put the 50 shades of grey crazy in love cover on bc i had it on repeat while writing this. :-)
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THIRTY ONE;
WICKED THIS WAY
Three gasps interrupted the silence.
Allison Argent, Stiles Stilinski, and Scott McCall all pulled themselves up from the ice bath, struggling to find warmth as their teeth vibrated against each other from their cold body temperatures. Each of them were running on a high after seeing where the nemeton was, practically stumbling and slurring their words to reveal the location before they completely forgot all together.
"I saw it! I know where it is," Scott rushed out to the others, his eyes fixated on Deaton.
Stiles nodded as he stood dripping wet in between Scott and Allison, glancing at Lydia and Isaac who had just entered the room. "We passed it. There was this stump of this huge tree— well, it's not huge anymore, it was cut down; but still big though, very big."
"It was the night we were looking for the body," Scott explained, turning to look over at the boy next to him to confirm that he had noticed the same thing.
"Yeah," Stiles agreed, nodding furiously as he swallowed hard. "The same night you were bit by Peter."
Allison, who had been standing silently as the boys conversed, found herself finally speaking up to tell them what she had seen. "I was there, too, in the car with my mother. We almost hit someone."
"That was me. You almost hit me," Scott spluttered, surprise written on his dripping complexion as he stared at the brunette only for her to let out an exasperated exhale. The wolf turned to look at Deaton with a sure expression. "We can find it."
The three others in the room looked weary, Lydia's arms crossed tightly over her chest while Isaac pursed his lips. Neither one seemed ready to spill what happened, much less actually tell the surrogates what occurred while they were under. Deaton didn't want to either, his face contorting into a deep frown as he stared down at the ground for a few seconds.
Allison was the first one to ask what was wrong, wondering why they all looked as though something horrible had happened. "What?"
Stiles' eyes narrowed, watching their facial expressions just before he realized that there was someone missing from this conversation, and his weight lifted from where he was sitting on the tub to glance around the room in panic. Scott and Allison seemed to catch on to who he was searching for, and looked around as well only to come up empty-handed.
The teenage boy whipped his head around to face the others. "Where is she?"
"Stiles—" Lydia went to interrupt.
Stiles' jaw clenched. "Where the hell is she, Lydia?"
"She's different," Deaton explained, looking uncertain as he began to explain to them where the missing blonde was. "She woke up an hour ago after she had been convulsing while in her state. I originally thought that something had gone wrong with the sacrifice, but she woke up and all of her vital signs were perfectly fine."
Allison's grip tightened on the edge of the tub. "But?"
"But, she won't talk to anyone," Deaton revealed, his hands falling limply at his sides. "All three of us tried to get her to speak but she hasn't said a word since she opened her eyes. Whatever she saw traumatized her greatly."
Stiles immediately moved to walk past Deaton and Lydia, ready and willing to find Sage only for the man to lay a hand on the boy's arm, stopping him. Scott's eyes narrowed when he realized that there was something else going on that didn't involve Sage's state of mind. He wasn't sure what was worse than the fact that one of his best friends is refusing to speak to them because of what she saw.
It couldn't have been that, right?
Scott's lips pulled down. "There's something else, isn't there?"
Isaac, who had been standing quietly behind Lydia, hesitantly spoke. "You guys were out a long time."
"How long is a long time?" Stiles spat, his anger fusing with his concern for Sage as he grew more agitated by the second that he couldn't be with his girlfriend; all he wanted to do was make sure she was okay.
"Sixteen hours," Deaton admitted.
Scott's eyes widened at the revelation. "We've been in the water for sixteen hours?"
"And the full moon rises in less than four," a voice called out from behind everyone, loud enough to hear but low enough to assure she didn't have to overwhelm herself by speaking.
Everyone whipped their head around to see that Sage was standing by the door frame, her jacket now discarded from her shoulders as she stared at the people in front of her. Stiles saw when he looked at her what Deaton had meant when he explained to them that she is different. Something inside of her eyes was broken, dark circles looming on her face as green orbs reflected to his brown ones.
This girl wasn't Sage.
The blonde slowly walked into the room, her arms wrapped protectively over her chest as though to keep herself out of distance from the others. Stiles and Lydia both edged towards her, wanting nothing more than to give her a hug, or something that would make this better, only to be shot down when Sage flinched away before they could even touch her.
"Sage," Deaton called, making the blonde shoot her head over to him. "How are you feeling?"
She looked at him with a blank stare, her eyes shadowed in confusion as she wondered whether or not he was truly concerned about her well-being. That, or she was just puzzled by the question in general.
"Alive."
She wasn't sure what else she could say about her health to console her friends. Hell, she could barely look them in the eye without feeling a wave of nausea slam into her like a ton of bricks. The only thing she distinguished when she stared them was each and every one of their figures burning to a crisp in Hale fire, and that triggered something so horrific inside of her that she wanted to claw the skin off her body to sanitize herself of the nightmare.
Now that she was alive, she just wished she could die because death didn't give her the fear of losing people. Death granted her darkness, and right now, she wished that she could see the poisonous black instead of the people in front of her.
Sage couldn't look at them the same way; she would never be able to hug Lydia again without remembering her in the window, she wouldn't be able to touch Stiles without wanting to drown herself thinking about him becoming ash.
She didn't know what to do.
Thankfully, Scott had interrupted her internal feud with the disfiguring thoughts to glance at the others with a frown. "I need to get back to Deucalion. I wasn't supposed to be gone this long."
"He's just going to get you killed," Sage muttered, eyes boring a hole in her hands rather than meeting her friend's gaze as she furiously picked at her nails. "All he ever does is get people killed."
Stiles seemed to agree with the blonde. "No, Dude. You're not going back to them."
"I made a deal with Deucalion," Scott explained, only for the girl across the room from him to let out a small snort before moving to the back of the room, careful to stray away from everyone else as she slid down to the ground with her head in her hands.
Stiles was growing frustrated now, not completely sure who the frustration was directed at: his best friend or his girlfriend. While Sage refused to show any emotions about anything whatsoever, Scott was setting himself out on a death mission by standing alongside the same man that single-handedly destroyed so many lives, the blonde in the room being one of them.
Crossing his arms over his chest, he faced Scott. "Does anyone else think that sounds like a deal with the devil?"
"Why does it matter, anyway?" Isaac questioned, his voice breaking into the conversation from his place next to Allison, only adding onto the growing tension that was wafting throughout the clinic room due to all the misguided trust and longing fears.
Scott frowned. "Because, I still don't think we can beat Jennifer without their help."
"You can't," Sage denied, glancing up at her friends from her position on the floor for the first time with a hard look. "Deucalion may be a murderer and he might be incapable of having emotions, but he can also be your ally. When he wants something, or someone, he'll do everything that is necessary to get it without ever considering the repercussions and costs. That can work both for and against your favor."
Allison's head began to shake slightly, refusing to believe that two of her closest friends were honestly believing the ravage killer could help them; turning to Deaton, she spoke. "He trusts you more than anyone. Tell him that he's wrong— that they're both wrong."
"I'm not so sure they are." Deaton shrugged. "Circumstances like this, sometimes, require you to align yourself with people you normally consider enemies."
Isaac scoffed in disbelief. "So we're going to trust him? The guy who calls himself 'Death, Destroyer of Worlds.' We're going to trust that guy?"
"I wouldn't trust him," Deaton denied, opposed to the idea. "But, you could use him to your advantage. Deucalion may be the enemy, but he can also be the bait."
The conversation about the murderous, ultimate alpha had been cut short when the bell to the front of the clinic chimed, signalling that another person had come to intrude on their little werewolf cult sacrifices. It was unsurprising to see Sage's shoulders tense at the sound, almost like anything that was a sign of humanity proved to be the bane of her existence in just the short fifteen hours she was dead.
Deaton glanced at the other teenagers, each of them boring a look of confusion considering everyone that knew about their secret was in the room currently. When the older man turned around the corner, his eyes flickering to the tense blonde on the floor just before, he wasn't surprised to see who the guest was.
"I'm looking for Sage."
The blonde's body grew even more rigid at the tone of voice, shutting her eyes tightly before she got up from the ground with the help of the wall. Her friends glanced back at her, the half of them that didn't know about her little secret, no doubt, confused while the other half just looked hesitant on allowing the corrupted girl anywhere near the corrupted killer.
Hand tightly gripping the base of the door frame, she squeezed in between Deaton and Lydia to come face-to-face with a ghost from her past. "What do you want?"
"I need your help," Ethan explained, his face blank as he refused to drop his gaze from the girl.
Sage thought that it would hurt less to see him. She thought that it wouldn't be as hard to look him in the eyes as it had been for the others standing around her. In all honesty, though, when she looked at the boy she could feel as much pain inside of her at the thought of him dying. She assumed that because of what he was, and what he has done, maybe the idea of him burning wouldn't scar her as deeply.
She had been wrong.
Before she could open her mouth to ask what he needed, another person had come through the back of the clinic to stand in front of the blonde protectively, Stiles adamant on his girlfriend staying away from the half of the voltron wolf at all costs. "Help with what?"
"Stopping my brother and Kali," Ethan began, pausing for a few seconds as he anticipated his next words. "— from killing Derek."
Sage's body was moving from behind Stiles the second that the man's name left the boy's lips. She hadn't even realized the instinctual act, only coming to her senses the second that a hand was grabbing her arm to jerk her back, a firm hold on her limb. She figured there was a fifty-fifty chance of it being Stiles or Scott, and only when she turned around to find out did she see that it was her boyfriend.
The boy that she could barely look in the eye without having haunting flashbacks of his burning silhouette in the window.
"You can't go with him, Sage," Stiles muttered, his voice lower as if it would make any difference to the situation they were in. "I just got you back."
The blonde felt a lump form in her throat, but she didn't shed any tears as she moved her eyes away from the boy and back over to Ethan. She knew that this was a decision she was eventually going to have to make, the decision to marvel in the past or try to fix her future.
Sage supposed her choice had been made long before Ethan ever showed up for help.
There was no future for her, not with Stiles and not in this town. She was hurting all of her friends by just standing beside them, just being a part of their life and breathing the same air as them. The only thing she was doing was preparing them for another funeral, the same one that she had seen while dead.
She was killing them all and she hadn't even realized it.
Trying to ignore the aching poison that was her heart, she shook her head at Stiles and grabbed his hand to pull it from her arm. With tears threatening to burn her eyes, but never being spilled, she clenched her jaw hard.
"I'm sorry."
Two things happened in that moment, two things that Sage hadn't even noticed until she was out the door and leaving her potential future behind just to chase down her past — to protect a man she loves from a boy she loved.
She had said the same thing to Stiles that Aiden uttered to her just before he left two years ago, and that couldn't have felt more like a goodbye to her than saying the actual word. The two strongest words with the shortest diction had altered the course of her reality.
Sage had just lost everything that brought her happiness in that very clinic, everything that was worth fighting for and everything that made her sane.
All because she had to find herself.
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Sage thought that when she saw Derek again she would jump into his arms and hug the life out of him, praying that he would rid her of the horrific thoughts burning holes into her sanity just like he had done when she was a young girl.
But, reality set in that the last time the two spoke to each other had been when Sage walked away from him, spitting words with such venom that they could have burned the ground he walked on. The last time she looked him in the eye, she was dying from the inside-out due to a poison running through her veins.
Now, she was just nothing.
In just the short amount of time that the two had been away from each other, more things happened than the past seven years they had spent living together. More pain and more strife had been influenced in their hearts in just the few moments spent apart, and Sage knew that the second she walked into her home that he was going to be the hardest one to look in the eye.
He was the only one that could see straight through her, straight into her eyes and straight into her hell. To her surprise, though, her eyes hadn't been the only ones captivated in darkness.
"They're blue."
Sage's comment had fell from her lips the second she walked forward and met eyes with the man. His orbs had been glowing fluorescent, an ability that he had been given due to heredity, but they were a completely different color now than they had been when she left him.
It was almost nostalgic to see the blue eyes again, mostly because they had been such an extreme part of who Derek Hale was. Sage Connelly grew up around more blue than golden, something that she had never been frightened by but appreciative, grateful even, because no matter how many mistakes she made, they would only reflect in her character.
But, wolves? Wolves held all of their mistakes in the color reflected back at them.
Derek didn't advance towards her anymore than she did to him. "You're alive."
"They're blue," Sage repeated, glancing behind the boy to see that Cora was now standing perfectly alive and healthy, no doubt in better mental condition than she was. Finally, she turned back to Derek and nodded. "It's still a pretty color."
"How are you alive?" Derek questioned, the two splitting the conversation with two completely different subjects, both parties doing their best to completely avoid their own section.
Sage didn't want to explain how she was alive any more than Derek wanted to explain why his eyes were glimmering blue again. Everyone else wanted to know, though. Even Ethan, who had been silent the whole ride to the loft, had noticed a change in the way Sage held herself. She was hesitant to hold onto him when getting on his bike, and she kept her head down if they accidentally made eye contact.
He knew it wasn't just because of what him and his brother had done to her, but something rooted so much deeper inside of the blonde than he had originally assumed at the time.
Figuring that he might as well spare the girl, seeing how much pain the question brought on, Ethan did his best to protect the sanity of a girl he still thought of as a sister. "There's something you need to know. I know that you don't trust me after what I did but you need to hear me out."
"Why should I?" Derek snapped, his arms crossing over his chest as he turned his attention away from the small blonde and over to the alpha that had helped in the destruction of Boyd's life.
"Because, we know all about the lunar eclipse," Ethan admitted, his eyebrows raising. "So, don't think that Kali is going to stop and wait to level the playing field. She's coming, and my brother is coming with her."
Peter hummed. "Good enough for me. Derek?"
Sage's eyes flickered from the ground over to the man that spoken, not at all surprised by the fact that Peter was opting to run away from his problems. The man was a coward when it came to the idea of dying, rather just watching the flames grow than risking the cost of getting burned to save others.
Her lip pulled up slightly in amusement, noticing how scared the man was. "I never thought I would see the day one monster is afraid of another."
Sage's humor was so twisted at this point, not even having realized how unstable she was already sounding. Derek stared down at her for a split second, catching on to the one thing that she feared he would, just before turning to look back at his uncle, the same man that he had killed just a year ago.
"You want me to run?" he asked, somewhat appalled at the insinuation.
Peter rolled his eyes, unaffected by the blonde's harsh blow. "No. I want you to stay and get slaughtered by an alpha with a psychotic foot fetish. Yes, I want you to run. Sprint, gallop, leap your way out of this town."
"If you want to fight and die for something, that's fine with me," Cora interrupted, introducing herself into the conversation as she stared at her brother. "But, do it for something meaningful."
Derek frowned, his ability to fight being questioned so harshly. "How do you know I'm going to lose?"
"I don't," Peter denied, shaking his head just before his head moved to glower at the blonde standing in the room with them. "I'm sure that she has an idea about what her little loverboy is going to do, though."
Sage's fists tightened but she said nothing to the oldest Hale, rather just turning her attention over to Derek despite the pain it brought her. She could literally see fire blazing inside of his eyes, and it took all she had to continue to make contact with him instead of cowering away. Derek needed to know that her decision was already made, and he needed to know that she was willing to do anything and everything to keep him and Cora safe.
Trying to ignore the idea of biting her lips nervously, she shook her head once. "Ethan and I can buy the two of you enough time to get out of Beacon Hills. You need to go now, though. I don't know when they'll get here or how angry Kali will be when she finds out your not with us, but it's the least we can do."
Surprisingly, all three Hale's seemed repulsed by the idea of leaving the blonde here, each one of them stepping forward to protest the thought of abandoning Sage for dead. Even Peter, who Sage had never wanted to murder more, was adamant on denying it.
Derek, however, had been the one to voice it. "You're going to get yourself killed."
"Then, I'll see my family," Sage opted.
"I'm not going to just leave you here to get ripped apart by two alphas."
She didn't even flinch at the idea of death anymore, rather just accepting it and all that it was. If Kali wanted to murder Sage, which she wasn't really doubting, then that was absolutely fine. The blonde had said goodbye to the one person that mattered most in the only way she knew possible, and maybe, she would die by the hands of a boy she used to love.
Maybe, she would just die; but, at least Derek and Cora would be safe.
"You're our family," Cora interrupting, moving back to what Sage had previously mentioned about her family, her eyes shadowing a fear that couldn't even begin to express through her words. "I'm not losing another sister."
Sage didn't have the heart to tell the brunette she already had.
"You need to go now," she muttered, tightening her fists as she moved to cross her arms over her chest without daring to look another Hale in the eye for too long. "I'll call you when they leave."
Ethan, who had been silently standing beside Sage for the time being, found himself meeting eyes with Derek. The two had barely had any interaction, mostly because his role hadn't been so much important to the older man two years ago considering he was just the blonde's friend and hadn't been sleeping with her like Aiden.
There was a silent truce in their stare, though, that Ethan would protect Sage and make sure nothing happened to her. If that meant fighting against his brother and his pack member, then he would do it. He would fight for her because he knows that she won't fight for herself, and that had been the last push Derek Hale needed before he found himself going upstairs to pack up as much as he could.
And, in the moments of the Hale family leaving, Sage couldn't have been more grateful to know that it wasn't just Beacon Hills that they were getting away from, it was also her.
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She hadn't even flinched when the loud bang echoed through the room the second that Kali's hand found the intruder alarm, more so just put up the facade that she had created a long time ago while in the presence of any member from the Alpha pack. Showing that she was afraid, even in the slightest, only fueled their homicidal tendencies.
"Something wicked this way comes," Sage hummed, her arms crossed lazily across her chest as she leaned on one of the beams that supported the roof. "You know, I do live here, Kali. Which also means I have the password to that thing."
Kali only growled, canines bared as she snapped at the teenage girl. Aiden followed closely behind, his eyes focusing in on the blonde from across the room. Despite the fact that she was playing off being perfectly fine, perfectly sane, he had caught bits of the conversation about what she had done to save herself from the Darach's poison. He knew that she had to sacrifice herself in order to restore who she really was.
He could see it in her eyes.
Kali, however, was as blind as Deucalion when it came to the girl's pain. "Where is he?"
Sage wasn't going to give the brunette what she wanted, instead she just decided to further frustrate the woman considering she had already dug a hole deep enough to bury herself. She figured the best subject would be to continue her babbling about the intruder alarm, acting as if Kali's question had never been asked.
"So, there was honestly no point in pouring your frustration out on something that cost more than a nail job in California— something you need desperately, if I might add. I mean, I'm not into the whole pretty in pink stuff, but at least I know what a nail filer is," Sage tempted, a sneering smirk on her face as she continued to pick at her black nail polish.
Kali snarled loud enough for Sage's lips to quirk a bit more. "Who do you think you're talking to?"
"All I see is a little girl with a broken heart," the blonde snapped back, pushing herself off the beam to smile at the woman. "And, even that's not much."
That had been the turning point, Sage's jabs towards the alpha getting to be too much as the older woman's face hardened to monstrosity. The fact that she was closing in on girl had been enough for Ethan to move a bit closer, an arm outstretching. His act hadn't been what lifted a red flag, but the low emitting growl coming from the wolf that was supposed to be on her side.
Kali slowly turned her head around in surprise, facing the angered boy. "Oh, really? Did someone take their assignment a little too seriously? Did you forget what Deucalion told you about getting too close to her again?"
"She's not the problem," Aiden dismissed, his eyes glancing over at Sage for a few moments before they went to Kali's figure walking around him, knowing that it was her own way of taunting him for showing that he cared about his ex-girlfriend.
Sage, compulsively, stepped forward when she realized that Kali was growing more ravage by the second that Aiden put more trust in herself and his brother than he did with Kali. She tried to ignore the ripping in her stomach when she saw him, ignoring the burning figure in her brain to try and put herself back in reality. There was no way she was going to survive if she was constantly envisioning everyone she loved burning.
Kali continued to walk around him. "Maybe the problem is where your loyalties lie."
"Ethan," Sage muttered, her hand finding his wrist without diverting her attention away from the scene in front of them. "Next time, make sure I keep my mouth shut."
She could feel his wrist tighten for a second. "We both know that's never going to happen."
Neither had a single chance to voice their fears about the idea of Aiden fighting Kali for Sage, and the brawl never even had a chance of being introduced because, just a second later, the sky was raining glass. Ethan had quickly grabbed a hold of Sage's waist, moving so that the blonde's body was protected under his own in an attempt to keep her from the shards.
The only thing that Sage saw when she was finally able to see again had been the back of the woman that had tried to murder her, and had. She saw the woman that was the culprit of the burning inside of her mind and the loss of sanity.
Jennifer Blake's voice echoed through the room.
"So, who's first?"
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ne
it's been forever. im sorry guys, ive just been dying in gym ( i kid you not, i was involuntarily put in an advanced p.e. class. im like lol bitch u better not be thinkin im running) and ive been hella stressed because we literally have around one or two days off this semester and i feel like shoOTING MYSELF IN THE FACE.
but, back to the chapter. i sincerely apologize and shall give you a fair warning to get ur tissues out and ready for the ending of part one and the beginning of 3b. :-)
comment what you think about the chapter and what you think is going to happen in 3b. do you think stiles and sage will still be together, or do you think sage and aiden might rekindle now that she realizes he actually does have a heart? wat do u think the nogitsune is going to do to our bby sage?
love you guys. you give me the ability to continue writing even on my worst days, and for that im eternally grateful. x