Derek remembers First Night.

He had been seven and a half, living in Northern California with a big family who loved and cared for him. Then, the zombie apocalypse had actually happened, something his sisters and brothers only occasionally joked about, and changed everything.

He'd ridden the bus home from school and walked down the long driveway into his family's property. His older brothers, Mitch and Dean were tossing a ratty football back and forth in the front yard, something they did every day. Laura, his fifteen year old sister, sat on the porch with Uncle Peter, animatedly talking about something to the younger brother of his mother. He marched up the steps and in through the front door. He dropped his backpack near the stairs and toed off his shoes. Kendra, the youngest of the Hales was at the dining room table, coloring. He calls a greeting to her, passing into the kitchen.

His mom was tall, with dark flowing hair and lips that were always red. His dad was sturdy, shorter with short-cropped dark hair and a beard that scratch Derek's face when he kissed him goodnight. They were cooking dinner, both flowing through the kitchen easily. Derek climbed onto a bar stool at the counter, propped his chin into his hands, and watched.

Later, Mitch and Dean would come inside, sweaty and laughing. Laura and Peter would stay on the front porch until dinner time, talking about life and school and whatever they wanted. (Derek never understood Uncle Peter and Laura's friendship. He loved Peter, sure, but he also kind of thought the man was insane. He supposed it made sense though, because Laura was kind of insane too.) Kendra would run into the kitchen, a picture in her hands and beg Dad to hang it on the fridge, which he always did.

Derek watched, because that's all he needed to do. He never needed to be part of the chaos; he just needed to see it.

That night, after dinner, the family crowded into the living room and fought over which movie to watch. Uncle Peter turned on the TV, and all noise in the house stopped. The news was on. The anchor, a largely respected older man from the central California area explained about a virus.

Derek doesn't really remember anything the man had said about the virus itself, but he remembered how the man had shakily explained the death of his own family. He remembers how the man had brought a gun to the side of his head and fired before the station had had a chance to cut the screen to black.

Derek wasn't part of any of the chaos at that point either. He'd sat on the couch with five-year-old Kendra sniffling into his side as his family had panicked, boarding up the windows and locking all the doors. Laura was crying and Dean was shaking and Mom and Dad just looked sad.

"It's gonna be okay, Kend, I promise." He remembers whispering into his sister's soft hair, holding her tight as the sounds of fists hitting the door rang through the house.

They were fine for a week, the boards on the windows holding and the doors staying locked, but soon their supply of food began to dwindle. Dad had run to his bedroom and come back with a shotgun.

"I'll be right back," He said, but he never did. Then it was Mom's turn, because she couldn't just sit there and watch her children starve. She grabbed Mitch's baseball bat and left in the middle of the night.

Derek never understood why they didn't come back. He didn't get why Mitch would squeeze Laura's hand every time there was a moan or groan from the army of undead that had taken up residence in their front yard.

The rest of the Hale clan left together. Seventeen-year-old Dean gave his football pads to Derek and Kendra, and Laura fit them on the kids. Peter had a handgun that he dug out from under his bed, Dean had a hockey stick, Laura had all the knives from the kitchen, and Mitch carried the kids.

They ran through the night and the next day, sticking to sparsely populated woods and roads. They slept in ditches and drank from ponds. Laura picked berries and Peter tested them before letting any of his nieces and nephews try them. They travelled for three days without incident.

Then, when finding an abandoned gas station, things went wrong. Dean went in first, and there was a sharp scream that was cut off by a gurgling moan, and the rest of the Hales were running before he came back out. They hid in bushes about a mile away, and Peter had gone back that night. He had returned with blood on his shirt and Dean's hockey stick. He shook his head to Laura, who dissolved into tears. They stayed away from gas stations after that.

Kendra was always tired. She didn't like all the running and being quiet they had to do and she wanted their mom and dad all the time. Derek wasn't strong enough to carry her as they travelled, and Mitch got tired fast. Laura had tried to piggyback carry her a couple times, but they had to move slowly and it wasn't working.

Kendra just didn't understand the danger. She was too little to realize that the "gray people" wanted to hurt her. She just didn't stay away.

She'd seen a zombie that looked remarkably like their mother, a tall, dark haired woman. Derek had known it wasn't her, but Kendra didn't. She'd been bitten and Peter was the one who shot her when she reanimated.

They weren't the same. It was two weeks into the zombie apocalypse and Derek just wanted it to be over. He wanted his mom and dad and sister and brother back.

Eventually, the remaining members of the Hale clan made it to a barbed wire-surrounded town, and begged to be let in. It was a small mountain town called Beacon Hills. There were many survivors there who had "cleansed" the town of all zombies and put up a fence about three days after First Night. There weren't many kids or families, but there were a lot of Rangers from the local preserve who had fought their way there and declared the town a sanctuary for other survivors.

They were there for three weeks, holed up in a small house, before Peter went crazy. It seemed like he had just woke up one day and was suddenly crazy. He'd lit fire to their house and then ran into the Ruin, leaving the kids in a burning house with no adults left.

Derek and Laura made it out of the burning house, but Mitch didn't. He'd run back inside to grab Dean's hockey stick, and never returned.

Derek and Laura are the only surviving members of the once-large Hale family. They'd run across the state of California, and against miraculous odds, survived.

Derek Hale was and always will be a survivor. He intends on keeping it that way.

Derek met Stiles when he was thirteen, almost five and a half years since his crazy uncle burned down their makeshift house in Beacon Hills and ran away. Derek and Laura were living with the Laheys, a small family. There were nice. The mom always made cookies on Saturday afternoons and they had game nights on Thursdays. The dad was nice too, he worked at the school, but neither Derek nor Laura were old enough to have him as a teacher yet. They had a ten year old son, Isaac, who Laura babied and played with. Isaac steered clear of Derek, scared of the older boy.

Isaac didn't have many friends. He was quiet and shy, and he hid behind his mother whenever they left the house. If his mom wasn't there, he hid behind Laura. The only friend he really had was Scott McCall, a gangly kid from down the street with shaggy dark hair and a crooked smile that almost made Derek want to punch him.

Mrs. Lahey died when Derek was twelve, and it changed the entire family. Mr. Lahey became cold and distant, and Isaac cried for days on end. The only time Isaac was really happy was when he was with Laura, who babied and held him for hours just to make him feel better. Derek missed Mrs. Lahey too. She was finally starting to feel like a mother to him, and then she had to go and die too. It just wasn't fair.

Scott came over to their house a lot, and him and Isaac sat in Isaac and Derek's shared room and annoyed him until he finally would have to leave, which would make the younger boys laugh. Then, one warm spring day half a year after Isaac's mother died, Scott brought a new friend over.

Derek was reading an old book from before First Night, something about a man who saw dead people and was best friends with the ghost of some guy named Elvis, when Scott and an unfamiliar boy knocked on the door. Laura answered it, like she always did, and let them in.

"Who's this, Scott?" She asked, pointing to the new little boy as Isaac came bounding down the stairs.

"This is Gen- Gendmi…" The tan little boy stumbled over his friend's name, looking at the other kid for help.

"Call me Stiles!" The kid supplied excitedly, smiling at Laura and Isaac. Derek sniffed and went back to his book.

"What kind of name is Stiles?" He muttered to himself, but the kid popped up next to him suddenly and poked his face into Derek's book.

"My dad doesn't like calling me by my first name, I don't know why, but my last name is Stilinski so everyone calls me Stiles. I don't know why they do that either, I guess I've never asked them, but I like being called Stiles. It sounds like a superhero name, like a hero from First Night or something, doesn't it?" The kid took a deep breath. Derek blinked

"You talk a lot." Isaac said from the bottom of the stairs. Scott nodded, smiling with a front tooth missing.

"He lives next to me." Scott tried to whisper to Isaac, but failed, resulting in the whole room hearing.

"Lucky you." Derek said sarcastically, earning him a dark glare from Laura, but he ignored it.

It hurt him, deep in his chest, to look at these three little boys, all so untouched by First Night.

Derek was seven on First Night, only a few years younger than Isaac and Scott and even Stiles, and he lost his entire family during it. These children get to be so young, so innocent, and he never got to be. Derek never had a childhood. He didn't think anyone else deserved one if he didn't have one.

Derek hated Stiles Stilinski the first time he met him.

Stiles Stilinski is in love with Derek Hale. He's been in love since he was nine and a half. It's getting a little pathetic at this point. He's seventeen years old, almost a man, and he's still harboring a crush from when he was ten. That's a long time to be in love with the same person.

It all started with a hyperactive nine year old meeting an equally hyperactive ten year old and it grew from there. Stiles and his dad came to Beacon Hills and were given a house next to the McCalls and Stiles and Scott McCall were fast friends. Then Stiles met Isaac and Laura and Derek. It's embarrassing that he still gets weak knees when he thinks about the tall, dark, and handsome Hale boy.

Embarrassing.

Now, he's seventeen years old with a dead family, a burned past, and an empty home. Yet, here he is, sitting in said empty home on a broken couch, eating cold macaroni, and thinking about Derek Hale. He's pathetic.

It's storming outside, lighting, thunder, the works. He hates storms. The power went out hours ago, so he's been forced to relocate from his bedroom to the downstairs living room so he can start a fire in the meager fireplace. If only he had another place to live, say with Derek and Laura Hale in their smallish home across the town? But no, he's just a stupid hyperactive teenager and Derek's a tall, dark, Adonis who's too old and hot and mean to like Stiles, and

Crack.

He can hear a branch fall to the ground outside, which only makes him angrier because he's totally going to have to pick that up later which sucks.

He picks up his book and shovels a spoonful of food into his mouth.

"Fucking Derek," He mumbles, furrowing his eyebrows and sinking deeper into the couch.

There's a knock on the door, which pisses him off even further.

"Coming," He yells, yet he makes no move to get up. Another thump at the door.

"I'm coming!" He says more forcefully, finally heaving himself off the couch and walking towards the door with bare feet. He throws open the front door to come face-to-face with a zombie.

He flashes back to not two months earlier, when he'd been forced to stick a knife through the back of his father's head and into his spinal cord.

He never expected his dad to make it long, but he lived longer after First Night that Stiles had anticipated. He'd stuck it out for his kid. As soon as he deemed Stiles a man, he let himself slip. He drank too much and took too many sleeping pills and thought that death would free him. It didn't, because he didn't stay dead. He came back as a zombie and his son had to kill him.

Stiles is good at killing zombies, but that one kill has forever changed him. Now every zom he sees looks exactly like his father. Instead of pitying the walking dead, he hates them. He kills them for sport because that's the only thing he knows how to do anymore.

Killing is not exactly how he wanted to spend his Saturday evening, but he'll take it. Every zom he kills is for his father. He tells himself that as he raises his baseball bat and brings it down onto the reanimated corpse of Mr. Lahey, Isaac's father.

a/n: just a glimpse into Derek's life since First Night, and a little info about him meeting Stiles. also, Stiles is in love with Derek. he's also in a lot of trouble. the plot thickens!

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