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He returns to Beacon Hills because Peter’s attacking townspeople and calling himself an alpha. Again. It’s one of those problems that could easily be solved if there was a guarantee that his uncle would stay dead, but he’s already come back once and they really want to avoid a repeat of The Lydia Incident.
So Derek comes back to Beacon Hills minus one sister, who decided to stay with the pack who took her in after the fire, so he can kill his uncle again and make him stay six feet under this time.
He’s just moved out of the hotel and into his new loft (which has less dirt but smaller windows than the last one), when Allison and Lydia swing open his perpetually unlocked front door, holding hands and covered in blood.
Derek calls Scott.
Scott knocks on the door scarcely ten minutes later, bag in hand and a frown on his face that only deepens when he looks at them all, Allison and Lydia dripping blood onto the floor and Derek trying to meld with the once beige coloured paint. Scott purses his lips, staring at Allison until she rolls her eyes at him and Lydia smiles her shark-teeth grin.
“You were awesome,” Scott says, grins so wide Derek wonders if his cheeks hurt if he does it for a while. He stares a little too long at the curve of his alpha’s mouth, at the way his shoulders move when he talks animatedly to Stiles about getting the body out of town and to somewhere Peter can’t use another person to come back from the dead.
This is the third time Peter has appeared dead, the first being the day he and Laura arrived back home to find it burned to the ground, but the only thing he’s thinking about is whether Peter just had a connection with Lydia or whether any random banshee would do.
He watches Scott act the alpha, calling Melissa and asking her to come over with a first aid kit and maybe some food - “Pizza good? Yeah, pizza would be great, Mom, and one with no pineapple so Allison can eat it” - and pulling spare clothes out of his bag for the girls, putting his hand on Stiles’ shoulder when it looks like the sight of blood is getting to him. They exchange smiles, and Derek feels a strange tug in the pit of his stomach.
Mostly, he watches the way he’s so easy with them, all grins and casual touches and asking if they’re okay, and he wonders how the boy who didn’t want to be a werewolf has fallen into this so easily. That’s what makes a true alpha, he guesses, and doesn’t admit to himself that he sounds a little bitter. Derek had tried to force them into the mold he had prepared from memories and hope and the clenching of his heart when he checked the contacts list where Laura’s name still was, but they weren’t clay and he wasn’t an artist who can make metal bend.
Scott has four betas, banshee and hunter and spark and werewolf, where he had three teenagers he turned because he needed a pack and a boy who turned into a giant lizard and tried to kill him.
(He doesn’t count Peter.)
He was never made to be an alpha; his beta skin fits much more comfortably than the alpha one ever did, and he will never regret giving it up to save Cora. But Scott was, the first true alpha in a century, and someone who had resisted being a werewolf for so long that it was almost inevitable he would end up on the other end of the spectrum.
Derek had once had three betas: Erica, Boyd, Isaac. Two of them are dead, and he drove Isaac away to protect him, and Scott had stormed over and yelled at him until neither of them had any breath left.
That was mostly because Derek had pushed him against the big window of his loft and waited for Scott to close the distance between their lips, but Derek has been trying to ignore that part of the story since it happened, and he’s not going to stop trying now.
“Derek, you coming?” Scott pokes his head out from the doorway of Derek’s kitchen, and the thing in his stomach tugs again. “You like pineapple, right?”
“Yeah.” He wants Scott to always be in his kitchen asking him about pineapple, and he wants to watch Scott play the alpha and play it well, and he wants to push him against the door frame and relive that night, and he wants.
“Hurry up, dude, I’m starving!” Stiles yells from the kitchen, and Scott smiles and heads back inside.
There’s blood on the floor of his new loft, an Argent is eating pizza in his kitchen, and his uncle is dead again. Scott will tell him later that that’s just another Thursday now that the nemeton is open, but for now he thinks it’s just as strange as calling someone his brother and still wanting to kiss him like he’s not a broken thing.
(“So basically,” Stiles says the next time they’re on a stakeout and Derek find himself saying words he really thought he’d never say to Stiles of all people, “He makes you want to get your shit together so you can hold hands and be mushier than Scott and Allison?”
He wonders if it makes him pathetic that that’s what he wants.
“I’ve been there, buddy.” Stiles claps him on the shoulder, and Derek threatens to rip out his throat with his teeth if he talks to Scott before Derek does. It’s a great Thursday.)