Family ties were the strongest for anyone, for any species, and wolves were meant to feel those ties stronger than most; they were pack animals by nature. Derek Hale had spent the majority of his life learning exactly how painful it could be to have those ties severed, cut off, amputated one connection at a time. It had started generations before he'd been born, in fact. The hunters had come and killed off his ancestors exactly as they'd come to his house to slaughter his family en masse. They'd killed everyone at once then except Derek and his sister Laura and Peter, his uncle, who'd turned out to have been left no better off than dead.
Derek had tried to cope with all that loss. He'd tried to make a go of it with Laura since Peter was beyond help, trapped inside his mind and seemingly too damaged by the horror or the fire one, but all he'd been was angry. The last six years of his life had been spent angry. Some days he woke up feeling as if angry was the only way he'd ever been.
He had honestly thought that the anger would pass once he found the truth behind the deaths of his family.
There should be some peace in that.
He'd been wrong.
The only thing that Derek gained from learning that Kate Argent had been even more of a venomous bitch than he'd thought before was that there really was a reason to trust no one and finding out that his uncle Peter -Peter who hadn't said a word in all those years since the fire- had been the Alpha? That had only been icing on the cake. To say that he had been numb to the knowledge that Peter brutally killed Laura was an understatement. It all seemed a part of it, expected, the way that his life was destined to go down in the end, and the only thing that Derek felt after killing his uncle, the last of his family, had been acceptance.
He hadn't been born to be alone.
He had been born to be an Alpha.
Derek had fallen asleep in the burned shell of his family's home in the last set of clean clothes he'd had to change into, curling around the sleeping bag that had been meant to spare him from the hard floor; his sleep had been untroubled for the first time in too many years to count. All his nightmares had already come true. There were no more horrors left for him to bear.
He had slipped into sleep with a smile on his face at that knowledge and the knowledge that when he woke up? He'd have a chance to start rebuilding a family of his own. His own pack.
It was all a matter of waking up, stretching, and heading into town.
Sitting up at a sudden jerking sensation, Derek awoke disoriented and still holding his worn sleeping bag. He blinked in confusion as his home appeared to have disappeared and what was happening? Had he only woken from one dream into another? He'd been in his house. Hale House. Why was the sun so bright?
Derek came to his feet slowing as the peace he'd finally found for himself began to sink away from him, drifting away like only another daydream.
So much for having no new nightmares left to face...
He took in the big bed while trying not to think about how long it had been since he'd slept in a bed and put his sleeping bag onto the sofa that ran along the wall. Derek took in the scent of the empty room, but could tell there were others outside the room he was in, others close. Strangers? Definitely. There was a moon soon. That was good. He was stronger at the moon. He was the Alpha. He would be strong enough to protect himself.
There was a device lying out that caught his eye and Derek opened his ears to try to determine if anyone was coming. He was reasonably sure that he could hear someone approaching. Taking the device over to the couch, Derek settled uncomfortably on the very edge as he turned it on and began to listen to the strange information it started to tell him.
Sometimes reality really was worse than a nightmare, he thought as he tried to use the device to move between screens to learn about how very not alone he was in this new environment.