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Summer is truly starting to set in as the sun rises slowly in the blue, cloudless sky, and the birds outside are chirping merrily. But with the large window covering most of the wall in the main living space and the sunlight above, Derek stirs with a groan, burying his face further into the warm pillow and the covers surrounding him to shield his sensitive eyes.
He feels a little groggy as he starts to pull himself out from the depths of sleep, not that far from what it feels like after experiencing wolfsbane in his system, and, what he can only assume, it feels like to have a hangover.
It doesn't take long for him to fully come to his senses and when he does he jolts up with a start. Brigid. He looks to his right where she's still lying beside him, but thankfully he doesn't appear to have disturbed her. She looks peaceful in slumber, he thinks, unable to remove his eyes from her sleeping form, and he reaches out without thinking about it, carefully brushing the wild strands of red hair away from her face. He finds himself smiling, almost as if nothing's changed and they're still teenagers without a care in the world, but the weight of the darkness around his heart doesn't let him forget for long.
He's glad she's here, he realises, even though he still can't let himself believe it's going to last; he wants to, but he can't. The second he starts to let himself hope, he knows everything can only go downhill from there, it always does. But maybe if she sticks around long enough, if she manages to settle without bolting as soon as she discovers every single sordid detail, and he knows she's going to have to meet the others at some point.
Derek carefully manoeuvres himself into a sitting position, back against the head of the bed and covers hanging over his clothed lap. He didn't plan to sleep through the entire night and half of the morning as well, but he needed it, and he knows that Brigid did as well. And he can already feel a lot of the weariness gone from the solid night of sleep. He catches the fresh scent of Isaac, but he can't hear his heartbeat from within the loft, so he knows he must have been and gone, always trying to stay out of his way to make sure he's not a nuisance. He doesn't mind having him around, though, and it's not as if either of them have anyone else, but he can't help feeling relief that he can hold off on introductions a while longer until he can catch her up with the recent going-ons.
He doesn't know how long he sits there, watching as the sun fully rises in the sky and glancing down to the woman beside him, a woman he never thought he would get to meet and the memories of the girl she used to be faded from the hard years that followed. He's an alpha, yes, but he knows he's far from perfect, that he wasn't born to the role, and that he's going to make a lot more mistakes before he finds his feet. And he's still got a long way to go before he can be anything to anyone beyond that, but if she's at his side then he thinks he can learn to try that much harder to discover who he was supposed to be before he got thrown off course.
He feels a little groggy as he starts to pull himself out from the depths of sleep, not that far from what it feels like after experiencing wolfsbane in his system, and, what he can only assume, it feels like to have a hangover.
It doesn't take long for him to fully come to his senses and when he does he jolts up with a start. Brigid. He looks to his right where she's still lying beside him, but thankfully he doesn't appear to have disturbed her. She looks peaceful in slumber, he thinks, unable to remove his eyes from her sleeping form, and he reaches out without thinking about it, carefully brushing the wild strands of red hair away from her face. He finds himself smiling, almost as if nothing's changed and they're still teenagers without a care in the world, but the weight of the darkness around his heart doesn't let him forget for long.
He's glad she's here, he realises, even though he still can't let himself believe it's going to last; he wants to, but he can't. The second he starts to let himself hope, he knows everything can only go downhill from there, it always does. But maybe if she sticks around long enough, if she manages to settle without bolting as soon as she discovers every single sordid detail, and he knows she's going to have to meet the others at some point.
Derek carefully manoeuvres himself into a sitting position, back against the head of the bed and covers hanging over his clothed lap. He didn't plan to sleep through the entire night and half of the morning as well, but he needed it, and he knows that Brigid did as well. And he can already feel a lot of the weariness gone from the solid night of sleep. He catches the fresh scent of Isaac, but he can't hear his heartbeat from within the loft, so he knows he must have been and gone, always trying to stay out of his way to make sure he's not a nuisance. He doesn't mind having him around, though, and it's not as if either of them have anyone else, but he can't help feeling relief that he can hold off on introductions a while longer until he can catch her up with the recent going-ons.
He doesn't know how long he sits there, watching as the sun fully rises in the sky and glancing down to the woman beside him, a woman he never thought he would get to meet and the memories of the girl she used to be faded from the hard years that followed. He's an alpha, yes, but he knows he's far from perfect, that he wasn't born to the role, and that he's going to make a lot more mistakes before he finds his feet. And he's still got a long way to go before he can be anything to anyone beyond that, but if she's at his side then he thinks he can learn to try that much harder to discover who he was supposed to be before he got thrown off course.
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"If anything, I was more behaved when you were around." He can imagine his mother, now, giving him an amused look of disapproval at the lie, but lacking any real heat behind it; he couldn't even recall the amount of times the rest of the family complained about the basket ball bouncing at all hours and the laughter that often escaped him. It still hurts to think about, but it comes easier in her presence somehow, and he hopes he can reminisce this easily from now on because one of his fears is forgetting them, even if the boy he remembers feels like someone else now.
"Tell me about them?" It's a question, not a demand, but he's curious, and although he can't say he's had too many in recent times, he never stopped wondering, letting himself have a little light in the dead of night when he couldn't take much more of his own depressing thoughts. "Your dreams."
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It's part of the reason, she thinks, that her Da always approved of Derek. Someone to draw her out of self-imposed silence and make her see more of life.
His question startles her and she stops scraping the carrot for a moment, while she thinks. Her cheeks pinken, again, and she takes a moment to gather her thoughts.
"I never thought we'd live in the big house, with the entire pack. We'd have something smaller, on the edge of the reserve. It'd still be on Hale land, but separate enough that we had our own household, and we didn't bother your mother." The house had been nice in her dreams. Hardwood floors, warm colors on the walls, with pictures of the family lining up next to each other. "It wasn't huge, but it was ours. My Da would have left Markus and come out here when I came, on the premise that he can't spoil grandchildren across the country."
Brigid is a natural storyteller. Her voice takes on a lilting quality that storytellers of old had used to teach.
"Our kids would constantly run between the two places." She'd often been over to her grandmother's place as a child. Even after her mother had died. "I'd be a professor, probably of history, and while every once in a while, there'd be an issue or trouble, it wasn't anything we couldn't handle. Our daughter would have these deep, black curls with green eyes and she'd constantly try to run away whenever someone chased her with a comb. But she'd sit for you, even if you were terrible at doing hair."
The carrots drop into the crockpots, making soft thunking sounds.
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He pulls and slides himself up onto an empty counter instead, hands curling around the edge, as he makes himself comfortable to watch her, to listen to the voice he thought he would never hear again, and his memories never quite did her justice.
As she speaks, Derek watches her unseeing, imagining the picture she paints so vividly, and he smiles as he does, even picturing their daughter and feeling something pull tight inside of him that he didn't realise was even there at the thought of her being a daddy's girl. It's almost as if there's a void there on top of the one where his family should be that he hoped to fill once upon a time, but didn't realise just how much he craved it.
"Mom would have liked that," he adds, because he knows she would; she would have loved for him to be happy, to have found someone to settle with, to create a family of his own, but also to have stayed closer. He knows all too well if he had been given the choice, he would never have strayed far from his family, he couldn't have, so when she says her father would have joined them, he starts to feel the weight of a dream they could have lived if things had been different. But they can still have that, even if it's not quite the way it should be. "Laura always said if one of us were having children, it wasn't her, but she'd spoil mine rotten. She would have been someone they could turn to when they didn't feel they could come to us. And Cora someone they could have looked up to." He barely got to know his younger sister, but she was a character someone would have to see to believe.
"It won't be the same, but we can still do it." He spent the previous night lying awake for a time, thinking about how the Hale land is going to be taken from him if he doesn't take any action. But he has a reason to, now, a purpose worthy of it, something to rekindle the family name and make it mean something again. "There's still time."
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She tosses the last of the vegetables in the crockpots and flips over the cutting board, pulling out the meat. Chicken for one; pork for another. The last will be just a vegetable soup.
"I want to still do it." Brigid admits, looking up at him. "I want to come home and find you collapsed on the floor with the kids, watching some inane cartoon we've seen a million times." Her attention goes back to the meat she's chopping for the crockpots. "Or get up in the morning to one of the kids giggling and saying your pancakes don't look anything like mine." Because hers are the best of course. "I want to argue over the colors to paint the living room, and which kitchen appliances we should invest in."
A deep breath. "And I'd love to stay on Hale land. It's beautiful and there's a peacefulness to it that Boston never had." Brigid looks up at him again. "We can build new dreams, a new home. From the ground up."
She knows nothing about construction, but building the house can't be that hard, right?
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The woman before him is offering him a path to walk that he thought was long cut off, lost to every mistake he's made to lead him where he is today, and he knows if he decides to take it, to follow through on it, nothing will ever be quite the same as it's been ever since his world was burned down to the ground around him; he fears the thought, the change, but most of all he's terrified of not being able to live up to it, of stepping across the line and ending up somewhere worse, and, even more so, taking everyone else with him.
But he knows he's already make the decision, he made it as soon as he clapped eyes on her and it dawned on him who she was; he hadn't wanted to believe, at first, told himself it wasn't possible, and it's all happened so suddenly. But he knows.
Using the strength of his arms, he lowers himself back down until his feet are firmly on the ground, and he takes a tentative step closer, standing behind her and hesitantly lifting his arms up to wrap aruond her slight waist. He lowers his chin to her shoulder and closes his eyes, nuzzling his face into the spot where her neck meets her should and breathes in her comforting scent.
"Marry me," he whispers, throat dry around the broken words, and he sounds as vulnerable as he feels, which is far from the image of what an alpha should be. "Marry me, and I'll find a way to give you it all. Whatever you need, anything you want."
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The warmth of his body and his touch make her melt back against him. Her eyes close and her head drops back against his shoulder. As if its done it a thousand times, her body molds itself to his, fully relaxing and enjoying the moment.
She laces her fingers with his, wanting everything she'd been talking about. Admitting to herself that some of it would never come true had been a hard thing to realize. But they can still have some of it. She can still marry Derek, still have that bright-eyed, black-haired little girl who wraps him around her little finger.
Her heart flutters just a moment at his words. Tears prick her eyes because yes, always yes. "Yes." Her own throat forces out the croaked word. "As soon as possible, as soon as you want, yes." Brigid doesn't want him to mistake anything she says. "There's a church and a priest. All we need is the license and the witnesses." She'll call Carlos. He'd run up here if necessary.
Her hand cups his cheek. "But. We'll give each other everything and anything we want." Gently, she strokes the scruff that covers his face. "Not just me, Derek. Us."
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"Isaac can be the witness, Scott and Stiles aren't usually far behind," he offers, knowing Isaac would do it if he were asked, and not even begrudging the others if they were to follow. It's a new start, for him, for her, and for their pack, and he's never felt quite so at peace with things as he does in the moment, even if it is moving quick, it's not as if neither of them have considered it before, planned for it.
But he pauses as something occurs to him, turning awkwardly in their embrace to meet her gaze.
"But don't you want the big wedding?" he asks, unsure, because Laura always banged on about how her wedding would be a big deal, a day to remember, and he knows the wedding doesn't make the marriage, but if it's something she wants in spite of their other circumstances, then he wants to make sure she knows it's on offer. "I don't know about having enough people to fill the church with, but don't you want something more than a simply ceremony?"
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His question draws her eyes open and she looks at him. A sputtered laugh escapes her and she shakes her head.
"Oh, no. No no no. I am not... no." It's amused and fond and warm, but a definite statement. "A church, a priest a few witnesses and our marriage is done in the eyes of God and the state. I dislike being the center of a large amount of attention." Which doesn't do her much good when she's teaching, but that's different. Then she has facts and dates and knowledge to back her up. She can retreat into them when she feels out of place and awkward.
She knows that had the Hales survived and her Da lived, there would have been a much bigger deal than this, but then she would have gone through with it for the packs, and not for herself.
Brigid turns in his arms, draping her arms over his shoulders. "I need the Church to sanction the wedding and for Carlos to come, but beyond that? I don't need or want anything else." She shrugs a shoulder. "I've always liked the simpler things in life." Give her a good book and a little bit of music and she'll lose herself for hours. Give her a chance to cook and she's happy.
Brigid is a creature of simple pleasures.
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But he tries to subtly wipe away the smile that's making his face ache with the effort as she shifts around in his arms, feigning seriousness.
"A teacher who doesn't welcome attention." It's a statement, not a question, and the amusement is evident, now, creeping in through the cracks as he rests his hands around her waist. "If you're sure that's all you want, then that's okay with me." He's not one for a fuss, either, although it wasn't always that way, but since losing his family, and especially Laura, he keeps himself to himself; it's usually the best for everyone.
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She shrugs. "His boyfriend might loom, but Kevin's a teddy bear." Brigid wrinkles her nose. "He's huge, but a teddy bear." She's tiny compared to him and it's an odd thing to feel when she's used to bigger people around most of the time.
Brigid threads her fingers into his hair. "When I teach, I can disappear into facts and dates and things I've memorized. Doing that around people tends to put them a bit off." She shrugs. "there's a reason I usually retreat into a corner with a book."
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"The car's off-limits."
But otherwise, he doesn't particularly mind; he doesn't exactly sound like anyone he keeps around, but if he's important to Brigid then he'll do whatever he can to make them feel welcome.
"I prefer the quiet," he assures her, but he also likes sitting down to conversation that goes beyond small-talk, which he's never been great at; if she wants to discuss whatever it is at the time that she happens to be reading about, then he definitely doesn't hate the thought of getting to listen. "Not that I've had the chance to enjoy it recently, but I'm hoping that's going to change."
With a soft, rare smile, he leans in to her touches and brushes his lips to hers, and then leads her to the living room to pass the time until dinner. Something tells him that everything might just start to look up from here on out.