Archive of Our Own ^beta

So open the shutters, raise up the mast
Rejoice, rebuild, the storm has passed
Cast off the crutches, cut off the cast
Rejoice, rebuild, the storm has passed
- The Next Storm, Frank Turner

Laura dreams of her mother. She sits with Laura’s head in her lap, softly humming and running her fingers through Laura’s hair. The light is fuzzy and soft, and Laura feels safe and warm and content. She wakes to the feeling of pack bonds snapping into place with such force she literally gasps as her eyes fly open, and she’s left with a disorienting moment where her mom is still alive before real life comes crashing in.

When her vision clears, she sees Peter holding Derek in a tight hug, his hand cupping the back of Derek’s neck in the same soothing gesture she remembers from her parents, from her grandparents. She feels the pack bonds vibrate as they embrace, as if they too are celebrating being reunited after so long. She must make some sort of sound because Derek and Peter turn to her, shame and embarrassment coloring Derek’s cheeks, and concern lining Peter’s face.

It’s Peter that rushes to her side, sitting next to her bed, and reaching out for her. She feebly squeezes his hand before drifting off again. She swims in and out of consciousness; sometimes Peter is there, sometimes Derek, sometimes she vaguely recognizes someone else… She lets the pain, all of it, pull her back under over and over.

Distantly, she is aware that she’s recovering slowly for a werewolf, her alpha spark struggling to combat the full effects of her torture at the hands of Kate Argent on top of, well, years of unresolved, ignored hurt. Her physical wounds heal, even the toxic bullet hole in her stomach. Mentally and emotionally––Laura wants to scream until her throat is raw, until her accelerated healing can’t keep up with the strain.

If nearly dying at the hands of hunters isn’t the time for Laura to feel just a little bit sorry for herself, she doesn’t know when is.

As the first born child of the formidable Alpha Talia Hale, Laura has spent her whole life biting her tongue and falling in line. From the moment she could shift during a full moon, she had been groomed to take over as the next Hale Alpha, and Talia expected her to take the lead with teaching Derek and Cora how to be part of a pack, despite being only a few years older than her siblings.

And look where all that’s gotten her: almost her whole family died in a fire that left her orphan, a guardian to her only surviving sibling, and an alpha all in one fell swoop. But Laura did what she had to do, up to, and including, coming back to Beacon Hills because of the promise in the picture of a dead doe.

-

She’s in a strange room, and there’s a strange figure sitting next to her bed, silhouetted by the gray half-light of the morning. There’s something familiar there, not a packbond, but almost like an echo of one.

“Hey, you’re awake,” the figure says, and as he comes into relief, Laura realizes that it’s Stiles. Stiles has been sitting next to her on and off; Stiles is creating that strange feeling of a not-yet-a-packbond.

“It’s you,” Laura says, dazed and surprised.

Stiles snorts. “Oh, that’s nice. And after all we’ve been through.” There’s humor in his voice but Laura can also hear that it’s trying to mask the sting her comment must have caused.

“I can feel,” she waves her hand towards him, unsure how to finish the thought before she remembers the bite. She turns Stiles’ hand over so the inside of his wrist is facing up. “This. I can feel this.”

“Really?” Stiles says, pulling his arm gently back towards himself and cradling it against his chest. “Before, back when Peter was still drugged, you said it was a promise ring. Peter called it an oath.”

“You haven’t talked to him about it?” Laura asks, surprised.

“He’s been busy tying up loose ends, catching up with Derek,” Stiles pauses, as if looking for the right words before continuing, “coming back to himself. And I knew that he wasn’t going to be able to focus on anything until you were fully healed. He’s made sure that one of us was with you the whole time.”

Laura smiles, feeling a warmth she hasn’t felt in years flare in her chest. “That sounds more like the Uncle Peter I remember,” she says softly. “Is he here now?”

“Let me go see,” Stiles says, sliding out of his chair and leaving behind a copy of one of the old bestiaries from the Hale Vault. He sees Laura’s expression when she notices. “Just trying to fill in some gaps of my own.”

“Why does that not surprise me,” she says.

“Well, if you haven’t figured it out yet, I tend to jump into things head first.”

“Yeah, I’m getting that,” Laura says with a small laugh.

She watches Stiles as he leaves the room and wonders how much Peter was aware of what he was doing when he bit Stiles’ wrist, trapped in omega form, being slowly poisoned. Because the more she learns about Stiles, the more she thinks that it can’t possibly have been an accident; that somewhere Peter was lucid enough to find a match.

But, god, Stiles is so young. He’s about the age Cora would have been if she had survived––sixteen? seventeen?––and though promise rings don’t always have romantic implications, most of the ones she’s seen have ended up romantic eventually, and the ones that don’t tend to cause complications when trying to pursue any other partner. And then she thinks about Derek, and everything she learned about what happened between him and Kate Argent when he was about the same age, and her stomach drops.

“Stiles said you were up,” Peter says, entering the room and interrupting her thoughts before they can spiral out of control.

“How are you feeling?” Laura immediately asks even though it’s Peter that’s coming to check on her. But the last clear memory she has of him was from checking him into the care facility, burnt and broken and barely alive; the whole recent encounter with the Argents is vague and fuzzy, like a dream she can’t quite remember.

“I’m fine,” Peter says with a small chuckle. “Once the rest of the wolfsbane left my system, I was right as rain.” He pauses and considers her. “But you’ve been out for days. Even with everything they did to you, you should have healed faster,” he says carefully.

Laura shrugs. She knows these are conversations she needs to have, knows that the only way to make them work as a pack again is to uncover all the hurt and trauma, lay it bare, and start over. But not just yet; it’s all too raw, too new. And she can already tell by the strength she can feel in their renewed bonds that they’ll have time.

“I’ll be fine,” she says, dismissive. “But we should decide what to do next. Derek and I have been in New York…”

“Yes, I know,” Peter says, looking back towards the hall.

“You want to stay here,” she says.

“This is our territory. You are the Alpha, the guardian of Beacon Hills.”

“Ah, so this is just about me and nothing else.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“I can feel him, you know,” Laura says, holding Peter’s gaze. “It’s not like a normal pack bond. It’s…soft, squishy.”

Peter squares his shoulders. “I know you all think I was out of my mind, but I could see him, Laura. He was like this bright star burning, pulling me towards the light.”

“You should talk to him about it,” she suggests. “He’s confused. I told him a little, back when he was helping me, but he should really hear the rest from you.”

Peter levels Laura with a look. “Your mother would not have approved.”

“Look, am I stoked you tied yourself to a teenager? Of course not. Especially after I learned what Kate Argent did to Derek,” Laura says and Peter flinches at the comparison. “But I know you. And I trust you. And I know you’ll do right by Stiles by telling him everything he needs to know, and letting him figure out his own place in our world.”

Peter gives her a small smile. “Thank you, Alpha.”

Laura reaches her hand up and smooths it down the back of Peter’s neck, and with one last smile, he pushes himself off the side of her bed, and leaves Laura alone with her thoughts.

-

Laura watches as they slowly exit the car and take stock of the remains of their family house.

Derek looks like a ghost as he wanders towards the burnt out husk that was once a house. Laura still feels bad about the phone call they had after Stiles discovered the yearbook photos, and she’s tried to broach the subject again, tried to reassure Derek that none of this is his fault, but she thinks Derek just needs more time. Still, the fact that he actually got out of the car feels like a win to Laura, and she’ll take as many small wins as she can.

Peter exhales somewhere between a sigh and a growl, and it occurs to Laura that even though Peter was here in Omega form, even though this where he rescued her, he hadn’t taken any of it in. And before that, the last time he was here he was burning along with the rest of the Hales. She sees Stiles reach out and slide his hand into Peter’s and she can immediately hear his heartbeat slow down, feel him start to calm.

Laura rubs her eyes. She isn’t sure what compelled her to bring everyone here now, why it felt so important to do it so soon after all the shit that went down. Part of her still wants to grab her pack and run as far away from Beacon Hills as they can, her duty to the land be damned. At the same time being here with her pack, being at their family home as burnt and broken as it is, feels innately right.

Peter and Stiles walk the perimeter, and Peter seems to be pointing out different things to him as they go. She sees how they keep brushing up against each other in a way that’s familiar and easy, as if they hadn’t just met each other a few days ago under the most stressful circumstances possible.

“It still has good bones,” Stiles says, bumping his shoulder against Peter’s as they cross back in front of where Laura’s leaning against the car watching and waiting.

“And what do you know about home construction?” Peter asks, amused.

“I watched a lot of HGTV when my mom was in the hospital,” Stiles says.

“Ah,” Peter nods, a small smile playing on his lips. “See, I didn’t realize you were approaching the problem so scientifically.”

“See, you joke, but just wait until you find me in full research mode,” Stiles says.

Laura hasn’t asked either of them what came of the conversation about their bond, but they both seem so comfortable and at ease with each other, she thinks it must have gone well. Watching them like this makes her feel something in her chest that must be similar to the feeling The Grinch got when his heart grew two sizes.

But the main thing she’s realizing is that the more Stiles and Peter spend together, the stronger the fledgling pack bonds seem to get. And the more she watches the two of them, the more she sees how Stiles slots into the holes left behind by the lost pack members; not replacing them––no one could ever replace them––but like something has subtly shifted to the side to make room for someone else, someone new.

Derek wanders back into view and Laura takes it all in––the land, her two (three?) pack mates, the future home that could be rebuilt here––and she feels the tug of a smile, the glint of actual happiness for the first time in longer than she can remember.

“You ok?” Laura asks as Derek leans against the car next to her.

Derek shrugs and nods at the same time, and Laura gets it. The silence stretches between them for a long moment before he finally speaks. “What about him?” he asks, nodding towards Stiles.

It’s Laura’s turn to shrug. “I mean, he’s a persistent shit. I kept trying to get rid of him, but he figured most of it out, helped save me, helped save Peter,” she says, aware that even though they’ve passed her, if he wanted to, Peter could hear everything she’s saying despite still being in full conversation with Stiles.

“And you’re not worried about the promise ring?”

“Of course I am,” Laura says. “How could I not be? Stiles is young and who knows how stable Peter really is after everything. But also, I don’t know. It just seems so,” she pauses searching for the right words, “inevitable.”

Derek looks over to where Peter and Stiles have sat down on the tumbled remains of a brick retaining wall, their heads bent together as they talk quietly. “It does feel like he’s always been here, doesn’t it?” Laura hums in agreement, as Derek kicks her foot with his own. “What about you? You doing ok, or are you ready to get the hell out of Dodge?”

“I don’t know,” she says, slinging an arm around her brother and looking over to Peter and Stiles. “I think we might have everything we need right here.”