13. Chapter 13

Just after eight a.m., Cora skids into the waiting room, startling everyone there but Peter, who had heard her distinctive, slightly lopsided gait coming down the hallway. “Ah ha!” She points an accusing finger at him.

He raises his hands in surrender. She glares at him and pulls out her phone, furiously tapping away for a few moments before coming over to sit next to him. “Your nurses are freaking the fuck out, you know that?” She speaks so softly that only he can hear her.

“I don’t care.”

“Right.” She rolls her eyes and flops back in her chair. “I knew you’d be here. Everyone else is out searching the woods.”

“That’s ridiculous. Where else would I be?”

“That’s what I said!”

Peter rests an arm over her shoulders. “You are the smart one.”

She preens at the praise, snuggling in next to him in a way he thought he’d never experience again after the fire, after insanity. He dares to peck a kiss against her forehead and they sit there in silence for a while. There is a clatter of noise out in the hallway and Derek shows up with Stiles and Scott on his heels, Stiles talking into his phone a mile a minute.

“Thanks, Pops. Nah, he’s in my sights...I don’t know, we’ll figure out something in a bit...Maybe we’ll ‘find’ him wandering around the site of the fire, traumatized, his eyes blank with grief...No I don’t think that’s too melodramatic! How dare you! I— Dad? Dad?” He glares at his phone as Derek steers him away from walking into a chair. “He hung up on me!”

“Hey man,” Scott says, holding out his hand to Peter. As they shake, Scott steps in close, his voice dropping. “Don’t go scaring everyone like that, no one knew where you were.” His eyes flare red briefly and Peter is nailed to the chair, tilting his head in instinctual submission to the Alpha power surging against him like a strong wave striking shore. He’s never felt this solid a pack bond from Scott before; suspects that he didn’t truly believe Scott was his alpha until this very moment.

“Sorry, Alpha,” Peter says, his voice rough.

Scott seems as surprised as he is by the words and the submission, dropping his hand quickly. “Uh. Good. Okay. Yeah? Uhmmm.”

Stiles is eyeballing both of them suspiciously. Derek, meanwhile, is sniffing the air like a fucking bloodhound, as if his mother never once taught him subtlety. Cora kicks at his leg and he finally stops, looking abashed for a brief moment until zeroing in on Peter.

“Time for you to go back to your room and check yourself out,” Derek demands, straightforward as ever.

“No.”

Cora pokes at his arm. “Uncle Peter, we can smell your pain and your blood, you need—”

“No. Next visiting time is in ten minutes. I’ll go when I get back out. They are moving Chris to a private room soon anyway.”

“Peter,” Derek growls, and the argument is on. It’s a battle, Hale against Hales, and Peter does not miss when Stiles asks Scott to get him popcorn for the show. It only lasts until the Sheriff walks in and literally lays down the law, Scott nodding like a bobble-head behind him and Stiles still looking far too amused. In the end, Peter gets another fifteen minutes with his mate then he will be “discovered” wandering around the basement by Deputy Parrish before checking himself out against doctor’s orders.

Even so, it’s three hours before Peter gets himself back to Chris’s bedside. He settles in wearing fresh clothes (Derek’s, again, because everything Peter owned is burned to cinders, again ), holding a book in one hand and Chris’s hand in the other. No one knows when Chris will wake up, but Peter can wait, and he really loves Jane Eyre anyway…

“Peter?”

Chris’s voice draws him out of the book sometime later, the sun slung high in the afternoon. He looks over into the bright blue eyes of the man he fell in love with, who apparently fell in love with him.

“You fucking asshole,” Peter says simply, closing his book and pulling some of Chris’s pain out.

“Gettin’...mixed signals.” Chris gives him an entirely too adorable, dorky, drugged out smile. He looks like a ten year old with a beard.

“You are stoned out of your mind. I’m not even talking to you.”

“Liarrrrrrrr.” Chris drags the word out, still grinning.

The pain that Peter feels is sharp and bitter, the worst of the dregs that the morphine can’t touch.

“I live!” Chris says, and tries to laugh but his body tenses up instinctively to avoid pain.

“You took a nine millimeter to the gut, and we’re just lucky the exit wound took part of your liver and not your spine.” Peter grits his teeth.

“Sorry not sorry.” Chris sticks his tongue out at him then promptly passes out.

Peter sighs and mentally prepares himself to rehash that same conversation for the next two days.

And he does. But in between, Derek and Cora bring him meals and the Sheriff checks in on him and Scott even pokes his head through the door and gives him a ‘thumbs up’ (which Peter doesn’t understand the purpose of but Stiles assures him represents major progress in their pack “relationship”, complete with scare quotes).

As Chris recovers and is taken off the heavy-duty pain killers, he starts getting grumpier and quieter. By the third day he’s snapping at everyone, even the nurses. Except Melissa, who snaps back — Peter deeply regrets not turning her and starts to wonder how he can “convince” Scott to do it for him. Little known fact neither he nor Derek seem interested in sharing with their generally ignorant pack of cubs: werewolves are matriarchal too, just like hunters.

“Don’t you dare,” Chris growls (growls!) at him when Melissa walks out in a fury.

“What? She’s a gorgeous woman. I can’t look?”

“That’s not looking. That’s—” He stops and his jaw moves as if he chewing on the words. “That’s sizing her up. You want her turned.”

Peter opens and closes his mouth, because yes, that was exactly what he was thinking and there is no way Chris could know that.

Chris rolls his eyes. “You are a manipulative bastard and this pack has no matriarch. It doesn’t take a genius to see the wheels in your head grinding.”

“I’ll have you know that the wheels in my head turn like a well oiled machine.”

Chris grumbles and then winces in pain. Peter is back in his chair and holding Chris’s hand in an instant. Chris stares at their intertwined fingers and the dark lines of pain snaking up Peter’s wrist and arm.

“John will shoot your balls off if you try to get her bitten,” Chris says with a sigh as the pain dampens and his body relaxes.

“He would try,” Peter allows, because the Sheriff would definitely try.

Chris pulls his hand free and tips his head toward Peter. “I guess we should talk now that I’m lucid and only in mild agony.”

“Don’t exaggerate. Your doctors are already sharpening their pens to get your ‘amazing recovery’ added to their publishing CVs.” Peter sits back in his chair and folds his arms over his chest.

“Still. We have...things...to discuss. Don’t we?”

“So I was going to bring you lunch but you’re on your own with ‘the talk,’ lover boy. Back later,” Cora’s distant voice reaches his ears.

“Don’t ever call me ‘lover boy’ again.”

Cora laughs while Chris looks horrified.

“Not you. Cora. She was down the hallway.”

Chris glares at the doorway before turning his attention back to Peter.

“Well?” Peter huffs in irritation. “Is this where you tell me that you went by my place to pack up your things and run away?”

“I was going to grab my bags and bug out.” He nods. “But Sunshine was there—”

“Shasta,” Peter corrects, hating himself for it.

“And then you were there.” Chris rides right over him. “And then.” He shrugs one shoulder, baring his teeth in pain but folding his hands in his lap, keeping them just out of Peter’s reach.

They both stay silent again for a moment.

“Do you want me to say it?” Chris asks, unmoving but glancing up at Peter. The submissiveness of the gesture makes Peter’s blood pressure rise from both anger and his wolf’s urge to claim, to mate, to possess .

“You know what? Yes. I want you to say it. I want you to admit it.”

That stirs some rebellion in Chris, who sits up straight in his bed and levels Peter with a masterful, if misplaced glare, given his next words. “I’ve been in love with you since you were sixteen.”

Peter doesn’t take in the confession for a moment, honestly waiting for a different set of words.

“Sixteen?” He spits out in surprise. When Peter was sixteen, Chris was twenty . When Peter was sixteen, he had just lost his virginity to a cheerleader and proceeded to work his way through the basketball team. Jean Christophe Argent was barely a blip on his radar, hell, they did not start flirting in earnest until after Peter graduated high school and started his training to be the pack’s next Left Hand. To Peter, it had never been more than a game. “ Sixteen ?” He repeats.

Chris merely nods.

“What…? How?”

Chris shrugs. “You were fucking your way through half the population of Beacon Hills High. You were a werewolf. You were a...a kid.” He gives a half-smile at the irony. “And I was a hunter.”

Peter is taking a long time to work though that statement because it shifts a lot of things into a new perspective. Chris takes the silence to mean something else, though. “I’ll leave. When I get out of here, I’ll—””

“No! Shut up!” Peter jabs a finger in his direction. “You do not get to throw this in my face and then walk off into the sunset. Not without a better explanation.”

“What’s to explain, Peter? I love you. I’ve been in love with you.”

“Your wife—”

“Was an arranged marriage, mostly to please my father. Did I love Vicki? Yes. I did. We were a good team and we...we had a good life together, while it lasted.” He looks away, and Peter knows he’s carefully omitting Allison from the picture he’s painting of that marriage. “But it wasn’t my idea. It wasn’t something I even wanted, at first. I only agreed to it because it would get me the hell out of Beacon Hills. Get me the hell away from you .”

Peter shakes his head, then closes his eyes and rubs his face. “Fuck.”

“I’m not sorry I used the bond to save you from Korhonen, if that’s what you are wondering,” Chris offers, his expression contrite.

“As if that is in any way, shape, or form on my fucking radar right now!” Peter shouts.

“I’m not asking anything of you!” Chris shouts right back before grabbing at his abdomen, his face a rictus of pain.

“You are a goddamn asshole, Argent,” Peter says as he gets up, slapping his hand on Chris’s mate mark and kissing him so fast and hard that their teeth clack. He pulls the pain out as he pushes his tongue into Chris’s mouth. The taste is sour and thick like the worst morning breath ever but it’s all Chris and Peter wallows in the way their lips slide together as Chris sighs into him, his body lax but his heart pounding away in his chest like a marching band.

When Peter finally pulls out of the kiss, Chris looks dumbfounded, his jaw hanging open unattractively, his skin flushed and ruddy.

Peter tilts his head, considering. “How much do you remember?”

“Uh.” Chris blinks for a few moments, his brain very obviously having to reboot itself. Peter tries not to be smug about that and fails, because he honestly did not try very hard.

“I remember getting shot. After that, things are...fuzzy.”

Well, that clears up some of the confusion between them. “Fuzzy, how?”

Chris tries to pull his arm out of Peter’s grasp but Peter refuses to let go. They struggle in a parody of a fight for a moment before Chris gives up. “More like hallucinations.”

Peter thinks about this for a moment. Chris is too cynical to believe anything Peter would tell him about the phoenix reappearing and saving them, about Chris kissing him first, about any declarations Peter might make of mates and love and the Hale alpha spark protecting them. He’s surely heard some of the story from the Sheriff or possibly even Stiles, but the paranoid bastard would definitely question Peter’s version of events.

“Our marks have changed,” he says instead, turning Chris’s arm up to show the new version in all its stylized glory. He lays his arm down next to it for comparison.

“I noticed.” Chris eyes their mate marks briefly. “I assumed some of the power burned out protecting us, based on what Stiles told me.”

“Hmm. Something like that.” He steps away to pull his chair closer again before sitting down. “Do you know why I killed Laura?”

Chris blinks at the non sequitur. “For her power.”

“Ostensibly, yes. That’s what I tell the kids: my insanity-driven lust for the alpha power.” He folds his hands over his belly and tips his head back to look at the ceiling. Waiting. Pulling his prey into the trap.

Chris sighs. “But?” He pauses. “Are you saying you weren’t insane? That it was premeditated?” His voice sharpens in censure.

“Oh, it was premeditated, yes, but I was definitely insane. The two are not mutually exclusive.” He finally looks over at Chris, his stomach churning. “But premeditated by who? Really?”

“I’m not playing this guessing game with you, Hale. Tell me what you want me to know. I’m in too much fucking pain to have any patience.” Chris’s growl is as solid and threatening as any wolf’s, which Peter takes a moment to admire.

“Laura left me as bait.” Peter snaps out the words. Chris’s eye goes wide with surprise before narrowing in suspicion, but Peter shakes his head to stop him from interrupting.

“It’s exactly what Talia would have done, hell, it’s what I would have advised her to do as her left hand. But Laura never trusted me, and I never trusted her, so she also broke the pack bonds when she left. Ill advised for both of us, but — and I’m being charitable here — she was young, running on instinct and fear. She left me as bait but did not want any connection to her and Derek, did not want anything that could be held against them. If anyone came after me, she would be informed as next of kin but there would nothing they — Kate ,” he spits the name, “Could use to track back to her. She left me as bait, she left me to die. I was rude enough to foil her plan.”

“And you know this because…?”

“She told me. We had a long, unproductive talk before we tried to kill each other.” He winces at the memory, the way her rage and terror fed into his instability. He takes a deep breath and looks away again. “Who would believe me if I told them that I lured her back to try and talk her into helping me? To let me be pack again so we could get revenge together—” His breath hitches and he snarls at his own weakness. “I still remember the exact moment I realized she was there to execute me, to eliminate every threat to her and Derek, pack bonds be damned. I don’t remember much about her attack, to be perfectly honest. I was shockingly unprepared but it set me off.” He shrugs. “I won.”

It’s a story too ruthless for Derek to believe of his precious older sister, whom he worshipped from the time he could waddle around behind her. Given the tentative overtures from him and Cora lately, Peter is not willing to rock the ship by sharing it with him now. He clenches his teeth and looks at Chris again, surprised at the expression of shock and confusion, but determined to see this out. “The alpha spark did my insanity no favors, as we all know.”

Chris stares at him for a long moment. Peter stares back, letting his mask fall, letting Chris see the pain of loss and anguish he knows sits under the surface of his snark and venom.“Why are you telling me this, Peter?” Chris asks softly, as if trying not to spook him.

Peter leans forward in the chair with his elbows on his knees and looks directly into Chris’s stark blue eyes. “If I can’t trust you, my mate , who can I trust?”

That, even more than the impromptu kiss, pushes Chris’s heart rate into overdrive.