𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐄 𝐃𝐎𝐖𝐍 𝐒𝐎𝐎𝐍, derek hale ✓

𝐓𝐖𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐘 𝐒𝐈𝐗

┏━━━━⋆°.☾⋆.ೃ࿔*:⋆━━━━┓

CASUALTIES

"SHE'S NOT DEAD."

"Derek, he said: there's a dead body, it's Erica. Doesn't exactly leave us much room for interpretation."

Emerson had her chin resting on her knees as she sat on the nearby countertop, next to the blond boy beside her who'd since stopped shivering and yet still opted to sit directly against her. She found she didn't mind, or maybe she just didn't have time to mind considering their latest problem.

"Then who else was in the vault with Boyd?" Derek asked gruffly, still arguing with the Stilinski boy about what Isaac's memories were telling them.

"Maybe it was the girl on the motorcycle," Scott offered up, trying to stop the pair from biting their heads off. He turned to Isaac, "the one that saved you?"

"No, she wasn't like us," Isaac responded, "and whoever was in the vault with Boyd was."

"What if that's how Erica died. They like, put them against each other during the full moons and see which one survives," Stiles hypothesized.

Emerson's stomach churned. "Deucalion has never done something like that," she told them. "He's ruthless, but that is just..."

Stiles levelled a flat stare her way. "The dude's hunted you for years, Emerson; I'm pretty sure he's capable of establishing a werewolf thunderdome."

"Then we get them out tonight," Derek said, his tone demanding in a way that told Emerson he was rushing.

"Be smart about this, Derek," Deaton warned. "We can't just go storming in."

"If Isaac got in, then so can we."

"And look where that got him," Emerson reminded the man, "or did you forget you had to rescue him from the hospital?"

"How are we going to break into a bank vault in less than twenty four hours?"

Emerson's phone rang, the silence in the tense room dissipating while the sound bounced off the walls.

She sheepishly went to get it, digging into the pocket of her hoodie and noticing the caller ID was one she didn't recognize. Hopping down from the counter she was sat atop, she ventured back into the lobby of the clinic and away from the others.

The wall of separation wouldn't serve as much of a barrier to the wolves with supernatural hearing, but it was a habit she couldn't kick after living with her human guardian for the last few years.

Pressing it up to her ear, she answered with a short, "hello?"

"Is this Emerson Avery?" an unfamiliar voice asked, and there was a distant beeping sound in the background.

"Yes," she responded, albeit a little uneasily. "Sorry, who is this?"

"I'm calling from Beacon Hills Memorial," the woman on the line stated. "We have you listed as Hannah Prescott's next of kin, and—"

Emerson's hand tightened around her phone, her feet pushing her toward the front door. "Next of kin?" she asked, even though she was all too familiar with the phrase. On a forged document that deemed her Hannah's niece, she was technically her next of kin, but that couldn't have been further from the truth.

"It seems your aunt was the victim of a break in, and we've got her in surgery now," the woman stated, the shuffling of papers sounding in the background. "How soon could you get he—"

A nauseating sense of deja vu filled her stomach as the phone crunched under her grip, the shards falling to the ground. Distantly, she could've sworn she heard voices coming closer.

This seemed way too familiar. It seemed familiar in the way that her previous guardian had been rushed to the hospital during a school day by a stranger, only to die on the table because of the injuries she sustained during a break in.

This has happened before, and because it had, Emerson had a feeling she knew the culprit of the supposed break in.

She'd been too worried about Isaac all day, and it seemed like Deucalion had anticipated that.

He knew Hannah would've been alone.

"Em, what's—"

Emerson left the clinic in a few swift movements, dodging the hand that was reaching for her arm. The door swung violently as she booked it toward the main road, leaving nothing but a small crowd of worried faces behind.

One of which would lean down to pick up her broken phone, the device limp in his hands.

ೃ࿔*:⋆

Emerson hated hospitals because from her experience, they always revolved around one thing: death.

When she arrived, she'd been pointed in the direction of the charge nurse who'd made the call. It was an auburn haired woman with a kind and sympathetic smile, details she didn't spend too much time looking at before she was shuffling the blond to a pair of seats in the waiting room.

The Prescott home had been broken into once again, and a man who was simply on an evening jog saw her body through the opened front door. He didn't stick around, Emerson wanted to roll her eyes, but left her in their care. 

Multiple stab wounds and blunt force trauma to the head. She'd been snuck up on by the intruder, and that fact alone made Emerson's blood start to boil.

Deucalion was taking it all away from her again, just like he had many times in the past; only this time, Hannah was facing the grim fate her old guardian had four years ago. Come to think of it, it was almost the anniversary of the incident in Rochester.

It wasn't a coincidence, none of this was, and she knew that.

"Is she gonna make it?" She knew the answer, but she had to ask.

"They're doing everything they can." That might as well have been a resounding no, she's not. Emerson had been through this before, so she merely let her hands pull at her scalp. "Is there someone else we can call, or—"

"It's just us," Emerson interrupted, knee bouncing as she sat there under the woman's gaze. "There's no one else."

When the nurse walked back to her desk with promise of bringing news within the next few hours, all she could think about was how much shit she had piling up on her plate.

She told Derek she would help with Boyd and Erica, plus whoever else was in the vault with the beta that remained, but this was Hannah. The same Hannah who'd taken her in when she quite literally had no one else left, when no one else wanted to deal with the consequences of having her.

With the full moon less than twenty four hours away, with Isaac's near death and Elizabeth's stormy farewell and now this, something was building up inside of Emerson.

No one could stop her from storming out of the waiting room, out of the hospital itself, before she could do something stupid. Though, in her mind, confronting the bad man wasn't stupid in that very moment. No, it was the best idea she thought she'd ever have.

And if she knew him, which she did, she knew he always returned to the scene of the crime.

⋆°.☾⋆.ೃ࿔*:⋆

[ wyn's note ]

all a distraction for deuc's real plan :/ hannah girl u better pull through !!!

ty for 11k!! crazy with a capital C asf