Kings of the Moonlight

Cold Desert

I'm too young to feel this old.

-

The polished matte black of the grill cuts swiftly through the bitter cold fog that curls itself around the gleamed black metal of the Camaro. The road, illuminated by a set of four headlights, is covered in the remnants of late winter rainfall whilst the low, rhythmic rumble of the engine intersperses with the wet sounds of the car rolling down the darkened interstate.

Derek Hale looks over at his son nestled in the car-seat, placed on the passenger side to his right, and his heart seizes up, pained and guilt ridden.

Isaac, his little Isaac, sits in his bumper seat with his small hands worrying at each other above the blanket that Derek had tucked around him in his haste. Isaac's tear stained face is pale with fear as he huffs ragged hiccoughs and trembled breaths despite the fact that the heating is turned all the way up in the car. 

Though, the one thing that Derek will never forgive himself for is the way Isaac's eyes darts from place to place within the car, for the way Derek knows Isaac can't bring himself to look out of the window, as if he expects Kate to reappear at any given moment. Derek will never forgive himself because no four-year old should ever be afraid of his own mother.

-

Derek wishes he could say it was a whirlwind; that Kate was a golden-haired hurricane who swept into his life in a cloud of perfume and cigarettes and turned him into the Prince Charming of her fairytale world, that everything happened so quickly; he could hardly blink let alone notice that anything was deathly wrong with her.

In reality it happened in increments, Derek fell deep and he fell hard. He can't pinpoint the precise moment in which he was absolutely sure that he loved her with every fibre of his being but he surmises that it must have happened somewhere between the first time she smiled at him across a bar, as he drunk away the remnant memories of his last relationship, frowning with conviction at his beer, and the first time she rose up above him again and again, like a crisp tidal wave, overwhelming him with warmth and want and Kate.

She was older than he was and a devil of a woman, with self-assuredness and a comfort in her own person that Derek fervently admired. That was the first thing that he found himself entranced by, the confidence that he only wished he possessed. She skirted the line between wild and dangerous and Derek found himself intoxicated by her and the reality she lived in.

Kate was like a drug, new and eviscerating, and she isolated him from everyone he cared about as soon as he graduated college, some seven months after they had first met. He remembers now the loud, tired arguments he had with his sister Laura, how many times he'd simply walked out of family meals with Kate in tow due to the dreadful tension around the dinner table, leaving behind his shocked parents. Derek remembers the screaming matches with Erica, his best friend, who despite hating Kate with a burning fervour, refused to abandon Derek's side even after she had moved back to their hometown and Derek had gone to the city with Kate.

In a kind of cruel irony, Derek knows exactly when he began to stop loving Kate. He knows the exact expression that caused him to finally see the cracks in the façade that she had created. For the first time ever he saw the real, unrecognisable Kate before she fixed the mask of the persona she had become in order to fool Derek.

Two years into their relationship Derek had sat beside her, both perched on the cold porcelain edge of their bathtub staring with baited breath at the small rectangular pregnancy test that Kate held in her hands. The blood had rushed out of Derek's face as the small blue cross appeared.

"We're going to have a baby?" he'd whispered.

In retrospect it had taken Kate too long to formulate an answer, but Derek had attributed it to the same shock and tentative happiness that had also rendered him speechless when she'd responded moments later, "Y-yeah, I guess we are."