彡 cora hale | teen wolf

[impetere]

	✔ Cʀᴏssᴏᴠᴇʀs/AU ✔ Aᴄᴛɪᴏɴsᴘᴀᴍ ✔ Pʀᴏsᴇ	✔ Pɪᴄᴛᴜʀᴇ ᴘʀᴏᴍᴘᴛs ✔ Oᴛʜᴇʀᴡᴏʀᴅʟʏ ✔ Sᴛᴀʀᴛᴇʀs	♥ F/M, F/F ⏰ Uᴘ ᴛᴏ ᴅᴀᴛᴇ

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[bereavements]

[impetere]

[She hears about Allison from Lydia. She also gets warned about Malia.

Not that Cora is necessarily opposed to having family. Family for people who have no family at all are generally good things to have, but the idea of Peter having a kid - one that's her age that she and Derek didn't know about. One that her mother took away - is a bit unsettling and she isn't entirely sure what to do with it.

So she doesn't focus on that. Instead she makes her way up from South America, despite the fact that Derek tells her not to (she was planning on coming up anyway, Allison's death simply forced her to move up her time table) and the first thing she does is track down Isaac. He's her pack.

Well, he's her pack that's not Derek (which would end in a fight) or Scott (which would be awkward) or Peter (which would just end in uncomfortable questions they don't have the answers to).

Argent lets her in without a second thought, directing her to the room where Isaac has been saying, and she stops just inside the threshold. She leans in the doorway for a moment, crossing her arms in front of her chest.]

Hey.

[dizzying]

[impetere]

[After Derek abandons her (not really) in South America, she takes to traveling on her own for a while, never really feeling quite right with sitting still. Eventually she hooks up with Granuaile because a wolf and a druid is never a bad combination. Wanderlust is a big thing for them both and keeping moving while helping whoever they can along the way isn't a bad gig.

She's currently sprawled out on her bed in the motel room, drumming her fingers against the map lightly.]

Do you want to head north or south next?

[splinted]

these keep turning out really emotional i'm sorry

[impetere]

Cora Hale doesn't scar.

Benefit of being a werewolf. She's probably been stabbed, shot and had bones broken more times than she can count, but her body doesn't show it. It's the kind of skin that most people would be envious of, but with it comes the detachment of self-preservation. You throw yourself further into things because you know you won't carry the marks of them, you can distance the things that happen to you because no one else can see them.

She doesn't like that these things happen to her, but she also doesn't worry about them either. She doesn't think about them. Pain is part of being a werewolf the same way that control is. They take them both in equal measure.

Besides, sometimes you have to hurt more to heal.

This doesn't mean that she doesn't recognize that scars are important for that reason. They show where you've been, proof that you've lived, that life is impacted you in some way. Cora's life has been hit by a semi-truck more than once, but all the scars she carries are internal, emotional, and those are the ones that should show. In some ways they do, in the stand-off way she views the world, bite that comes before the bark. The way she gives away her self-preservation in exchange for defending those she cares about, those that do break and scar, the ones that die long before they should and need to be avenged or fought for, because if she doesn't, then what's the point of her being here if she's going to do nothing?

It's the way she freezes at the fire that shoots from one of the doors on the boat, one that she and Alek had opened at random. The flames leap towards them and the panic sets in before anything else and she's fisting her hand in his shirt, yanking him back. Fire's claimed too much of her family already, she's not going to let it claim him too. Once that initial tug is done, however, that tense alert feeling claws at her chest, making it difficult to breathe and in a moment she's back in the middle of that blaze again, listening to her family scream and cry out for help around her, and there being nothing she can do to stop it. She couldn't save them. She couldn't save any of them, she could barely save herself.

(She was eleven years-old, but she still blames herself at the same time.)

The problem right now, however, is that she can't breathe, and her hands scramble at Alek's shoulders, trying to keep herself upright, because she needs to run. They need to go, go now, go fast, but she can't manage to form the words. All she can do is panic, and underneath all the fear, there's a part of her that hates it.

I hope this works ish

[vodkavirgin]

i don't really know the canon at all, so if this set up doesn't work, let me know!

[impetere]

[Stumbling into Hemlock Grove on her own? Probably not the best choice Cora's ever made. But she's become tired with the idea of sitting still as it's not really something she's used to, and there's a pack there. It might be worth checking out, in case Scott ever needs allies beyond the Hales.

For right now, however, she just wants lunch. She glances around at the various buildings, looking for ones that advertise "food" as being a prime selling point, and hopes that she doesn't run into any trouble on the way.

She's heard about other things in this town too. She doesn't want to piss off any of them.]

double tap bc i want my btr!verse gimme

[splinted]

lemme know if this works. =D

[impetere]

When Cora and Derek embark on their end of Season 3A road trip, they head east before they head south. Vegas, St. Louis, Chicago - most of their stops are day trips, trying to find somewhere that's worth stopping for more than a few hours before continuing on their way. They've got six years of time to make up for, six years of sibling bonding to catch up and put them back on the same page again, so most of the important time for this particular family road trip, the important things that are worth noting happen in the car while Derek drives and they find ways to make the other familiar again.

It's Chicago where this trip stops, however. It's not because Derek gets a call from Peter about the Calaveras having something Derek's been looking for, like it will be, and lead to her brother abandoning her in South America on her own while he runs off to Beacon Hills, but instead because sometime between them leaving the pizzeria and heading back to their car (Derek is dismissing Chicago on the basis of the pizza being terrible - Cora thinks he didn't live in New York long enough to adopt their judgmental stance on pizza but she'll let him have it anyway, just because it's amusing to see Derek be passionate about something completely dumb), the air changes.

The air changes, and she's suddenly standing on the end of Navy Pier, not in the middle of downtown.

Her head whips around in surprise, trying to figure out what just happened, where the car went, where Derek went, and she can't help the heart racing panic. The fight or flight response surges through her system, which is quickly followed by sharp, sudden pain as her body shifts in a way it hadn't been able to before. Before she even knows what happens, she's suddenly gained four paws, a tail and a coat of fur, never mind the claws that have torn her clothes to shreds. The only thing that manages to make it out of the entire situation alive is her leather jacket.

She doesn't have much time to consider what exactly is happening to her, or panic about the fact that she knows she hasn't earned this (she's not an alpha, she's not her mother) because before she can even process the situation, the people who had been on the pier at the time are shouting something about "Wanderers" and coming at her with whatever they can find on hand, and she has no choice but to snarl, snap, and do her best to defend herself without hurting anyone too greatly. She grabs her jacket in her teeth, takes off through a gap in the crowd and tries to run until she finds the best cover she can until she can find a way to shift back.

It takes her three days to figure it out.

Mostly because it takes her three days to calm down and adjust. She found a place in Grant Park to hide and sleep when she needed to. She let the wolf instincts guide her when it came to hunting things like squirrels and rabbits for food (though she still didn't really have the stomach for it - she could more likely be found scrounging for food out of restaurant dumpsters and from the school cafeteria at Looney than actually eating small fluffy creatures) and it's prowling around the high school that she actually finds her claws and fur retreating and replaced by regular human fingernails and miles of pink skin. Miles of very, very naked pink skin.

(Not that Cora is particularly body shy, but she doesn't want to be arrested either.)

She bolts for the nearest locker room, which she immediately regrets (it was the men's, the smell is not worth it but it was the only one empty at the time), and tries to find herself something to throw on so that she at least is covering everything no one else really wants to see. She immediately passes on all of the lockers she could easily break into, if for no other reason than the smell from there makes her want to gag, and she pulls open the coaches closet where the spare uniforms are kept, quickly finding the smallest jersey and shorts she can find. They smell like someone else - someone not her - but for now, she's at least covered until she can get out of there.

She's ready to head back out the way she came, bare feet and all, when she hears the sound of someone entering the locker room. Her head snaps in the direction of it, listening to try and gauge how much time she has, before she quietly tries to make her way in the direction of the coach's office to try and hide. With her eyes on the door, however, she doesn't count on the bag of basketballs sitting behind her, and tumbles over it with a loud thump!

Whoops.

She lands hard, winces, and hopes whoever it is will think it's a ghost or something and decide to ignore it.

She knows, however, that her luck is not that good.

[engender]

[ Derek Hale failed. He failed at properly equipping Scott, he failed at being an alpha, and he almost failed at being a brother. Which is where the ultimate sacrifice comes in. Maybe it's in Peter's plan, but Derek can't care about that. He gives it all up for her. He finally gets it. He gets that being the alpha, being a werewolf, it's not about power. It's about loyalty. It's about acceptance. It's about working together. That is what a pack is about.

He skips town with Cora. He's lost out on too many years with her to waste any more time.

What he wants to do, besides spend time, is to see where she'd been, who she knew there - if it's safe there.

For the first time in a long time, he's not in a rush to get anywhere. He has no real plans beyond getting to know his sister all over again. He sleeps soundly most nights, something else he hasn't done in months. Maybe, years. In town, he pays for a leatherbound journal. He spends his early mornings writing. Left behind, Derek hadn't gotten the education he needed, the experiences he needed in life. He never wants that to happen to anyone again, especially not his sister.

So, he starts writing. Pack politics. Pack traditions. Cultural differences. Mantras. Anything he can think of, anything that might benefit his sister.

He wants to teach her everything he can. To borrow from Buffy Summers, he doesn't want to hide her from the world, he wants to show it to her. (Okay, he also wants to hide her from it. She almost died. And, maybe, maybe Derek's the one that can't let go here. He can't go back just yet.

Today, he's out front in the wooden chair, scribbling down what he remembers about kanimas. ]

[impetere]

[Compensating for six years of being without each other in one road trip is a little much, but Derek is certainly trying. And Cora gives him a lot of credit for trying, because he could have easily kept them there, gotten them swept up in the next pile of Beacon Hills drama, but having time for just them is nice.

She could almost get used to it.

She wanders out onto the porch looking for him, frowning when she sees him sitting there writing, before walking over to read over his shoulder.]

What are you doing?

i am positive you are shocked.

[splinted]

completely stunned } { riftverse

[impetere]

[Cora's first run in with the CLF comes late one night, months after Derek and Braedan stumbled their way into Chicago. With her brother there things start to stabilize a little more for her. She has a pack, she has friends, she's stumbling her way through trying to pass her GED thanks to her brother's tutoring and when he parts ways with her because he's going to take Braedan on a date (the loser), she's making her way back to the Hale house on her own.

The mob comes at her before she realizes what's happening, people swarming on all sides of her to try and force her back into a vulnerable position. Her claws don't work the same way they used to, her fingers didn't have sharp daggers on them at a moment's notice. She needs to fight with her own too hands and that isn't enough.

She manages to keep it together until she smells the gasoline. Gasoline and sulfur and things are escalating faster than she can stop them, and before she can do anything about it, she's already changing.

The panic overwhelms her before too long and she can feel it happening, but for the first time she welcomes it, the claws and teeth that tear and shred and after that she has everything she needs. Her teeth catch the throat of the demon in front of her, black blood spilling over her fangs like ink and after that she has a break in the crowd and she runs, leaving her torn clothes and books behind but not really caring, all at the same time.

She runs until she can't, and when she can't run, she hides, curling up until a ball under an outcropping of rock in the middle of the park. She knows she should shift back, go home where it's safe, but right now nowhere feels safe and everything feels wrong.

She'll go home eventually. Right now, she just needs to breathe.]

[commandertoolbelt]

emma gave me a crash course on camp jupiter, let me know if i need to fix

[impetere]

[Following the fire, Cora somehow found her way to Lupa. After proving to her that she wasn't weak and that she could hold her own, she gives her directions to Camp Jupiter which solves the mystery of where Cora spent most of her years between eleven and seventeen. They trained her, they gave her a support system, and when she left to find Derek, they told her she shouldn't go alone.

She probably should have listened, but there's nothing she can do about that now.

When Derek goes back to Beacon Hills and leaves her behind in South America, she finds her way back to Camp Jupiter again. It's late when she reaches the highway which makes it easy to spot the door and the pathway across, highway is clear. As she runs closer she can feel the starting bubbles of excitement rippling through her (it's so rare that she actually gets excited about things anymore, but this, this she feels). As she gets closer to the door, she can spot the guard sitting there and a smile stretches across her face as she starts to charge her way through.

In a lot of ways it's like coming home. She can't wait to get inside.]

your choice in verse!

[splinted]

riftverse

[impetere]

Once Cora manages to figure out how to shift into wolf form on command, she goes for runs in the woods on the Hale grounds every morning. There's a thrill to it that she can't really put into words, a kind of speed and power and certainty in it that makes her feel like nothing can touch her, and it's the kind of feeling she wants all the time. She's always been a light sleeper, even in a place this quiet, so when she wakes up, early in the morning, she sneaks out into the woods, leaving her clothes in a hidden pile for her to find later, shifts and runs.

By the time she returns, she's feeling stretched out and lazy, comfortable, it's almost time for breakfast, and if she's lucky, no one knows she's gone. She shifts back quickly, pulling on her clothes, and just as she's getting her shirt over her head, she hears the sound of footsteps coming closer.

She yanks the t-shirt down and steps back to hide behind the tree, waiting to see which Hale brother is coming her way. She doesn't, however, have time to grab her shoes and her boots are left sitting there, with her socks, waiting to be seen.

[pushinglimits]

if this doesn't work, let me know!

[impetere]

[Thanks to spending most of her childhood running for her life, Cora never really does well with settling in one place. She sticks around for a few months, just to build up some cash, but without a pack to ground her, she leaves herself to wander instead, slowly making her way through the Midwest until she lands in St. Louis.

She books a hotel room with money that Derek wires her, saying something about Peter having it stashed in a vault, and since Peter is in Eichen House, he doesn't really need it, now does he? Cora's more than happy to burn through it when she's running low on her own funds, and it's on that cash that she starts hitting up some of the local bars to see if anyone is looking for a bartender. It isn't until she walks into one and werewolf hits her that she starts to move a little more cautiously, eyeing the crowd curiously as she makes her way over to the bar.]

[untangle]

1. How in hell did you set a salad on fire??

2. You called me at 4am shouting drunk shit about Poland and asking me to 'come out and play.' Where the fuck were you?

I don't know. Sometimes you can be a wild card with your emotions. Mostly the emotion known as anger.

1 }

[impetere]

It's made of leaves. Leaves can catch fire.

[unstiff]

Cora came into Dauntless the year after Four. He wasn't in charge of anything, but he watched everything. He watched on the cameras in the security room and he waked into the Dauntless training room like he owned the place, never commenting, never saying a word at all. He just watched and made his own sorts of notes that he never shared with anyone.

He slipped out of the shadows one evening when Cora was alone, angry and glaring at Erik, at Max at the rest of the trainers who pushed her too far (so far). He didn't touch her, aware that would probably earn him a black eye, but he stood close.

"If you keep letting him push you, he'll kill everything soft in you and you'll be just like him."

It was clear by his tone of voice that Four did not approve of this.

[impetere]

Cora doesn't want to be soft.

She wants to be hard. She wants to be hard and cold so she doesn't have to feel the pain of being alone. The Hale family had been gone a long time, killed in a fire that should have killed her too, but she still feels the loss of it every day. She wants to beat it all away, until there's nothing left of the girl she used to be.

"Would that be such a bad thing?"

u know

[womanking]

[impetere]

Moving to Asgard doesn't happen immediately after Teleios closes, but it does happen eventually. It's mostly just a matter of talking Derek into it, into leaving the coffee shop, but unfortunately (for Derek) not leaving the mice. It turns out that Asgard is great for Aeslin Mice, however, and they find that they're not as obsessively committed to following the Hale family's every move. There's a lot of history to log in Asgard, history that's been forgotten and history that isn't quite history yet, but still needs to be noted to pass down to the rest of the world.

In a lot of ways, it's a good move for the Hales too. Derek gets to be useful in terms of rebuilding things, helping to put together houses and huts, as well as hunting and other things that come more naturally to wolves. Cora also takes to the same, finding lots of ways to be useful where needed, but the most important thing for Cora is Sarah. Their relationship has grown in a lot of ways that she isn't entirely sure how to explain to Derek yet, but fortunately they were best friends before they became something more.

Therefore excuses for having Sarah around all the time aren't needed.

Today, however, she is planning on being more distraction than help, having grabbed some of the lunch prepared and packing it away in a basket so that she can go steal her girlfriend for a quiet picnic in some of the less populated areas of Asgard. She makes her way over to Sarah is working and leans over her shoulder with a smirk.

"Have some time for lunch?"