┌─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───┐
chapter one!
WORRY WART ALPHA
└─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───┘

( tattoo, pt. i )

∘₊✧──────✧₊∘

VERA IS TRYING to finish her summer reading homework when she gets the call.

"You need to leave Beacon Hills."

Vera frowns, positioning her cell phone between her cheek and shoulder so she can take her pen out of her mouth and speak. "Hello to you, too. What's the occasion? We had all summer to go on a trip. It's the night before school starts and I have an entire book to read before English class."

The voice on the other end sighs, but she can't tell if it's because of the reason for their call or the fact that she'd waited until the last minute yet again to start her homework. Anyone close to her wouldn't be surprised by this fact. Full-assing things right before they're due is better than half-assing them as soon as they're assigned. It's how Vera's brain works.

Derek Hale tells her firmly, "He's back."

Her frown deepens. That isn't specific at all, and this much beating around the bush tells her that whatever's going on, Derek really doesn't want to be the one to tell her about it. A blossom of worry sends an ache spreading through her chest. Her heartbeat increases, fingers turning clammy. Few things can rattle her older, not-blood-related brother.

"Derek," she says, voice level and low. "Who's back?"

"Deucalion."

Vera inhales sharply at the sound of his name. She knows it well. After all, she had grown up with him visiting Derek's mother whenever he needed guidance. She'd only glimpsed him from afar – humans weren't supposed to intrude on Pack meetings, but Derek had snuck her out anyway because he'd been curious, too – and she knows how his reputation precedes him nowadays. There are many aliases for him. The Alpha of Alphas. The Demon Wolf.

Vera's preferred nickname for him is The Psychotic Asshole Who'd Killed My Father.

She forces her breath to come out slow when she exhales through her mouth. The name terrifies her. The man terrifies her. But if Derek knows that, he'll show up at her house within seconds and drive her hundreds of miles away himself. She has to make sure that there isn't even a flicker of fear in her voice when she responds.

"I'm not leaving."

"Vera," Derek warns in a tone that reminds her of a disappointed parent.

"I can't!" she explains a little louder this time, jamming her pen into the crease of Great Expectations so she doesn't lose her page. "I have school tomorrow. I missed enough days last year when I had to recover from the bite, and I really don't want to go through another round of detention to make up for that lost time. Besides, my mom's on another business trip and I have nowhere to go. I'm not running."

Silence on the other end. Vera bites the inside of her cheek as it stretches on. Derek isn't the best at cluing others in on his plans, but he's always been upfront with her. She's one of the only people that he's always been completely honest with. Now, however, it seems like he's kept some things bottled up from her, and that fact is of great concern.

Three heartbeats later, he continues.

"He left his mark on the Hale door."

Vera doesn't want to know how Deucalion figured out where that is. Derek had been staying in the half-destroyed home of his family since he'd come back to Beacon Hills in January until he'd just recently bought a loft. The charred house is in the middle of the woods, and the old Pack meetings had never been hosted there. Then again, she should know not to underestimate the powers that certain werewolves have. After all, it had taken multiple Molotov cocktails and a slash to the throat to kill Peter Hale, and he still came back from the dead.

"Maybe it's you who should be running."

"This isn't funny."

"Does it sound like I'm laughing?"

An annoyed huff from the other end. "Just watch your back, okay? The last thing I need is for him to find out who you are."

There's another stretch of silence. Vera can't shake the feeling that gnaws at her gut and makes her suspect that there's still something more to this phone call.

"Derek," she says, speaking slowly and carefully, "what else aren't you telling me?"

"Erica and Boyd are still missing."

She can hear the despondency in his voice, further twisting her gut. Half of Derek's pack has been missing for months without a trace. With every passing day, the rivet between his eyebrows deepens so much that she's starting to worry that it may become a permanent fixture. It's like there's a gaping hole where Erica and Boyd had once been. Vera and Isaac feel it, but for Derek, their Alpha, it's much worse.

"We'll find them," Vera promises to convince both herself and him. "We will."

"I have to believe that," Derek replies. "For now, finish your homework. Did you take your Adderall?"

"Yes."

"Did you?"

"...No."

Yet another sigh. "Take it. I'll keep you updated."

They say their goodbyes and hang up. Vera doesn't feel like reading anymore. The large chunks of text are too much for her to focus on, anyway, and Charles Dickens takes way too many words to say such little stuff. She shifts in her bed and finds candy spilling over her fingers. The bowl of Sour Patch Kids she'd been using as a reward for reading – one page equals a piece – had been knocked over while she'd been on the phone and had sent the brightly-colored candies cascading across her blankets, grains of white sour-flavored particles tossed into the mix. She groans.

The door to her bedroom creaks open. Vera's cat, Hades, invites himself in and jumps up onto the cluttered full-sized mattress. His small paws step where they please. Her school papers crinkle, creasing under his weight, and he finally sits on top of Great Expectations with a self-righteous expression that tells her he knows exactly what he's just done.

Vera sighs and stares into Hades' green eyes. His bushy tail swishes from side to side, sending tufts of orange fur floating down onto her bed.

"Imagine if everyone had been were-cats instead of werewolves," she says to him. "I think Derek already has the brooding part down. Isaac has the attitude, and you are a cat who cannot understand me and I really need to finish this stupid book."

Vera picks Hades up and sets him onto an unoccupied section of her deep green blankets. Offended, the cat trots back over her homework and hops down onto the floor, paws softly padding the wood as he saunters out.

She decides that they would probably be better off if every werewolf in town was a were-cat instead. Maybe then there wouldn't be so much drama, and she could finally have more than six months of experience being a normal teenager.

— ✯✯✯ —

They say things tend to come in threes. The Holy Trinity, the three blind mice, three strikes and you're out in a baseball game. Vera wonders if this also applies to animals acting strangely. Last night, her friend Allison Argent had sent her a picture of a deer that had run straight at her car while both she and Lydia Martin had been inside, crashing its front half through the windshield and causing its near-immediate demise from the broken glass that had slit its throat.

Now, she drops Hades with an unceremonious gesture, knowing that he'll land on his feet anyway, and hisses as she inspects her now-bleeding forearm.

"Shit," she hisses, watching her blood trickle from the deep, four-inch-long scratch puncturing her skin. Her cat hasn't scratched her since he was a kitten and hadn't trusted her yet. That was six years ago, and this hadn't been a mere accident. Hades had been content in her arms until he abruptly began to writhe, barely giving her time to begin to set him down when he'd sunk his front claws into her flesh and slashed.

She glares at the orange-furred cat who is now sitting innocently on the floor and staring up at her with wide eyes. He blinks at her as if feigning oblivion.

Unfortunately, unlike some people she knows, Vera doesn't have supernatural healing powers. She heaves a resigned sigh and heads to the bathroom for a bandage.

The Northern Californian temperatures allow for her to change from her checkered t-shirt into a forest green sweater that thankfully covers her still-stinging wound. That, tucked into her high-waisted pair of ripped jeans and coupled with ankle boots, is about as dressed up as she'll ever be for school. It's her idea of a 'nice first-day' outfit as well as a "Look at me! I'm still not dead!" ensemble.

By the time Vera is ready to leave again, she's already running late. She locates Hades in the doorway of her room and shoots him another 'this-is-your-fault' glare before performing one of her favorite tricks: dissolving through the floors of her house to save time. Her eyes close as she concentrates on making herself transparent. She can feel the compounds of her body change, her weight becoming as light as air and frame barely visible to the naked eye. Then she drops through the floor.

While she'd gotten fairly good at this over the summer (when she hadn't felt like taking twenty extra steps to the fridge by using the doorway to her kitchen), she still hasn't perfected it, per se. It still takes an incredible amount of concentration for her to remember to make herself tangible again as soon as she pops out of the floor. Not doing so would mean she'd be more likely to just keep falling through the bottom floor and into the basement, then down into the Earth's crust.

Things work in Vera's favor this time. She drops onto her home's first floor in a crouched position and feels the sting of the landing travel from the bottoms of her feet to her brain. Roll next time, you idiot, she reminds herself as she pushes herself to her feet and slightly hobbles out the front door and to her car in the driveway.

She climbs into the small vehicle, about to chuck her backpack into her back seat, when a voice speaks.

"Hi, how are ya?"

Vera jumps so high she bangs her head on the driver's side doorframe, wincing as she reaches up to rub her now-throbbing skull. That same person breaks out into a burst of cackles. She cracks open an eye to see Dominic Shire, her best friend since diapers and also her next-door neighbor, laughing his ass off in the front passenger seat.

"You're such an asshole," Vera grumbles as she slides behind the wheel. She's infamous for being late to everything because she can't seem to keep track of time for the life of her, but for Christ's sake, Dominic has never snuck into her car to wait for her before. She's used to him sitting on his front porch until she finally stumbles outside.

The seventeen-year-old boy swipes a hand through his tousled, chestnut-brown hair with a shit-eating grin still pulling up his full lips. "I'm not denying that, but for a real-life ghost, you're too easy to scare."

Dominic knows that the reason for her jumpiness is because her brain somehow finds a way to zone out at the most inopportune moments. Unless something has her full attention, Vera's brain can stop paying attention to anything within the blink of an eye. It's one of the many side-effects of the ADHD she's been dealing with since childhood.

Because they live right next to each other, Vera and Dominic have been carpooling to school since she got her license. The result is either catastrophic or extremely fun— on the mornings when they've both gotten little sleep and can only manage exhausted grunts of greeting to each other, Vera has to grip the steering wheel to the point of pain to keep herself from falling asleep and killing them both. On good mornings, they blast their favorite music and screech along to the lyrics so off-tune that they get glares from people in neighboring cars at stoplights.

Vera's phone buzzes with another text. Without looking away from her street as she sets them on their way to school, she asks Dominic, "Can you see who that is?"

He reaches for her phone that sits in her cup holder and scans the text on her lock screen. "It's Allison. She's asking where you are— apparently, Lydia's got her sight set on some new kid already."

Vera playfully rolls her eyes. As far as she knows, Lydia Martin can seduce anyone and everyone, or maybe even an inanimate object if she tried hard enough. She's not surprised that the strawberry blonde already has a new boy in mind. Poor Allison just has to deal with it alone for now.

"Tell her I'll be there in ten, and that Lydia needs to find me someone while she's at it."

"'Bi and ready to cry from being single for so long,'" Dominic recites as his thumbs fly across the screen, typing exactly that. "Got it."

"Are you talking about yourself?" Vera retorts with a smirk.

"Hey, I already told you about that boy I met at hockey camp this summer— we've been texting. It's going somewhere."

Vera reaches over without looking and yanks on the closest string of his pastel yellow hoodie. Dominic bats her hand away with a curse, meticulously straightening them out so they're the exact same length again. He wears a sweatshirt practically every day, and when he's not, he has a zip-up one over a t-shirt. His entire closet consists of hoodies in every color of the rainbow and then shades in between.

She pulls into the school's parking lot a few minutes later and stares wistfully at the bikes parked in the front row. Though she likes her car — as run-down and beaten up as it is — she longs for a motorcycle. She already passed the test for it, she just doesn't have one of her own to ride. At least not yet. She's been saving for years, and in about a week, she should have enough to finally get one and have extra cash to spare. That means that Dominic will either have to start driving himself or hold on for dear life while she's on the bike.

"What's your first class again?" Vera asks as she pulls into a parking spot in the middle of the lot– a stroke of luck considering she's arriving so close to the ring of the first bell.

"Physics with Harris," Dominic replies with a hateful scowl, green eyes flashing with anger. "I've already done the reading for the first three chapters so I don't get behind after the first day."

His excessive preparation is understandable. Mr. Harris is one of the worst people that Vera has ever met, and her Uncle Peter (who isn't related by blood, but is close enough to be considered her family) used to be a psychotic Alpha who'd turned Scott McCall into a werewolf and killed his own niece. Well, the psychotic part still stands even if he isn't an Alpha anymore. Derek had killed him and taken his power in retribution for him murdering his older sister. In the Hale family, it's just another thing to make Thanksgiving dinner awkward.

"I have English with Miss Blake," Vera says. "I think she's new– I've never heard the name before."

After they scurry inside the building and head in opposite directions toward their respective first classes of the day, she salutes him good luck. He gives her a weak thumbs-up before taking the stairs two at a time in order to reach Harris' room prior to the bell.

Vera bursts into Miss Blake's classroom and quickly scans the room for a place to sit. To her dismay, the class seems to be entirely full of confused faces staring at her due to her chaotic entrance. That is, it seems to be the case until she catches sight of a familiar figure home to a strawberry blonde head of hair removing her designer handbag from the spot behind her. Vera shoots her a thankful glance before heading to the seat in the row closest to the windows and slides into the chair, tossing her backpack on the floor.

The bell rings as soon as she gets herself settled.

"You're getting closer and closer to actually being late," Stiles Stilinski mutters from the row to her right.

Vera glances up from her desk and gives him a falsely sweet smile. "Thanks, Stiles, for pointing out the obvious. I never would have noticed otherwise."

The scrawny raven-haired boy rolls his eyes at her sarcastic response, ticking his leg up and down in the exact same manner as her. The sight of his Converse shoe bouncing against the tile makes her heave a sigh. In her mad dash to get out the door, she'd forgotten to take her medication. And she's sitting right next to the window. God, she'll have a field day if she manages to pay attention for more than three minutes in a row.

Then her eyes shift to the person another spot down from Stiles– Scott. And in front of him is Allison, his ex-girlfriend. Her gut twists with second-hand embarrassment and awkwardness. The two had broken up while Vera was recovering from the bite Derek had given her. Allison had visited her and ranted through her tears for two hours, intermixed with Vera puking up rejection fluid.

Leaning forward, Vera taps Lydia on the shoulder and whispers, "You couldn't have given this spot to Allison?"

The girl purses her bubblegum-pink lips as she mulls over the question. "I could have offered to switch places with her, too, but I think she needs this. She's been dying to ask him something all day but hasn't had the guts to just talk to him."

The two of them stare at Allison, who's hunched over her desk with her blushing face buried in her hands. The red of her cheeks is mostly covered by her shoulder-length hair, though it would have served that purpose better if it was still the long curtain that it had been before she'd cut it during summer break. She senses their gazes on her and lifts her head from her hands just enough to shoot them an incredulous expression. Lydia gives her an innocent wave while Vera shoots her a supportive thumbs-up. Allison twists her lips to the side in a look of utmost discomfort.

Vera's attention is seized by the sound of every single phone in the room going off at once. She looks around the classroom to see everyone pulling their cell phones out of their pockets or bags, staring at their screens in perplexity. It takes her a moment to remember that she hadn't felt her phone buzz because it's still on Do Not Disturb for everyone except those in her favorites list– her mom and her friends. That means that whoever's texting her doesn't do it often. Pulling out her phone, she unlocks the screen to see a paragraph that immediately makes her go cross-eyed even if it isn't that long.

"The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness," a female voice rings throughout the classroom, accented by the click of high heels on the tile floor. Vera looks up from her phone to see a woman likely in her late twenties leaning against the desk at the front of the room. Her sharp gaze skitters over the class, heart-shaped face seeming paler due to the dark hair framing it. "This is the last line of the first book we are going to read. It is also the last text you will receive in this class. Phones off, everyone."

Vera turns her phone off and slips it into the smallest pocket in her backpack, almost thankful for the removal of one of her biggest distractions. She pulls out Great Expectations next, expecting to have a discussion about it, only to have Miss Blake's voice interrupt her actions.

"We will be having our quiz on the summer reading book tomorrow," she informs them, making Vera stifle her groan. She'd stayed up finishing that book only to find out that she could have had another day to read it? Great. "For now, we will begin with Heart of Darkness. Please answer these questions individually and without talking– I want to see how you can respond to these on your own."

The teacher turns to the green chalkboard, writing the title of the book at the top before beginning to copy down pre-reading questions. Vera sighs, twisting one of her gold-colored rings on her finger as she waits for her to finish.

A man walks into the classroom and whispers something into Miss Blake's ear. She glances directly at Scott, making Vera yearn for the gift of enhanced hearing that werewolves have. If she'd turned into one like she was technically supposed to, she would be able to make out the man's words with ease. Instead, she has to sit with the terrible sensation of not-knowing. It's usually a disaster if someone is looking for Scott.

When Miss Blake calls Scott up to the front of the room, Vera feels her gut twist with curiosity and almost painful unease. Her mind whirls with the possibilities of what he could be needed for. If Derek had found Erica and Boyd, he'd have called her out of class, too, right? So that can't be it.

Her spine straightens. Maybe it has something to do with Isaac. He's been missing for days, now, though he should have returned shortly after his hunt for the lost teenagers. Though he and Vera are in the same pack, they're not what she would call friends, and the likelihood of him asking for her help is slim to none. But if he's back...

Isaac could have information about Erica and Boyd's whereabouts. Even if he doesn't, she feels like, as a member of the same pack, she should be kept in the loop about things like this. Would Isaac keep something like that from her just so he could keep being petty? It's too bad she had to turn her phone off, or else she could have simply shot Isaac a quick text.

Miss Blake brings Scott out of the room for a few moments and then returns without him. Vera's finger-tapping turns into a frenzy that causes her entire arm to move. She winces when the bandage on her forearm pulls at the hairs on her skin, rolling up the sleeve of her sweater to fix the problem and unstick part of it. It catches the attention of Stiles, whose hyperactive mind also seeks any kind of distraction that can take him away from the task at hand.

"Hey, Vera," he hisses with a frown. A crease creates a chasm between his eyebrows, brown-eyed gaze locked on the covered wound and filled with both curiosity and concern. "What happened?"

"Hades scratched me," she answers back just as quietly so their teacher is less likely to overhear.

"Has he ever done that before?" Stiles asks. When Vera shakes her head, he leans toward her in earnest, making Lydia turn to him in confusion. He has a specific expression on his pale face that usually means he has some sort of theory. "Okay, what if it's the same thing as the deer? You know, like how animals start acting weird right before an earthquake or something?"

"Meaning what?" Lydia questions in a voice dripping with snark. "There's gonna be an earthquake?"

"Or something!" he whisper-yells back. Lydia rolls her eyes so hard that her head moves with the action. "I just– maybe it means something's coming. Something bad."

Vera shrugs. "I actually agree with Stiles. You guys know Hades wouldn't do that, and with what happened last night..."

"It was a deer and a cat," Lydia says, but her voice doesn't have the same tone of downright disbelief that it had before. Instead, she sounds inquisitive, echoing Vera's earlier thoughts when she asks, "What's that thing you say about threes? Once, twice–"

Right when she's about to finish the rhyme, a bird smacks into the window to their left, making all three of them jump and turn toward the source of the loud thud sound. All that remains of the creature is a crimson bloodstain that mars the otherwise perfectly-clean glass.

"Thrice?" Vera suggests with a knowing glance at Stiles. He holds her gaze with a nod that says, I told you so, his lips pressed together in a grim line.

She absentmindedly rubs at the bandage again, creating a sting that symbols her wounds tearing open again. The pain reminds her of how bizarre the morning had been. Hades scratching her wasn't just out of the ordinary– it was unheard of. He's the kind of cat that loves everyone he meets as long as they don't seem to hate him first. He even loves the werewolves despite the fact that they're technically part-dog.

Stiles' words echo in her mind. Maybe it means something's coming. Something bad.

Can't they just have a normal school year?

A shadow passing over her desk makes her return her attention back to the window. Her eyes widen at the sight of an entire flock of birds heading straight for the classroom, their caws filling the air and causing the hair on the back of her neck to stand straight up in apprehension. She curls her hand into a tight fist to keep it from shaking. Her body still jumps when the first bird slams into the glass hard enough to leave another stain of red. Then another. And another. A fourth bird breaks the glass, sending shards raining down on the tile as its carcass lands somewhere in the room.

Vera is transfixed at the sight of the flock slamming into the windows. More of them shatter, granting the birds access to the classroom as they swarm around the students with reckless abandon. A pair of talons scrape against her cheek hard enough to draw blood.

"Get down!" Miss Blake shouts, her once-perfectly-curled hair already in a disarray from the wings that have ruffled it. "Everyone, get down!"

Vera launches herself out of her seat and ducks beneath the cover of her desk. She pulls her knees to her chest and tucks her head into them tornado-drill style, trying to protect her face from the sharp beaks and claws swarming around the room. Desks are shoved aside as students rush to take cover from the crazed creatures. Her cheek stings, blood smearing on her jeans where they brush against her new cut. Bodies of birds – some alive, some not – pelt her from left and right, making her long to turn translucent and escape to the safety of the school's basement below them.

One bird's talons get snagged in her sweater. She gasps as its wings beat mercilessly against the side of her head in its attempt to fly free, beak pecking at whatever part of her it can reach as if she's the problem, here. Vera winces at every jab that will definitely leave a wonderful litter of bruises on her upper arm and back.

"Fuck – off–!" Vera hisses at it as she rams her elbow into the writhing bird's body, rendering its delicate frame immobile enough for her to work on carefully untangling its claws from the green thread of her clothing among the utter chaos in the room. Her fingers tremble as she finally frees the bird. It flops to the ground and then weakly hops away, only to get crushed by a textbook that falls off of someone's desk a second later.

She clutches her aching shoulder and tilts her face downward again, wondering if it's just her or that seconds have morphed into years. It seems to take forever for the students to stop screaming and for the birds to cease their relentless attack. Nobody comes to their aid, though that could be because screaming students is a normal occurrence at an American public high school.

Once she's sure that it's over, Vera slowly glances up from the cover of her arms to see Lydia's frightened eyes locked on hers, her usually immaculate hair now frizzy and falling out of her braided headband. Allison shakily gets to her feet from the middle of the classroom.

Vera glares at the mess of black feathers littering the room. Can't something supernatural happen at some other town instead of Beacon Hills for a change?

________

a/n:

welcome to chapter one! this one was a bit less action-packed than the others will be, but i wanted to introduce a few things to kick off the story and introduce a bit of vera's background. and if you're wondering, yes, the alpha pack arrived at the end of season 2, but derek didn't tell vera yet for reasons he'll explain to her later.

i'm really excited to get into the dynamics between vera and the other characters! personally, the friendships i get to write are my favorite parts of fanfiction. i'm especially pumped to explore vera and dominic's friendship because they're both bisexual disasters

also i laughed imagining isaac at the hospital when derek isn't picking up the phone and melissa's like "do you have any other supernatural contacts you can call?" and isaac considers vera for 0.2 seconds before remembering that they hate each other and then immediately disregarding her as an option

melissa: isaac is in the hospital with amnesia and some pretty serious injuries

vera:

–kristyn

( word count: 5.0k )