Derek Hale Imagines

Just So I Could Call You Mine

Based on a request for a Derek Hale songfic centered around 'Favorite Crime' by Olivia Rodrigo

Derek Hale is staring out a photograph. It's old, so old he can't remember the exact date it was taken but just enough to picture how he felt at the precise moment the shutter snapped. Derek didn't even know he had this photo anymore until he was rifling through storage, trying to find something of considerably more importance. Now, he's just looking at it, all other tasks forgotten when faced with the crippling necessity of this one, this reminder of who he was, how stupid he was when it came to one girl.

The photograph stares at him accusingly from where it's clutched in his fingers. Two figures smile back at him, practically giddy on how happy they thought they were. There's a fold deep enough in the paper that it cuts right across the eyes of the girl, although Derek doesn't need this photograph to remember how Kate Argent's face looks. He can picture it plain as day, how harsh every line and angle seemed the night she killed his entire family.

He still doesn't know how to feel about the whole thing. Kate had been older than him then, and she had known exactly what she was doing to the teenage version of Derek unlucky enough to fall into her clutches. Some part of him had known all along that something was wrong, but that didn't make it any easier.

Know that I loved you so bad

I let you treat me like that

I was your willing accomplice, honey

Besides, he had still wanted to impress her. Derek can remember nights spent out, just the two of them pretending there was a world in which they could skip town and find a life outside of their families. Younger Derek had thought it was such a dramatic reveal when he finally told Kate that he was a werewolf, although, looking back on it now, she had probably known for a very long time.

Back then, though, he fancied them to be a bit of a Romeo and Juliet, him from a werewolf family and her from a clan of hunters. He had really thought they could make it out alive, or do something to fix the irreparable damage between the Argents and every other facet of the supernatural world.

Derek has lost count of all the plans they'd made, all the things he did to keep his family off his back while he was out visiting Kate. He had covered up her family's exploits further into the Hale side of the woods, pretended he had no idea that the Argents kept getting eerily specific information on the movements of Derek's family. The only other option was to accept that Kate had betrayed him, and he would rather have died than do that.

In the end, Derek had no choice. Despite the amount of blood he had on his hands trying to keep their future safe, Kate had played her cards exactly as she pleased. Derek had watched his house burn, heard the tortured screams of his family, and known. He knew it was her; perhaps he'd known it all along that she would use him to kill the werewolves in Beacon Hills. There was no perfect Shakespearean ending, not when one of them had been plotting all along.

And I watched as you fled the scene

Doe-eyed as you buried me

One heart broke, four hands bloody

Still, seeing this old photograph plunges him back into the thick of things. He really had believed in her, hadn't he? It was bizarre to think that he could go from mourning Paige to ever loving again, yet he had when Kate came around. Then again, Derek's not sure that what he had with Kate Argent was ever truly love. It was some sort of fierce dependency in which he was terrified to be alone and she promised him things he knew would never come true. To a teenage boy who couldn't take any more losses, it was everything, and then it wasn't.