![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Name: Catherine
Age: 24
Personal DW: None
email/msn/aim/plurk/etc: michael heroin at g mail dot com / catherinesmells on plurk / stoptheworld26 on aim
Currently played characters: None
Canon Source: Teen Wolf
Canon Format: Television Show
Character's Name: Derek Hale
Character's Age: It's not entirely clear. Apparently this is something that we're going to find out ~officially~ in season three, but roadmarkers point to him being 22 for me. (In the tie-in novel On Fire, he's sixteen years old in flashbacks from six years ago. So yes, I think 22.)
Sex: Cisgendered male
Species: Werewolf
Character Suitability: N/a
Character History: (The history I've got for Derek is informed by the tie in book On Fire, and some season 3 spoilers that have come from interviews.)
Derek was born a werewolf, into a whole family of werewolves. He had a large, close family, and grew up in a big house out in the woods of a small American town called Beacon Hills. His immediate family were his father, his mother, who was Alpha and matriarch of their pack, and his older sister, Laura. He was a solitary teenager, constantly aware that he would have to lie to any friends he had about his identity. He was close to his family, and closest of all to his sister, who he was only a few years younger than.
In high school, he was an athletic youth, but didn't participate in competitive sports because his natural advantage put him at risk of being revealed as inhuman. Instead, he swam, and was on good enough terms with the school lifeguard that she would let him stay late and swim after school regularly.
When Derek was sixteen, Beacon Hills High hired a new lifeguard. Kate Argent.
The Argents were a family of old school werewolf hunters, and over the course of several weeks, Kate seduced Derek and began a sexual relationship with him. Derek quickly became completely infatuated with her, to the point of believing that he was in love. Kate slipped him some wolfsbane to test her suspicions that his family were werewolves, and once confirmed, she continued their relationship until the night of an important event in the werewolf calendar, when the extended Hale family would all be together in their house. Early in the morning, she and some other hunters went to the house and bolted and chained the exits shut, before dousing the house with gasoline and setting it alight.
Derek and his sister were spared due to her school commitments meaning that they'd had to go in especially early that morning, but the rest of his family were killed in the blaze, save for his uncle, Peter Hale. Peter was badly burned, and reduced to a vegetative state. He was hospitalized permanently, and while Derek and Laura still visited him, they ultimately left Beacon Hills, to live in New York City. With the death of their family, the role of Alpha fell to Laura, and Derek became her Beta.
They lived in New York for several years, before Laura was called back to Beacon Hills. She disappeared, and Derek went after her, and holed up in his burned out family home hoping to find her.
Then canon happened.
Point in Canon: I will be apping Derek from the end of series two. He has just lost half of his pack, been rejected (again) and worse, outsmarted by Scott McCall, and awkwardly re-embraced his homicidal and sassy uncle into the bosom of his family and pack. Oh, and an ominous pack of alpha werewolves have emerged and begun scratching shit onto the door of his already plentifully scratched up house. Rude, alphas.
Previous CR: n/a
Character Personality:
"Why should I help you?"
"Because you need me."
Derek Hale is not a nice person. Let's just put that out there right from the beginning. He is not a pleasant person to know. He's hostile, threatening, and mistrustful of others to the point of undermining his own agenda by appearing to be the most suspicious person in the universe. He doesn't want to be popular, doesn't want to be loved, and in some ways he actively pursues the opposite.
Derek's inability to trust others is probably the greatest influence behind this kind of behavior, since his chief objectives usually tend to be fairly reasonable and moral ones. For instance, not wanting a teenager to transform into a werewolf in the middle of a crowded lacrosse field? Reasonable. Responsible, even. Threatening to murder the teenager if he tries to play lacrosse, on the other hand? Not so reasonable.
This is a pattern that emerges in a lot of Derek's attempts at persuasion. Do as I say, because if you don't I'll kill you. Work with me, or I'll leave you to go crazy and murder all your friends. Don't leave me in the street to die, or I'll tear your throat out with my teeth.
Eventually this reaches a point where Derek is trying to barter for things that the relatively normal, non-sociopathic people surrounding him would willingly do for him anyway. In series two, episode four, there's a scene where after being paralyzed by a monster and dropped into a swimming pool while attempting to protect another character, he essentially tries to blackmail that same character out of letting him drown. On the basis that once they get out of the pool and he is done being paralyzed, he'll be the best defense against the monster waiting for them. His exact argument is: "You don't trust me, I don't trust you, but you need me to survive and that's why you're not letting me go."
The trust issues are obvious, but even to Derek's mind this is less about the other character than it is about him. He doesn't think they'll drown him because they're an especially bad person, he thinks they'll let him drown purely because without his supplying one, there is no compelling reason for anyone else to want to keep him alive. The thing is, Derek has a pretty serious survivors guilt complex.
In his teenage years, Derek trusted someone outside of his pack, and was rewarded with the extermination of his family. To his mind, he was responsible for their deaths. His desire to be loved, his desire to forge a bond with someone outside of his immediate family, cost almost all of his loved ones their lives. He still had a sister who loved him, and who he loved. Still had someone who had seen to his survival, and in doing so had in her mind placed a value on his life. When Laura was gone, so was the last person who had ever cared for him, ever sacrificed for him, or ever had any reason for wanting him to live. To some degree, Derek is incapable of looking further than this evaluation of himself.
Related to this is the fact that Derek almost never openly does things because he wants, or needs to do them. He throws up a pretense when he needs help, turns his request into a deal, an offer, or a compromise, to avoid ever having to seem vulnerable or desperate. Even when it comes to expanding his pack. After he's bitten a bunch of teenagers, Derek admits that he did it because he needed the power, but before this? He makes them an offer, gives them a choice, finds people who are vulnerable, and makes it about them needing him rather than the other way around.
This pretense is partly because honestly, Derek knows he's a huge jerk. His acerbic personality is likely as much deliberately cultivated as it is a natural response to having a horrible life. He can't trust other people and he can't trust his own judgement about them, so to some degree, he does want to drive people away. More than this, it's a survival mechanism.
Derek is in a position in Teen Wolf where he's shouldering a responsibility which he isn't ready for. He's isolated, way out of his depth, and his only way of getting people to help him is to come across as more dangerous, informed, and generally more useful than anyone else they have access too. As an alpha, he has to seem like he knows what he's doing, and if he opens up and talks about his feelings, then that's not an act that he's going to be able to keep up very long. A lot of the time, Derek's constant bad temper thinly veils the fact that he doesn't really have a plan. He faces down unconquerable odds with the stoic determination to survive, and very little else.
Despite all of this negativity, Derek does have a strong survival instinct. He may punish himself emotionally for living when almost his entire family is dead, but that doesn't mean that he'll try and stop. After the death of his family, Derek and Laura focused only on their own survival, but with her gone, he finds himself confronted with a new prerogative. With no pack left to protect, Derek moves to rebuilding it. It is not insignificant that Derek's first reaction to finding out that Scott had been bitten was to tell the teenager that the bite made them brothers, and although Scott never bought into this idea, for Derek it has never ceased to be the truth. When he was in danger, he went to Scott, and on multiple occasions when Scott has been in danger, Derek has gone to help him.
Derek was raised with pack and family being synonymous. On the same night that his last family member died, Scott was brought into his pack. This is why Derek is pretty much completely incapable of ever dropping his obsession with trying to get Scott to be his bro, even though Scott clearly does not rate Derek as acceptable bro material.
This is also, to some extent, why Derek made such incredibly shitty decisions about who to bring into his new pack. Again, it doesn't seem coincidental that the first person Derek bit was a character who had been orphaned, and who hated the lack of identity he perceived to come from this, or that the second character he bit was one whose mother had passed away, and whose father had betrayed the duty of care that a parent has to their child.
Certainly with Erica and Boyd, Derek was clearly more deliberately manipulative in his approach to winning over new recruits, and eventually he was maybe just enjoying his ability to cut loose and make some werewolves, but his initial motivation was, I think, about rebuilding a lost family.
Perhaps the least obvious thing about Derek (forever obscured by his serious, brooding attitude, and sensational car) is that he's actually kind of socially awkward. Or really, awkward in general. His first romantic relationship ended with a mass killing, so it stands to reason that in the 5+ years since, Derek has never blossomed into much of a people person. He knows how to be a pushy alpha-male jerk around people, and he knows how to threaten their lives, but he really doesn't know how to respond to more normal social situations. He's not stupid, but he's not especially quick thinking or witty either, and there's a kind of constant veil of discomfort over him when he's trying to be.
This is mostly evident in his scenes with Stiles, where he occasionally tries to keep up with the witty banter for a few lines, while Stilinski basically runs rings around him. Eventually he just goes back to threats of bodily harm, because that's his safe place. Another time when this arose, was when Derek was hiding out in Stiles's bedroom and had to be explained away to another classmate. Stiles cobbled together a lazy story about Derek being his cousin, and instead of smiling, nodding, or playing along in any way, Derek sat perfectly still, and stared at them both, with eyes full of hatred.
He lives in abandoned buildings and hangs out with teenagers and just materializes in people's rooms and is basically a huge weirdo.
In conclusion, Derek Hale is not a nice person at all. He's paranoid, self hating, socially awkward as hell, manipulative, dishonest, not the best of decision makers, and really kind of needy. That said, he also spends quite a lot of his time trying to minimize the Beacon Hills body count.
"You're going to trust them? You think they can help you?"
"Well, Why not? They're a lot freakin' nicer than you are!"
Strengths and Weaknesses
(a helpful aside)
In a lot of ways, Derek's strengths in his own world will become weaknesses in this new environment.
As a werewolf, he's stronger, faster, and heals much more quickly than a regular human does, and without these natural advantaged, he'll find it harder to judge his limits, and to overestimate his capabilities in syndemic. This said, Derek's strength isn't solely supernatural. He works out and trains, a lot, and while his strength and reflexes will be reduced, his athletic and fighting abilities are something that he's worked on.
In human terms, he'll still be in peak physical condition, but with his limitations drastically altered he'll be much more likely to put himself at risk.
His social ineptutude is likely to be another major weakness. Derek seems to make enemies easily and friends... well, never. He can manage strained alliances, but even these tend to result with him being ditched in the end. His inability to ask for help tends to manifest with people not really actively trying to help him, even when he does, desperately need it.
He doesn't really get people either. That can't help.
On the up-side, that 'facing impossible odds with nothing but the gritty refusal to lay down and die' thing that I mentioned earlier? That's actually worked out pretty well for Derek so far. He's utterly focused, extremely determined and adaptable. He can hunt, live happily without any creature comforts, and is entirely self reliant. One of the advantages of trusting no one is that you learn to survive on your own, and Derek has definitely learned.
Appearance/PB: Tyler Hoechlin.
aka: this jerk.
First Person Sample: A lovely dear_mun post!
Third Person Sample:
Derek didn't look at the screen. Didn't need or want to listen to any of this. He read over the pamphlets quickly enough, before he turned his attention to more pressing matters. He rifled through the bag waiting for him, examining everything he'd been given to face this place with, before stashing it back down and moving to the counter. He forced down a few of the crackers to get something into his stomach, then drank as much of the water as he could bear. In the background, he could hear himself talking to Scott. Shouting about Allison and self control, and the Alpha, without really knowing anything about any of those things.
It made his skin crawl, knowing that he'd been recorded somehow (Not invented. Not scripted. Not composed. He didn't have to accept any of that to be confronted by this.) knowing that all his ignorance, all his mistakes, all his bad decisions had been crystallized in time, to be replayed at someone's leisure.
He emptied the remaining crackers into his bag, and listened to his life play out on the screen behind him, scene by scene. His limbs felt weak and heavy, movements slow and uncomfortable as he prepared himself for the outside. Time skipped ahead behind him, to when he'd gone after Deaton. Whoever had done this clearly knew about him. Which meant they knew about werewolves. Which meant that they knew about the magnitude of electrical current required to keep a werewolf from being able to turn, or how to heal. There were ways of suppressing the basic biology of what it meant to be what he was, and that was all this place was doing to him. A couple of pamphlets didn't erase your existence. Some video on a screen didn't undermine the last twenty years of your life. The present may seem more real than the past, but it's not. Nor more important, nor more powerful.
The voices dropped off, and Derek turned to look back towards the screen behind him. The video footage was gone, replaced with a web browser. A webpage headed with the words "Fuck Yeah Hale Family!" filled the screen.
There was a slick photograph of him chained to the wall in his basement, with electrical wires leading into his side. Beneath it was some text that Derek managed to skim a few lines of (lollll she's a total bitch and all but I can't blame Kate for this bit at least...) before the window began to scroll down.
The next image was Peter, his expression mild and sardonic on his ruined face, then on, to a drawing of Derek. It was cartoon doodle of him with tiny dog ears and a leash scribbled around his neck, the end of which was held by another cartoon with large, anime eyes and a red hoodie. The page scrolled down further. A photograph of him, paralyzed and drowning and half sunk to the bottom of the swimming pool (AU where Derek actually drowns and Stiles has to write his eulogy) and Derek needed to leave. He needed to not see this.
Derek started towards the exit, and infuriatingly, the scrolling sped up. Peter's ruined face pasted over that of some anonymous bodybuilder, a gif of Derek being electrocuted on the floor, his shirtless body convulsing from the hip, and those few short seconds playing over and over. As he wrenched the door open, the site slid down to an image of him smiling, looking happier than he'd ever looked or felt. In the picture, he was wearing a baseball cap, and holding a ball. Directly beneath it was the title of the next post: Derek Hale brain cancer AU.
It wasn't real. His heart was tight in his chest, and he felt so angry he could barely breathe. Barely speak. He had to remember that none of it was real.
Derek slammed the door behind him, and set out into the world.
Age: 24
Personal DW: None
email/msn/aim/plurk/etc: michael heroin at g mail dot com / catherinesmells on plurk / stoptheworld26 on aim
Currently played characters: None
Canon Source: Teen Wolf
Canon Format: Television Show
Character's Name: Derek Hale
Character's Age: It's not entirely clear. Apparently this is something that we're going to find out ~officially~ in season three, but roadmarkers point to him being 22 for me. (In the tie-in novel On Fire, he's sixteen years old in flashbacks from six years ago. So yes, I think 22.)
Sex: Cisgendered male
Species: Werewolf
Character Suitability: N/a
Character History: (The history I've got for Derek is informed by the tie in book On Fire, and some season 3 spoilers that have come from interviews.)
Derek was born a werewolf, into a whole family of werewolves. He had a large, close family, and grew up in a big house out in the woods of a small American town called Beacon Hills. His immediate family were his father, his mother, who was Alpha and matriarch of their pack, and his older sister, Laura. He was a solitary teenager, constantly aware that he would have to lie to any friends he had about his identity. He was close to his family, and closest of all to his sister, who he was only a few years younger than.
In high school, he was an athletic youth, but didn't participate in competitive sports because his natural advantage put him at risk of being revealed as inhuman. Instead, he swam, and was on good enough terms with the school lifeguard that she would let him stay late and swim after school regularly.
When Derek was sixteen, Beacon Hills High hired a new lifeguard. Kate Argent.
The Argents were a family of old school werewolf hunters, and over the course of several weeks, Kate seduced Derek and began a sexual relationship with him. Derek quickly became completely infatuated with her, to the point of believing that he was in love. Kate slipped him some wolfsbane to test her suspicions that his family were werewolves, and once confirmed, she continued their relationship until the night of an important event in the werewolf calendar, when the extended Hale family would all be together in their house. Early in the morning, she and some other hunters went to the house and bolted and chained the exits shut, before dousing the house with gasoline and setting it alight.
Derek and his sister were spared due to her school commitments meaning that they'd had to go in especially early that morning, but the rest of his family were killed in the blaze, save for his uncle, Peter Hale. Peter was badly burned, and reduced to a vegetative state. He was hospitalized permanently, and while Derek and Laura still visited him, they ultimately left Beacon Hills, to live in New York City. With the death of their family, the role of Alpha fell to Laura, and Derek became her Beta.
They lived in New York for several years, before Laura was called back to Beacon Hills. She disappeared, and Derek went after her, and holed up in his burned out family home hoping to find her.
Then canon happened.
Point in Canon: I will be apping Derek from the end of series two. He has just lost half of his pack, been rejected (again) and worse, outsmarted by Scott McCall, and awkwardly re-embraced his homicidal and sassy uncle into the bosom of his family and pack. Oh, and an ominous pack of alpha werewolves have emerged and begun scratching shit onto the door of his already plentifully scratched up house. Rude, alphas.
Previous CR: n/a
Character Personality:
"Why should I help you?"
"Because you need me."
Derek Hale is not a nice person. Let's just put that out there right from the beginning. He is not a pleasant person to know. He's hostile, threatening, and mistrustful of others to the point of undermining his own agenda by appearing to be the most suspicious person in the universe. He doesn't want to be popular, doesn't want to be loved, and in some ways he actively pursues the opposite.
Derek's inability to trust others is probably the greatest influence behind this kind of behavior, since his chief objectives usually tend to be fairly reasonable and moral ones. For instance, not wanting a teenager to transform into a werewolf in the middle of a crowded lacrosse field? Reasonable. Responsible, even. Threatening to murder the teenager if he tries to play lacrosse, on the other hand? Not so reasonable.
This is a pattern that emerges in a lot of Derek's attempts at persuasion. Do as I say, because if you don't I'll kill you. Work with me, or I'll leave you to go crazy and murder all your friends. Don't leave me in the street to die, or I'll tear your throat out with my teeth.
Eventually this reaches a point where Derek is trying to barter for things that the relatively normal, non-sociopathic people surrounding him would willingly do for him anyway. In series two, episode four, there's a scene where after being paralyzed by a monster and dropped into a swimming pool while attempting to protect another character, he essentially tries to blackmail that same character out of letting him drown. On the basis that once they get out of the pool and he is done being paralyzed, he'll be the best defense against the monster waiting for them. His exact argument is: "You don't trust me, I don't trust you, but you need me to survive and that's why you're not letting me go."
The trust issues are obvious, but even to Derek's mind this is less about the other character than it is about him. He doesn't think they'll drown him because they're an especially bad person, he thinks they'll let him drown purely because without his supplying one, there is no compelling reason for anyone else to want to keep him alive. The thing is, Derek has a pretty serious survivors guilt complex.
In his teenage years, Derek trusted someone outside of his pack, and was rewarded with the extermination of his family. To his mind, he was responsible for their deaths. His desire to be loved, his desire to forge a bond with someone outside of his immediate family, cost almost all of his loved ones their lives. He still had a sister who loved him, and who he loved. Still had someone who had seen to his survival, and in doing so had in her mind placed a value on his life. When Laura was gone, so was the last person who had ever cared for him, ever sacrificed for him, or ever had any reason for wanting him to live. To some degree, Derek is incapable of looking further than this evaluation of himself.
Related to this is the fact that Derek almost never openly does things because he wants, or needs to do them. He throws up a pretense when he needs help, turns his request into a deal, an offer, or a compromise, to avoid ever having to seem vulnerable or desperate. Even when it comes to expanding his pack. After he's bitten a bunch of teenagers, Derek admits that he did it because he needed the power, but before this? He makes them an offer, gives them a choice, finds people who are vulnerable, and makes it about them needing him rather than the other way around.
This pretense is partly because honestly, Derek knows he's a huge jerk. His acerbic personality is likely as much deliberately cultivated as it is a natural response to having a horrible life. He can't trust other people and he can't trust his own judgement about them, so to some degree, he does want to drive people away. More than this, it's a survival mechanism.
Derek is in a position in Teen Wolf where he's shouldering a responsibility which he isn't ready for. He's isolated, way out of his depth, and his only way of getting people to help him is to come across as more dangerous, informed, and generally more useful than anyone else they have access too. As an alpha, he has to seem like he knows what he's doing, and if he opens up and talks about his feelings, then that's not an act that he's going to be able to keep up very long. A lot of the time, Derek's constant bad temper thinly veils the fact that he doesn't really have a plan. He faces down unconquerable odds with the stoic determination to survive, and very little else.
Despite all of this negativity, Derek does have a strong survival instinct. He may punish himself emotionally for living when almost his entire family is dead, but that doesn't mean that he'll try and stop. After the death of his family, Derek and Laura focused only on their own survival, but with her gone, he finds himself confronted with a new prerogative. With no pack left to protect, Derek moves to rebuilding it. It is not insignificant that Derek's first reaction to finding out that Scott had been bitten was to tell the teenager that the bite made them brothers, and although Scott never bought into this idea, for Derek it has never ceased to be the truth. When he was in danger, he went to Scott, and on multiple occasions when Scott has been in danger, Derek has gone to help him.
Derek was raised with pack and family being synonymous. On the same night that his last family member died, Scott was brought into his pack. This is why Derek is pretty much completely incapable of ever dropping his obsession with trying to get Scott to be his bro, even though Scott clearly does not rate Derek as acceptable bro material.
This is also, to some extent, why Derek made such incredibly shitty decisions about who to bring into his new pack. Again, it doesn't seem coincidental that the first person Derek bit was a character who had been orphaned, and who hated the lack of identity he perceived to come from this, or that the second character he bit was one whose mother had passed away, and whose father had betrayed the duty of care that a parent has to their child.
Certainly with Erica and Boyd, Derek was clearly more deliberately manipulative in his approach to winning over new recruits, and eventually he was maybe just enjoying his ability to cut loose and make some werewolves, but his initial motivation was, I think, about rebuilding a lost family.
Perhaps the least obvious thing about Derek (forever obscured by his serious, brooding attitude, and sensational car) is that he's actually kind of socially awkward. Or really, awkward in general. His first romantic relationship ended with a mass killing, so it stands to reason that in the 5+ years since, Derek has never blossomed into much of a people person. He knows how to be a pushy alpha-male jerk around people, and he knows how to threaten their lives, but he really doesn't know how to respond to more normal social situations. He's not stupid, but he's not especially quick thinking or witty either, and there's a kind of constant veil of discomfort over him when he's trying to be.
This is mostly evident in his scenes with Stiles, where he occasionally tries to keep up with the witty banter for a few lines, while Stilinski basically runs rings around him. Eventually he just goes back to threats of bodily harm, because that's his safe place. Another time when this arose, was when Derek was hiding out in Stiles's bedroom and had to be explained away to another classmate. Stiles cobbled together a lazy story about Derek being his cousin, and instead of smiling, nodding, or playing along in any way, Derek sat perfectly still, and stared at them both, with eyes full of hatred.
He lives in abandoned buildings and hangs out with teenagers and just materializes in people's rooms and is basically a huge weirdo.
In conclusion, Derek Hale is not a nice person at all. He's paranoid, self hating, socially awkward as hell, manipulative, dishonest, not the best of decision makers, and really kind of needy. That said, he also spends quite a lot of his time trying to minimize the Beacon Hills body count.
"You're going to trust them? You think they can help you?"
"Well, Why not? They're a lot freakin' nicer than you are!"
Strengths and Weaknesses
(a helpful aside)
In a lot of ways, Derek's strengths in his own world will become weaknesses in this new environment.
As a werewolf, he's stronger, faster, and heals much more quickly than a regular human does, and without these natural advantaged, he'll find it harder to judge his limits, and to overestimate his capabilities in syndemic. This said, Derek's strength isn't solely supernatural. He works out and trains, a lot, and while his strength and reflexes will be reduced, his athletic and fighting abilities are something that he's worked on.
In human terms, he'll still be in peak physical condition, but with his limitations drastically altered he'll be much more likely to put himself at risk.
His social ineptutude is likely to be another major weakness. Derek seems to make enemies easily and friends... well, never. He can manage strained alliances, but even these tend to result with him being ditched in the end. His inability to ask for help tends to manifest with people not really actively trying to help him, even when he does, desperately need it.
He doesn't really get people either. That can't help.
On the up-side, that 'facing impossible odds with nothing but the gritty refusal to lay down and die' thing that I mentioned earlier? That's actually worked out pretty well for Derek so far. He's utterly focused, extremely determined and adaptable. He can hunt, live happily without any creature comforts, and is entirely self reliant. One of the advantages of trusting no one is that you learn to survive on your own, and Derek has definitely learned.
Appearance/PB: Tyler Hoechlin.
aka: this jerk.
First Person Sample: A lovely dear_mun post!
Third Person Sample:
Derek didn't look at the screen. Didn't need or want to listen to any of this. He read over the pamphlets quickly enough, before he turned his attention to more pressing matters. He rifled through the bag waiting for him, examining everything he'd been given to face this place with, before stashing it back down and moving to the counter. He forced down a few of the crackers to get something into his stomach, then drank as much of the water as he could bear. In the background, he could hear himself talking to Scott. Shouting about Allison and self control, and the Alpha, without really knowing anything about any of those things.
It made his skin crawl, knowing that he'd been recorded somehow (Not invented. Not scripted. Not composed. He didn't have to accept any of that to be confronted by this.) knowing that all his ignorance, all his mistakes, all his bad decisions had been crystallized in time, to be replayed at someone's leisure.
He emptied the remaining crackers into his bag, and listened to his life play out on the screen behind him, scene by scene. His limbs felt weak and heavy, movements slow and uncomfortable as he prepared himself for the outside. Time skipped ahead behind him, to when he'd gone after Deaton. Whoever had done this clearly knew about him. Which meant they knew about werewolves. Which meant that they knew about the magnitude of electrical current required to keep a werewolf from being able to turn, or how to heal. There were ways of suppressing the basic biology of what it meant to be what he was, and that was all this place was doing to him. A couple of pamphlets didn't erase your existence. Some video on a screen didn't undermine the last twenty years of your life. The present may seem more real than the past, but it's not. Nor more important, nor more powerful.
The voices dropped off, and Derek turned to look back towards the screen behind him. The video footage was gone, replaced with a web browser. A webpage headed with the words "Fuck Yeah Hale Family!" filled the screen.
There was a slick photograph of him chained to the wall in his basement, with electrical wires leading into his side. Beneath it was some text that Derek managed to skim a few lines of (lollll she's a total bitch and all but I can't blame Kate for this bit at least...) before the window began to scroll down.
The next image was Peter, his expression mild and sardonic on his ruined face, then on, to a drawing of Derek. It was cartoon doodle of him with tiny dog ears and a leash scribbled around his neck, the end of which was held by another cartoon with large, anime eyes and a red hoodie. The page scrolled down further. A photograph of him, paralyzed and drowning and half sunk to the bottom of the swimming pool (AU where Derek actually drowns and Stiles has to write his eulogy) and Derek needed to leave. He needed to not see this.
Derek started towards the exit, and infuriatingly, the scrolling sped up. Peter's ruined face pasted over that of some anonymous bodybuilder, a gif of Derek being electrocuted on the floor, his shirtless body convulsing from the hip, and those few short seconds playing over and over. As he wrenched the door open, the site slid down to an image of him smiling, looking happier than he'd ever looked or felt. In the picture, he was wearing a baseball cap, and holding a ball. Directly beneath it was the title of the next post: Derek Hale brain cancer AU.
It wasn't real. His heart was tight in his chest, and he felt so angry he could barely breathe. Barely speak. He had to remember that none of it was real.
Derek slammed the door behind him, and set out into the world.
