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Jennifer Blake could not stop smiling. She smiled through her morning classes, through the usually abysmal duty of monitoring the cafeteria, through her free period, filled up with marking and trying frantically to find time to go over her lesson plan for the Crucible. Derek's suggestion about McCarthyism... hadn't really worked, but just thinking about Derek, about him taking the time to check on her, letting himself get cut to pieces to save her from those other terrifying wolves. Coming to her for help when he needed it, trusting her to take care of him. She couldn't help but smile.
Jennifer had despaired when the Twilight books had become so popular; quite apart from being offended by such bad literature apparently being enjoyed by so many people, the basic premise had seemed ludicrous and saccharine sweet. Now she could understand why so many girls had sighed over the badly written passages. To be the focus of a supernatural creature, to be let into their world and apparently loved (well, at least lusted after, she amended in her head. It was early days and Derek wasn't Edward. There was plenty of time for that) by someone so charismatic, so strong and handsome and pained: it was intoxicating.
So, as she remembered the feel of Derek's skin under her palms, the sight of his flesh rapidly knitting together as he healed from her kiss, the look on his face as he moved inside her, sweat and blood slick between their bodies, Jennifer Blake couldn't help but smile.
She kept on smiling right up until she noticed Stiles Stilinski and Scott McCall whispering together, worried looks on their faces, halfway through her Junior class. The smile slipped immediately, replaced with a worried frown, and she had to forcibly turn her attention to the student who was answering her question. She managed to phrase a response by looking down at her carefully crafted lesson plan, but her focus was shot for the rest of the period.
She still had very little idea of what exactly was going on with all these werewolves running around Beacon Hills, but she knew enough to know that Scott and Stiles were involved. That had become painfully obvious when they, surrounded by several of her other students, had skidded into Derek's loft the previous day, Stiles panting a few steps behind the others. Luckily they had already dressed, although Jennifer had had to borrow some clothes from Derek's sister. They didn't quite fit her, but as the front of her dress was still smeared with his blood it couldn't really be helped. In any case, it was quite obvious what they had been up to, and it had made Jennifer angry to see the accusation in the teenagers' eyes when they realized what Derek had spent the last night doing.
She had wanted to give them a piece of her mind. Derek was not a superman. He had nearly died, and he had deserved a night to recover, to forget about the pain, about these teenagers and their constant demands on him. He had deserved his night with Jennifer. She had very nearly snapped at Isaac, whose gaze had made Derek flinch away, and Stiles, who had continued to gape at the two of them long after the surprise should have worn off, but Derek had insisted that she let him handle it. It had hurt, a little, to have to leave when the rest of his - friends? Pack? - had finally shown up, but she could read in the gentleness of his voice, of his eyes resting on her face, his hands lightly gripping her shoulders, the need to protect her, and she had felt warmed through. Especially so when she was safely ensconced in her car, and could relive the same care in the attention he had paid her the night before. The smile had crept onto her face then, and had not left. Until now.
Now she had to watch Isaac Lahey and Allison Argent shoot worried looks over their shoulders at the two boys, and couldn't keep the worry from entering her own mind. Derek had seemed to be healed when she left him yesterday, but the damage had gone deep. Had he still been injured inside? Had whoever had done this to him - one of the wolves from the full moon, perhaps - come back to finish the job? She fretted her way through the rest of the class, and was immeasurably grateful that it was the last of the day. It meant that she didn't have to feel guilty about asking Scott to stay behind as he left.
Stiles decided to stay as well, hovering a few feet away somewhere between Scott and the open door, and Jennifer could only spare him enough attention to tell him to close it before turning to Scott and saying, "You're worried. Has something else happened?" There was silence for a moment as the boy turned to Stiles and they seemed to go through some kind of complex conversation using only their eyebrows and, in Stiles' case, incredibly emphatic hand-gestures. She was too impatient to wait for them to finish. "Is Derek alright? What's happened to him?"
Scott stiffened, and his eyes flashed golden bright as he turned back to her, reminding her far too much of the musty basement on the full moon, eyes glinting at her from the darkness. She much preferred the reassuring red of Derek's. She straightened in her chair, reminding herself that Derek wouldn't let Scott do anything to hurt her. "What has happened to Derek?"
"What's happened to Derek?" a voice snapped out from behind Scott, sharp and caustic. Jennifer had to forcibly prevent herself from flinching. She had almost forgotten that Stiles was there, caught up in steeling herself against Scott's too bright gaze. "You mean since he decided not to call and tell his traumatized betas that he wasn't dead, or let my best friend know that he hadn't gotten him killed, or hell, just stop Isaac from getting suspended for beating the shit out of Ethan? Since then, nothing. There are plenty of other things to worry about in this town besides Derek freaking Hale."
"Stiles," Scott hissed, looking slightly taken aback by the aggression in his friend's tone, but he didn't move to actually defend Derek, and Jennifer let all the anger she hadn't released the previous day flare back to life.
"Derek is not responsible for every bad thing that happens to you," she snapped back, surprising even herself as she matched Stiles' tone for anger. She was behaving like a teenage girl, but for Derek, everything seemed justified. He needed someone else to defend him for once. "Derek is allowed time to heal, to recover. He is allowed a night off from all the demands you put on him. Just because he was thinking through my suggestion to use being dead as an advantage-"
"Your suggestion?" Scott broke in, looking horrified. "You told him not to call us? Not to let us know that he was alive? Why would you do that?"
"Obviously, getting laid was more important," Stiles mumbled, but he looked abashed even as he said it, and she let it go to try and answer Scott's question. Somehow it was much harder to face Scott's look of betrayal than it was Stiles' aggression.
"Being thought dead can be very useful in dangerous situations," she tried to explain. "I don't know exactly what's going on, but clearly Derek has some enemies. Being dead would give him time to regroup, to figure out what to do. There are examples everywhere," and she pulled out the few she had offered Derek which, in the end, had seemed to work. "Les Mis, a Tale of Two Cities, Romeo and Juliet." She refused to let her voice falter as she said the last one, but Scott looked uncomfortable the moment the first syllable left her lips, and Stiles looked up sharply as she went down her list.
"And, what?" he bit out, his voice strong and clear again, "you think that you two are the new Romeo and Juliet? Forbidden love between a human and a werewolf? Well sorry, Ms Blake, but Scotty boy here has got that riff all sewn up." He moved forward as he spoke to clap a hand on Scott's shoulder. The other boy shifted uncomfortably, but didn't actually deny his friend's words.
"This isn't a story, Ms Blake," he said instead, softly, earnestly. "This is real. People have died, and more people are going to if we can't figure out some way to make this right."
"I know that," she protested, thinking back again to the snarls in the basement, Derek terrifying even as worn out and vulnerable as he obviously was, terrifying until she realized that he was there to save her. "I know that people are getting hurt -”
"See, I don't think you do." Stiles broke in, venom beginning to drip into his voice. "You go on and on about Derek and how much of a burden we are to him. If that's what you think then you obviously don't know him as well as you think you do." Jennifer opened her mouth to protest, and even Scott seemed to want his friend to shut up, but Stiles just kept talking, bulldozing right over them both.
"Derek called Scott his brother maybe the second time they met. He bit Isaac and Boyd and Erica," Jennifer wondered wildly who Erica was, if it was the red-head who she'd seen Stiles try to protect, but then remembered that that was Lydia Martin, "and when he did that he promised them pack. He promised them family. He promised them that he would be their Alpha, that he would be there for them. Because without their Alpha," he lent in and lowered his voice purposefully, theatrically, so that Jennifer almost wanted to laugh, "they go omega. They lose their ties to humanity. They lose their control, and they become the kind of wolves that nearly killed you a few weeks ago." She flinched.
"You think it's bad for the victims? Well it is, of course it is. But imagine losing your mind. Your intellect. Your ability to reason and think beyond the next second, beyond the hunt and the kill. Imagine being consumed by your body and leaving your mind behind."
He lent back. "We know Derek. We know exactly what he's been through. And you're right." He grinned, a horrible, toothy parody of a real smile. "He did deserve a night off. He deserved a night to recover. I deserved one too, after I was beaten half to death as a message for him and Scott." Scott sucked in one shaky breath, and then another, and when Jennifer glanced at him, his eyes were glistening, but not with wolf magic.
"I deserved one, but instead I drove my car into a lizard monster so that the girl I was in love with could save his life. Through, y'know, the power of love. She deserved a break after she was taken and bitten by an Alpha, but instead she had her mind raped by a dead werewolf. Isaac deserved a huge break after being abused for years by his Dad. He definitely deserved to have the closest thing he has to family to let him know that he was alive. Instead he got given hallucinations of being abused all over again, and he didn't have anything to hold onto. Because you told Derek not to call."
He was panting now, and Scott looked as though he desperately wanted to stop the flow of vitriol coming from his friend's mouth, but knew better than to try. "Instead you decided that your little Shakesperian werewolf romance was more important than any of Derek's pack. They're the ones that are important to him, you know that? He would never want them to suffer needlessly.
"Just because you have a little mutual life-saving going on with the big bad Alpha doesn't make you special," he spat. "You're hardly the first person he's fallen to his knees for because he had no choice in who to ask for help. If you were going to base a relationship on saving each other's lives and bad pop-culture references, Derek and I would have been banging for months. If you want to do what always screws everything up and put your stupid fling ahead of everything and everyone else, then go right ahead. I'm sure it'll work out just as well for you as it did for Derek and Scott. Or Romeo and fucking Juliet for that matter." With that he threw his arms in the air and walked away, rage apparent in every footstep.
She stared after him for a moment, and then turned back to Scott, hoping to find some understanding in his eyes. She wasn't sure how, but somehow, during Stiles' speech, she had shifted from anger and worry for Derek to desperately wanting someone to tell her that she had done the right thing.
"Scott?"
"It's not that we don't want Derek to be happy," he said slowly, and she slumped.
"Just not with me."
"No, no," Scott hurried to reassure her. "If you're what makes him happy..." he shrugged and looked at the ground, and she was suddenly struck simultaneously with how inappropriate it was to be discussing her personal life with a student, and how ridiculous caring about propriety seemed right now. "But Derek's pack makes him happy too. When you stopped him calling Isaac and Boyd, you basically stopped a dad from calling his kids. You did stop him from letting his only remaining relatives know." Jennifer started. Somehow she had never considered that Derek had relatives. He was Derek Hale after all, and everyone knew that all his family was dead. She hadn't even thought to ask if the owner of the clothes she had borrowed was alive or dead.
"I didn't stop him," she said quietly. "Just suggested..." She trailed off. Scott didn't seem to know what to say.
"I'm not part of Derek's pack," he said finally, "but knowing Derek was alive - it was important to me. And pack is important to him. I can't believe that the first thing he wanted to do when he was healed enough wasn't to call us. And you stopped him. You wanted to stop him." He chanced a quick look at her face and then babbled out, "Derek does kinda get a free pass. After everything. But you don't." She caught her breath. "I can't - wouldn't - tell you not to see him, but if you do, you need to remember something. For him, pack comes first. And if you want to be with him -"
"But I'm not pack," she protested, glad to finally have a relevant point to make. "I'm not a- a-"
"Wolf?" Scott said wryly. "You don't have to be, to be pack.And you don't have to be pack to be with Derek. But to be with Derek and have it mean something, you would have to put the pack first. And as soon as you do that," he smiled a little sadly, "you are pack." He waited to see if she had anything to add, but her whole body felt frozen. He turned for the door instead. "Goodnight, Ms Blake."
Jennifer Blake remembered the night she spent with Derek. She remembered her stumbling reference to forbidden lovers, the care that Derek had shown her, how special she had felt under his attention, from the fact that they had saved each other lives. She remembered the venom in Stiles' voice, and the sadness in Scott's.
Jennifer Blake thought about Derek Hale and smiled, a grim parody of the grin she had carried for the last two days. The smile died on her face.