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Somewhere along the way, Derek finds himself in the woods again, like usual. He stops.
This isn't a scene that he's unused to. He's been in this exact same spot many times before -- he might not have stopped, but he tends to run the same track over and over, unless, say, his safety is in jeopardy. During times of high hunter activity, he'll often find an alternative route, but wolves stay to what they know well, and this exact spot in the woods is one that Derek has almost completely memorized. The grooves in the trees and the way the leaves blow in the wind, the bent twigs and the floating mist in the air.
There's an old, thick oak, right in the middle of the sunken plot of earth that he's begun to feel so comfortable in, and he feels like he knows its years well, knows the way its story twists up its roots and branches, how its life is embedded in its bark. He knows that it sounds awfully poetic for someone like him, but there are dozens of carvings in the tree from stray lovebirds (most have faded overtime, but the most recent one reads SM+AA, and he rolls his eyes every time he sees it.) There have been angry, beautiful, solemn words etched and painted onto its surface, and the occasional bit or two of profanity, but Derek doesn't tend to notice.
He sometimes doesn't stop, but sometimes he does. He'll pause, or he'll glance, or sometimes he'll just halt and sit on the dirt ground below him and breathe for a minute or two. He'll listen to the world around him, and he'll bolt if he hears anything, but he likes to relax that way, likes to sit in front of that tree and just... be.
If that doesn't sound too existentialist.
Derek's sure that if anybody knew about the routes he takes through the woods, about the old tree or about the dipped patch of dirt, they'd laugh and make jokes about Pocahontas or something, but they just don't get it like he does. They just don't get that bubble that he immerses himself in, that it makes him feel cleaner or lighter for some reason.
Like he doesn't have the ashes of his family sunken into his skin, flowing through his blood, weaved into his bones. The burns at his ankles, working up his hips, over his ribs, they get sucked into the dark, scratched at and ignored. This is the only place that he's Derek Hale, and not a failure.
It's there that he stops one morning, just like he did the morning that Kate Argent's ghost wrapped around his mind and drove him to his knees, that he looks at the tree and stumbles. He feels that same sense of freeness, of clear conscience, but it feels different this time. Not that it's changed, but that he's felt it somewhere... before.
He's long since decided that he needs to stop living in the past, because it's doing nothing for him now. There's a difference between precaution and paranoia, and he knows that the latter will only get him killed in the end, but that odd sense of familiarity that suddenly washes over him feels a lot like it did that morning a few weeks ago. But this time, it fills up his lungs and wraps around him, drives all that ash and smoke out of him like a billow, and he feels his shoulder relax, all of a sudden.
Because it's the same, but it's... better. It's much, much better, it's the feeling of realization washing over him, of realization that things are much more bright than they seem.
All he remembers feeling when he knew Kate Argent was a horribly toxic sense of adrenaline, a sense of artificial happiness that came with anxiety and shame and ignorance to the gravity of the situation. He remembers driving his knees into the dirt, shaken and pallid, his eyes and teeth and tongue burning from death and heat, right in this exact spot on the planet, right after Kate Argent had slipped his very life from underneath him.
He remembers this feeling, but it's much different this time around. It's that same sense of happiness, but it comes not from anxiety, but excitement. Not from shame, but from change. Not from ignorance, or even paranoia, but... a lucid awareness. An acceptance. A water flowing through him and washing him out, shoving the darkness far away from him.
He's stopped at this place in the woods many times in the past few days, and he doesn't know why. But every time he's stopped, he's suddenly felt a heaviness in his limbs that he remembers feeling underwater, back when the kanima cut open his neck and left him for dead. There are a few mornings when he finds himself near the school, almost like he ran there without thinking, and he just ends up staring, perplexed.
Derek wonders where this clean feeling comes from, because it reminds him of being in that pool, or of nights driving in the dark, or of ripping poison out of his body, because it's just... the same sort of adrenaline. He remembers falling neck deep, unmoving, into ice cold waters and feeling his limbs freeze up, sinking further and further down into a blue, shaking abyss. He remembers light streaming in through a break in the sky, rays of gold and white reaching down as his body floated, heavy and motionless.
Sometimes, he wonders what he was thinking in that moment, because part of him remembers thinking of his family. Part of him remembers wondering if that moment of water and blue wrapping around him, of looking up and seeing nothing but light, if that was at all like dying. Maybe that was part of dying, and he just got wrenched out before he saw the whole production, but he wonders if his family ever looked up and saw light above them.
Derek sometimes wonders if they ever got to Heaven, and if they didn't, he wonders where they went. He wonders if there's somewhere else for people like him, some place nastier and more twisted than Hell, somewhere... fitting. He wonders if he has enough of a soul left to go anywhere. But he knows that he had younger sisters and brothers, cousins and aunts and grandparents, that smiled and laughed and must have gone somewhere.
But he wonders if that will be the same for him. He wonders if it'll matter anyway.
Because that was the moment, the one fleeting moment, that he wondered if all the survival and all the paranoia even meant anything, if it was even worth it. But there was an honest moment when he was hauled back into reality, when a hand grabbed at his arm and another wrapped around his waist, and he was being tugged up, out of his own morbid internal monologues and through feet of water, back into the air and into a life where he was responsible for the death of his mother and father, his sisters and his brothers, back into a high school swimming pool where a lizard monster was trying to kill him and --
Stiles.
When Derek runs through the woods in the morning, mist pooling around his limbs and clouds above him, he stops in front of that tree and thinks about himself. He's old, older than people would think, and he's tired and he's seen so much pain. He's taken advantage of his strength, he's been arrogant and cocky and every other synonym for "jackass" known to man in every language, but he has his scars and he's grown from them.
And now he just stands quietly. The tree is trusting and happy, hurt but content, strong and taller than it was years before.
He thinks about himself. He smiles.
Werewolves, to him, and to many people, aren't part of any natural cycle. In all theory, like it says in textbooks and encyclopedias, they are myth and nothing more, but Derek knows better. He's not bound by any worldly net, he's not strapped down by truth, despite the ground underneath his feet and the air around him. There's him, and there's the planet, and that's it.
History repeats itself, and he knows it, but unlike others, he has the strength and the experience, the pain and the sorrow to take hold of history and keep it in its place -- behind him, where it should be. There's nothing he can change, not realistically, and there's nothing he should be afraid of that's in his realm of capability.
Derek looks at the tree and digs up that strength inside of him that's rested there since Kate Argent set fire to his house. For once, he doesn't blame himself, even for just a moment. For once, he doesn't feel ashamed, or weak, or like a failure. He's not exceptional, and he's certainly not perfect, but he's workable, even more so than most people, and...
Well, he's got more vim and vigor in him than entire armies.
Derek knows, because he's been in places of paranoia and fear, of defeat, he's been submerged under gallons of water, unable to move, and he's been pulled above the surface by someone that he can confidently say that he cares about and even lo -- likes, maybe. With Kate, there was apprehension and shame and arrogance, but with Stiles, it's like he's finally, after so many years, been able to see the padlocks melded into his skin, been able to break them open and kick his ankles from their ashy tombs.
For the first time in years, Derek Hale can walk forward.
So it's there, in those quiet morning moments, that Derek wonders what he should do with his newfound inertia, with this feeling of momentum and of strength, and he figures there's only one thing he really can do, or wants to do, for that matter. There's still that self-loathing that eats away at him, but a sudden ability to turn it around, to transfer it into something else, something better.
It's like breaking free of water, really, if he wants to be so poetic.
He finds Stiles on top of that hill that he loves so much, where the stars are clear and the heavens are just close enough for comfort, and he thinks about his own family and that light he saw from a distance. He smiles.
Stiles isn't happy with him, and he wasn't expecting that, either. But this will all happen as he goes along, as he gains speed and moves... forward. He pretends not to notice when he leaves his jacket in Stiles' Jeep -- it's old, anyway. Why would he need it?
Somewhere along the way, Derek finds himself thinking of that light he saw underwater.
And he smiles to himself, because that's all it is.
Light.