deep breath and a lip bite that might just have been to keep him steady.  “She’s pissed at you too, so -” Shrug, but not in the same way his little boy self had shrugged off wanting to impress little girl Rhiannon with hand picked flowers, in an adult - why did she get pissed at me, and how did I break through and find a crack in her irritation to get her to laugh.

“I knew she wanted something,” I’d have had to have been blind and deaf to mix her overt - and shockingly open, even for a teenager - attempts at seduction. “But I couldn’t decide,” I glanced at him, hoping he knew I wasn’t saying what I was about to say to hurt him, not after he’d basically fileted himself for it. “If she was trying to use me as a diversion from her finding out about Paige -” 

It’s what I assumed, she never said she knew, but she was observant as hell and I had no doubts that between her own ability to see the smallest hints and figure it out, and the fact that every wolf pack in the history of werewolves gossiped like small town grannies fueled by Red Bull and spite.  

It made the most sense.  Look, I know I’m attractive, but aside from a light school girl crush from Rhiannon - I never would have thought “I’m so hot and charismatic that this girl is going to offer up her virginity like she can’t imagine anyone else worthy enough to take it, and keep taking it, over and over.” Because I was damn good at observing things too, and while her and Derek went through the “eww, cooties” stage of their childhoods and the constant push together that having moms who were best friends would make inevitable, I also watched while they blossomed into what could be, or would have been if Derek hadn’t gone full relationship martyr.  

Derek didn’t flinch, not when I hit what I normally would have aimed for maximum impact, he just waited. 

“I tried, Derek,” it was NOT a plea, even if my voice broke just a little. “I tried not to look. I tried to bring over enough women when I knew she was staying over - so she could see, smell, and hear that I wasn’t right for her.” And she would double down, waiting until the faceless nameless women walked away, left in a satisfied cloud of ‘one and done’ lack of shame, and leave the bathroom door wide open “by accident” and step out of the shower like she’d timed it so I couldn’t look away.  “And then, one day,” it was the day of the fire, as if she knew something was about to happen, something that would dramatically change everyone’s life. “She stood right in front of me and told me to take it. To take her.” She’d challenged me, telling me that I could have it, all of it, her and that taste of power that being with the future Alpha of the Morrigan pack would give me. “And I shot it down - her, and all that came with that offer.” 

She looked like I slapped her. Like I’d taken what was left of her heart - I knew that Derek was being toyed with by an older woman, but I’d thought, mistakenly, that it was just one of those ‘sew wild oat’ things that boys do - and just handed it back like it wasn’t worth my time, that she wasn’t worth my time. I’d been thinking of her age, of her - what I considered - irrational teenage hormonal behavior. I hadn’t seen this young woman bleeding out in not feeling like enough. And I just shrugged like “oh well”.  Her eyes were glassy. But her spine went solid steel and then she gave me a look that told me I was the unworthy one.  And she was right. On so fucking many levels.  

Chapter Text

PETER, AKA WOLF DADDY:

Can you come over now?

We’re in share mode - yes, WE’RE - Derek is being -

Can you come over now? If you want us at our most open and vulnerable, now is the time, Rhiannon.

Today seemed to be a great day to fully unpack trauma - so why not?

I didn’t change my clothes. I didn’t reply to Peter’s text. I didn’t give any of us a chance to pull back and refortify our battlements. I was tired of it all - the games, the “do you see me now” trials.

I’d been waiting for this since the moment I learned precisely what Derek’s self-sacrifice and Peter’s “thank you, but I regretfully decline to flirt with a jail sentence to take what you’re so clearly offering on a naked platter” - and honestly, since I finally told Dad, and since he seems to understand the hows and the whys of my ten year absence and had granted Peter a brief reprieve from what will definitely be a very tense discussion - I just can’t keep doing it.

Deflecting. Using humor, sarcasm, and pop-culture to coat my pain and frustration, my longing and need, it’s not working - not now that my walls are cracking open.

I didn’t tell Dad I was leaving - I think he knew - and I didn’t tell him where I was going - ditto on his knowing.

And unlike the first time I stepped into Hale territory upon my not so triumphant return? This time my footsteps were hushed - wearing Keds instead of stilettos. My perfume lighter, no longer needed to make a statement, just worn because it was me and this was how I was - I was still wearing the loose denim bibs, the tight white, long sleeved t-shirt, the loose ponytail… I hadn’t considered that I looked like a slightly more mature version of the girl they’d seen when I was 15, before I walked away.

I could find them on their heartbeats alone - still - just like my first staged reintroduction to their lives. Even without the subtle scents of them, under Peter’s Dior Homme, stripping away the smell of Diesel for Life from Derek - those two steady drum beats, like the quiet soundtrack to accompany my own.

They were in what must be the kitchen - I hadn’t taken a tour on my last, memorable, but abrupt visit. Seated at a table, one at each end, an empty chair waiting for me midway, on the side. Holding space for me, as if it had always been set up like this - three seats, the three of us.

In front of Derek was the copy of Nikita Gill’s Fierce Fairtytales I’d used Liam as a mule to give him - Peter’s phone sat in the same spot in front of him as if he’d been waiting for my reply to his text.

“This looks -” there was no sharpness in my voice. No lilting flirtation, tinged with threat. “Tense.”

Peter, usually so smug, looked stripped bare - his smile real, raw and made my heart slam against its cage. Derek? Derek stared at me like I was part ghost and part prophecy of what could be, and it scared him equally.

I pulled out my chair, the one that seemed to radiate my name, and took a seat as quietly as I could. This - what was coming - didn’t need dramatics, it didn’t call for an entrance that could make movie goers clutch their pearls and gasp. Not now.

Looking at the book lying in front of Derek, I smiled. “Did you like it?” It was one of my favorites, though with Nikita Gill that was a hard choice. “If you did -” but I stopped, this wasn’t a book club. I hadn’t sent it to him so he could just enjoy the prose.

And Derek Hale, just as Peter had warned me, opened his mouth and offered me what I’d given him -

“What if Cinderella had an attitude problem
and Snow White just liked the idea
of strangers and poisons too much?

What if the Little Mermaid always enjoyed human company
more than her own kind’s and Sleeping Beauty
just liked her solitude more than human touch?

What if the only rabbit hole Alice ever fell down was
a terrible mistake with an awful substance,
never discussed as such?

What if they locked Wendy away
for hallucinating about Neverland
and a boy who never grew up?

What if fairytales aren’t as innocent
as they sound and even princesses
aren’t perfect?

What if I told you that your damage
doesn’t define you and the way you survive
is no one else’s damn business?” (Nikita Gill, Question the Fairytale)

Ah, he memorized them, or at least the ones that spoke to him. And that one? That one wasn’t just about me, that one was about himself - and how he tried to survive.

“I didn’t do it to save you from me -” I waited, trying to breathe while he spoke, since Derek so rarely just monologued. “I did it to save me from you.” I still didn’t speak, because he had the tone of a man who wanted to purge it, his pain, and his grief.

“Your mom died the same way mine did, the same night, the same place.” We all knew this, but this wasn’t just repeating what we knew, it was telling me what I didn’t know. “And I had to live with the knowledge that it was my fault.” Wait what? “It was my fault, Rhiannon, mine. I -” He took a deep breath, his fingers locked on the book of poems like it was a lifeline. “Did you know about Paige?”

Who? I looked to Peter, but he was watching Derek, so offered me no help. “Who?” I had no clue who Paige was, why would I? When I still lived in Beacon Hills I’d gone to the private school, not the public one the Hales went to.

We all heard him swallow - it was loaded. “Paige, she’s the reason that my eyes are blue when I shift,” wait, he murdered a girl? “It was mercy, she asked me to -” That sounded about right, Derek Hale always taking the weight of someone else’s choice onto his shoulders. “I wanted -” his eyes were tight, but they never left mine. “I needed to know if I could have something that wasn’t YOU.” Oh. Oh.

If you ever hear a song that asks if a broken heart can still break? Yes, I can confirm that it can and does. And apparently it showed, because his left right started to reach for me, but stopped, curling back around the book like he thought I wouldn’t welcome the contact.

“She - she wanted to be more like you,” ah, the universe just never stopped mocking us - a girl he must have picked because she wasn’t me, and she decided I was the ideal. Poor Derek. “She had Marcus bite her -” Oh, that fucking was perfect, she’d gone to the point of going to a very tenuous ally, an Alpha who heard “for a Hale” and thought he’d found a way to link the packs. “It didn’t take, she was in agony,” trying to convince me or yourself, I didn’t say it, but apparently my face did it anyway. “I’m not justifying this, Rhiannon, I just want you to know what you’d have been tying yourself to -”

A human who makes mistakes? How horrific. But I waited, because unless Paige came back and committed arson via ghostly vision, there was more.

“I knew,” Peter, feeling that I wasn’t ready for whatever came after this particular confession. And he didn’t flinch when my eyes found his. “I knew about Paige, and I assumed you knew,” directed straight at me, not an ounce of his usual swagger laced with flirting edge. “It’s why -” it’s why he dismissed me and my exhibitionism, why he shrugged off my offer when I laid it bare at his feet. He thought I was just jealous. “I couldn’t take you, I couldn’t, Rhiannon.” Then, was unsaid, but the fire in his eyes said that was then, this is now.

“And,” Derek, reminding me that his time in the confessional wasn’t over, not nearly. “How did I follow my flirtation with teen infatuation that ended in my giving that girl what she begged for even if it ripped me open and made me a monster?” I didn’t want more, not more reasons that he’d made a choice for me, for us, without even telling me why, but my mouth wouldn’t open. “I got into bed with the Devil and let her steal every shred of innocence I had left, including being able to say I had no part in your mom’s death - in my mom’s death, in Cora’s, in our pack’s….”

Chapter Text

There’s a moment - right before the storm comes - that’s absolutely silent. And that silence is a warning. A warning that what is about to unleash can cleanse, but it will also destroy.

That moment came when Derek just admitted that he - indirectly - caused the fire that left Rhiannon motherless, left himself motherless, and killed more people than even his blue eyed wolf could show.

It was quiet before the raging thunder. It was that moment when things settled and waited, with a held breath, for that first drop of rain.

And that first drip wasn’t loud. That first rumble of thunder didn’t come from a raised voice.

It came as a deep breath, followed by a long sigh.

And when Rhiannon opened her mouth? She didn’t speak above a murmur, she didn’t have to.

“When you were saving yourself from me,” and she wasn’t only looking at him when she was speaking, she was including me in this. “When you made choices without asking me what I wanted -” her tone was the same one I imagined she used when she discussed what she wanted for dinner, calm, controlled. “Did either of you ever once, in those moments leading up to making those choices, wonder how I’d feel about them?”

I blinked at her. I was expecting the Rhiannon I knew when she was fifteen and staring at me like I was the stupidest man alive mingling with the moment she walked back into our lives, smirking and dangerously flirting with the fire she had to know either of us dismissing didn’t extinguish. I wasn’t prepared for this. For calm. For coolness. For her to look at us like - like she was disappointed.

“Do you know why I left?” This was to Derek, since I was out of commission from the fire and coma - I hadn’t known she left until I woke up and she wasn’t around, lingering like the ghost of mistakes of my past. When he didn’t dare answer, a whisper of a smile nearly curved her lips. “Heartache is the obvious answer, but there was more -” of course there was, Rhiannon wasn’t shallow, no matter how much we wished she was.

“You both rejected me,” there was a tiny crack in her voice, but she didn’t address it or hide it. “You both decided that I wasn’t enough. I wasn’t worth the risk. That I would never be the one for you.” Either of us, both of us. “And I knew, if I stayed, I would haunt your hospital room,” this time her eyes were on me, and - and she wasn’t hiding the tears, they were coming down, silently and she wasn’t brushing them away. “That I would torment myself about why you didn’t want to at least make our mothers happy in their deaths,” Derek saw them, and he flinched.

“So, I left,” she took a breath, ragged, but kept going. “And then I turned 18,” she had to stop, because she was going to tell us - I had no idea what, but it was going to hurt. “I met someone,” there it is, she wants us to know she moved on, we were just toys in her revenge, but then, “and I wanted it to be him. I wanted to give what both of you so easily brushed away, but -” she couldn’t? She couldn’t let another person touch her, please God. “My body shut down like a trap had been set.” Wait -

“Rhi-” one hand and she silenced Derek.

“Do you know what happens when you destroy a magically binding marital pact that some helpful and deranged assholes added clauses to that you didn’t read first?” No one breathed. “It means that you forge those additions into the very blood of the other person, the one that didn’t have a say in the dissolution of that agreement.” I hoped Derek felt as fucking horrified as I did, since he made this happen. “Someone, some cosmically aligned joke of a fucking asshole, added some cute little addendums to our contract - should say, some savior complex with a jawline sharp enough to cut cheese with rips it up and burns it - that doesn’t end the contract, oh God no, why go simple and free, when you can curse the unwitting?”

Her eyes were sharp, even as her cheeks were soaked with her tears. “Derek, you didn’t give me freedom, not even while you were happily using your own through Paige and then whatever hunter whore you tripped and slipped your cock and our secrets into -” the laugh she offered was soft, yet harsh and lacked humor. “Isn’t that the punch in the tit? You got to have MULTIPLE partners even before you ripped up our future and set it on fire, but me? I get to stew in perpetual virginity that not even my own fingers can sate.”

Chapter Text

I expected her anger.

I had prepared for her rage, possible violence, I even mentally cataloged what she might throw at me - both verbally and tangibly.

What I hadn’t planned for - what I could tell not even Peter had made himself mentally ready to see - was her tears.

Rhiannon didn’t cry. Her eyes might go glassy. She might even allow her nose to get a blush of red at the tip. But tears? No, never, at least not where anyone would see them.

And yet, here she sat, between us, and her face was soaked.

Her voice? Soft.

Her truth? A fucking knife between my ribs and twisted.

Not only did she hear me when I told her about Paige, and maybe hinted more than told her about Kate - she heard that I’d gotten what she couldn’t have. What my own actions toward her had forfeited. And I’d fucking told her that I did it to save MYSELF from HER.

How do you fix something you had no clue you were breaking in the first place?

My own truth, internal for now, because this was not the time to make it about me - I’d loved Rhiannon Morrigan since I was five years old and she kissed my cheek for the first time. This little tornado of raw truth, disguised as a five year old with curls that crackled with her energy, with green eyes that flashed with both mirth and the urge to create chaos. And I was terrified that I was too - too ME to deserve her.

When my eyes landed on Paige, I made myself think that I could love her instead. That what I felt wasn’t desperation to feel wanted by a quiet, soft person, a match to my own silence, but instead I destroyed her by how I must have talked about Rhiannon - reluctantly, but reverently.

And Kate? Kate was my “fuck it, I am a monster, so why not let a monster play with me” penance. What came of that? Rhiannon losing her anchor, her mom, and yes, I lost more in terms of quantity, but - Rhiannon’s mom was the softness that anchored her storm. She was the one who didn’t damper her fire, but showed her how to use it without destroying herself. Me, my choices, did stole that from her.

I loved her so much that I “released her” from being linked to me - I told myself that my pain was worth it. And I trapped her in a bigger cage - and - fuck.

Could I count how many women I’ve had sex with since Paige, Kate, and after? Nope. Some were literally faceless in my memories.

Meanwhile, Rhiannon hadn’t been able to even have herself to have an ounce of release. She couldn’t conjure up a fantasy and go over the edge that might almost make her toes curl. She couldn’t let herself go with that boy - who I should not feel like finding and punching - she chose to TRY to move on with - and that was on me.

“Don’t,” Peter’s voice cut through the silence and my eyes snapped to his face, he was staring me down. “Don’t you dare start going into your emotional constipation comfort zone, Derek Hale,” and even though he no longer had a spark of Alpha inside of him, I couldn’t argue, I couldn’t disobey. “This isn’t about you and your fucking martyrdom, this is about her,” his gaze softened, landing on Rhiannon. “And about how we both fucking locked her up, and nearly threw away the keys.”

Rhiannon, silent while I stewed, listening while Peter laid down a verdict - finally spoke again.

“I am not here, listening and sharing, because I think we can just FIX this,” she didn’t have to gesture and she wasn’t looking at either of us, her eyes were on the bare wall across from her place at the table.

“If I wanted a quick fix, I would have texted Peter with ‘horny, willing to help?’ and my ladybits would be back in fully functional order.” That - that cut deeper than I care to examine right now.

“Ten years away and do you want to know what I did when I wasn’t shopping, touring ruins, writing letters I didn’t send and learning about how curses could be personally insulting to the point that you’d expect at least one god to step in and go ‘come on, really?’ -” she was met with silence, but she seemed to expect it.

“I was haunted by the sight of you -” What? “Peter, I swear I caught a glimpse of you in the Piazza Dellapizza in Kea - near the huge chessboard, and a hint of your cologne on the breeze,” she said the words with the lilt of an accent only spending ample time in Greece would have given her. And her lips were curled in a soft smile, like the memory was pleasant.

“And I would have sworn, if I had a person to swear it to,” had she been alone the entire ten years? “That I saw you in New York, near Times’ Square, after I’d taken a daily trip to The Strand,” my heart stopped, we lived in NYC, right up until I came back here. “Your cologne was harder to spot, the city scents nearly overpowered it.”

Shaking her head like she was pulling away from a dream that she didn’t want to wake up from, “Maybe it was the spell pulling at my bones like a compass. Maybe it was just loneliness wearing your faces. Maybe it was the fact that Micheal Bubleè’s “Home” was on every fucking playlist my nimble little fingers created when I left Beacon Hills. Either way, I saw you when I shouldn’t have—and it felt like betrayal all over again.”

Her eyes, still so pale green that I knew I’d search forever and never find a color that matched them, met mine and she sighed. “I didn’t give you those books as a test, not really, I just wanted you to SEE me, Derek. And since you seemed hellbent on not looking at me -” then she moved from me to Peter, “And I understood that asking you to do something that was illegal, to prove that you wanted me, was wrong, but - but I wanted to know that you felt it too, what I felt and still -” She stopped, dropping her gaze the to table’s surface. “It isn’t part of the curse,” what isn’t?

“I still want you both to want me, and that’s not—”
She swallowed. “That’s not the curse. That’s just… me.”

Chapter Text

She took a beat, a few extra steadying breaths, and then Rhiannon stood from her seat. Her posture was as straight as it had been from the first moment I saw her when she walked in and told us she was back.

“We’ve told our truths,” she wasn’t looking at either of us, not at the moment, and I understood. She’d given us her tears, her vulnerability, but now she needed distance and that meant both physical and emotional. “Now, I’m going, and I’ll let you both consider them -” the truth, her pain, her curse, and how neither of us had made anything better when we made choices without her. “Peter, you can give Derek my number, in case anyone would rather speak privately.” Unlike us, she was giving us options - not making choices for us.

And before either of us could move, could speak, she turned and walked away.

She hadn’t been gone long, just long enough to be out of range of us to hear her heartbeat.

“I dreamt of her,” the words escaped before I could stop them, before I could frame them for impact or weaponize them.

“She looked exactly like she did just now,” older, but still with the aura of the girl who I flatly refused.

“Rhiannon stared at me, through the pain of those burns, through the fog of my mind trying to trap me and keep me safe from it,” those years, ten of them, while she was finishing school and trying to figure out why she couldn’t move on, physically or mentally, I was trapped too.

“And she just sat with me.” She’d held my hand, put her hand on my brow, whispered that the pain wouldn’t last, that she’d be beside me until it left me.

Silence fell, not tense, not comfortable, just silent.

“My dream of her was at the diner we had our only date at,” Derek’s voice was low, rough, but it was solid enough to slice through the quiet.

“She had her hair up, not like just now, but softer than even that, all curls and tendrils.” I listened, seeing it like it was a movie he was writing, and directing, based on a dream he just woke up from.

“She was quiet, quieter than she’d ever been -” those early years, Rhiannon a force and unapologetically so.

“She let me tell her I didn’t mean it, that I -” his regret, his longing was heavy and coated every word. “And she rolled her eyes and asked me if the girl in my bed knew that I was dreaming about her while she was curled against my body?”

It lingered. Hanging in the air, the way she had haunted us as much as we had her. And that made it easier to remove the card that I’d pilfered from Liam, her perfume still lingering on the parchment and slide it across the table to him.

He took it, staring at the numbers, his finger tip tracing where her pen had marked the paper with her handwriting.

“How long do we give her?”

I wanted to know if he was into the idea of making her realize that we were as deeply connected to her as she was to us. Because I was. I was all in.

Chapter Text

Note to self: Maybe shoot Dad a “I’m having an emotional sharefest with two emotionally stunted Hales who match me for my inability to just open up, so there were tears” warning text before his blood pressure rises to terrifying levels.

I had to cut him off before he started the “PETER MOTHERFUCKING HALE” howls, again.

And add “check prices on AED devices and count how many potential areas Dad could be in when he sees tear streaked face” to the to-do list.

“Train pack members known for being in his close circle in how to use AED devices” - the list keeps growing.

“Dad,” he stopped, right at the “PET-” part, so, right now all packs and pack members in howl hearing range probably assumed he had made up a new, very fucking weird, nickname for me.

I’ll take it.

“I’m ok.” His eyes narrowed and I sighed.

“OK, maybe OK is a stretch, but I -” he knew all of it so why was this still so fucking hard. “We all sort of laid our cards on the table, Dad, and it was emotional.”

“Did they -” welcome to the landmine laden field of - how do I address whether the Hale men hurt my daughter, or WORSE offered to unburden her of her curse, via their dicks that had to be my Dad’s brain as he started to ask me his version of “how did it go” and cut himself off when he realized that maybe he didn’t WANT to know…

Is it weird, that after sitting through Derek Hale telling me that he threw away our prospective future after screwing not one, but two other women, and when I had to admit that his tossing our potential marital bliss into a fireplace - that was lit - he made it literally impossible for me to repeat his “healing process”, that I kind of felt a twitch of glee that I was watching Dad do that thing.

The thing that all dads do when they started off strong, wanting to be that new age dad who wants to promote self love and owning your trauma like a bitch who owes you money, and then realized that in order to truly go beyond that trauma, healing via a penile shaped implement, that can only be wielded by a Hale, would have to have been used and just faded?

“So - um -” Dad was rebooting again, poor man. “Have you settled anything?”

Dad Decoded: Am I going to need to leave, or get bunches of sage to cleanse this house, after one or both Hales unlock your cursed vault?

“We had a discussion -” he waited, clearly hoping I wouldn’t finally give him graphic details no father ever wants their child to offer up. “With words only, Dad.” I did NOT imagine the way he let out that held breath like a deflating balloon, people

“And?”

“And, I think I know why both Hales thought they were saving me from themselves,” and them from me, but I knew that Dad was a hair’s breath from invading Derek’s warehouse and going nose to nose to nose with Derek and Peter.

“Does that mean that I can have a word with Peter now?” Alright Eager Alpha Papa, calm your teets.

“You do understand that if you terrify Peter into impotence and Derek doesn’t step up from the puddle of self flagellation, that leaves me with a snapped shut -” he made a noise that I’ve never heard a werewolf make. In either human or wolf form.

“I. Won’t. Kill. Him.” His teeth were clenched so tight that I was almost impressed that he managed to still be audible.

“Um, point of contention, your honor, but you could make his boy parts retract to the point where even double doses of Viagra would be useless, so -” OK, that earned a growl that shook the hardwoods beneath my Keds. “I’m just trying to explain why making Peter incapable of unlocking my virginal cage, would be a bad thing - since he’s one of only two options I have.”

“Couldn’t you just give Derek a pass?”

I blinked. Did my father just tell me to give a boy who literally cursed my vagina through contractual breach a PASS?

“OK, not a pass, Rhiannon, more like a little GRACE?

“Grace?” If I kept blinking, I’d lose my perfect eyesight. “You want me to show Derek Hale, the boy who literally fucked two other women, PRIOR to ripping and burning the contract that BOUND us together and actually bound my lower lips into CURSED TOMB state, GRACE?”

It was Dad’s turn to blink. Good, maybe I could give my eyelids a rest.

“Did you say he -” blink, blink, blink, blink. “DEREK GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING HALE CHEATED ON YOU WITH TWO WOMEN?!”

“Dad, I grasp that you’re hurt by Derek’s actions,” as in, I’m trying to process this from the actual wounded party side, but sure Dad, it was clearly an attack against YOU. “But we were young, and he was - might still be - dumb as a rock, emotionally, and possibly in other ways, but the point is -” fuck did I have a point? “The point is, that you can’t kill Peter, or maim him, or make his cock crawl up inside of his body on the off chance that I can’t forgive the first boy I ever loved - and also you know, I kind of love Peter too… like throuple, but well reverse harem style?”

Dad - and maybe me, too, was saved by the bell -

The doorbell, that is.

And we both took a beat and knew precisely who was on the other side of the front door.

“You really have to stop bellowing their entire government names like a conjuring spell, Dad -” and then because clearly I have no self preservation bone in my entire body - “bonus points for giving them the same new family nickname, though.”

I shouldn’t have patted on Dad’s back and started for the hidden entrance to my bedroom - not when Rosa was opening the front door and being the gracious woman who helped raise me.

“Oh, look, the Hales are here to visit -” her sweet voice offered as she invited them inside. “I’ll make sure Calvin knows you’re here -” I heard her tell them as I made it to my room.

I shouldn’t eavesdrop. It was rude. So I flipped on the TV and hit play on Scream. What better way to drown out the possible sounds of my Dad verbally castrating the two guys who could actually be useful - even if I wasn’t irrevocably in love with both of them.