Chapter Text
Once upon a time, when Derek was feeling extra trapped by the smothering weight of all of the shit that had happened to him in Beacon Hills, he caught himself scrutinizing Stiles’s Wall of Weird (honestly, Derek couldn’t believe Stiles wanted to admit to watching Smallville). The pièce de résistance of Stiles’s obsessive researching was a map of all of the supernatural happenings Stiles thought could be legit. Derek couldn’t have stopped his eyes from wandering around the representation of the continental US like a thirsty man in a desert, fantasizing about what it would be like to live where no hunters were, and where none would ever think to look for him.
Derek had kept his hopes and dreams safe inside his mind, and never spoke them, and no one had ever been curious enough about him as a person to ask him why he and Laura had picked New York of all places. And now after the unrelenting horror of the past few years, Derek was so tired, more tired than he was after the fire. He wanted to be safe again. He wanted to relax. He wanted to be just another face in the crowd. But there was no way in hell Derek wanted to confront his old friends, or Laura’s choral buddies, or the pack that had taken them in. How could he face them, when even the goofy souvenir shops held precious memories of Laura? He was doing his best to tamp down his grief because if he started crying, Derek knew he’d never stop.
He knew he couldn’t face the place where he’d almost rebuilt his life.
So he picked the next best thing: a place completely the opposite of New York. A place where he could be alone in the woods. A place free from the supernatural.
After he’d transferred his credits to USM and had *seen* Hattiesburg, Mississippi, with his own two eyes, he’d realized he had been a little naïve. He’d driven up from I-10 and while, yes, there was fields and country, the entire area was much more built up than he’d realized. His little retreat into the woods was a refurbished trailer located just north of the city limits. It was pretty far away from the weirdly sprawling town. His new home was all alone down a hill by a creek at the end of the lane -- but only after he’d passed a sizable neighborhood with attractive houses, even if it was also full of cows and horses and donkeys, to get there.
And he’d gone to get his keys from the couple living at the top of the hill, only to realize they were druids once they’d scrambled out onto their porch and shooed their guard wasps away. Fuck his life.
The supernatural had found him anyway.