And the walls come tumbling down...

[cunningwolf]

"Talia!"

Many men will tell you that you knew the heart of a hero when it came to fire. Normal men would run away from it. Heroes would run into it.

But no one would ever call Peter Hale a hero. Yet into the fire he dove, recoiling back from flames as he tried to make his way through the house to find his sister. The screams from the tunnels threatened to deafen him, but he still kept his focus, trying to find her.

Talia had always taken care of her brother, even at his worst points. He refused to not give up on her now. We are all going to burn for this he had warned her, but as always, the stubbornness of the Hales kept her from seeing the reality of the situation until their world was ablaze.

One of the walls cracks and came at him, and he was barely able to duck out of the way in time. "Talia!" he screams, then coughed as his lungs started to remind him that they can only heal if he has actual oxygen going to them. He knew he had to leave, but he couldn't abandon his family.

"Help me!"

Peter's head snapped around as he heard the voice of his eleven year old niece. He pushed away from the wall, heading for the stairs and climbing up them as fast as he could, and then when her bedroom door wouldn't open, he smashed it in. And there was Cora, crouched into a corner and crying. He made his way over, kneeling down in front of her. "Cora, honey, focus on me. We need to get you out of here."

"I want mommy."

"I know. We'll find her outside." The floor under them shifted and Cora screamed. Peter stood up and looked at the window. If he opened it, the fire was be sucked into the room from the rush of oxygen. "Come on, we have to go."

He pulled the tiny werewolf into his arms and started back downstairs, using his own body to shield her from the fire. As they got to the bottom, one of the stairs broke and his foot went through it, sending him crashing to the ground and he felt his knee pop as he twisted to land on his back to keep Cora from being crushed.

"Cora, the front door is open. You need to run outside and hide. Hide from the hunters like I taught you, okay?"

Cora bit her lip, scared. "I'm scared."

"I know, but you go, and I'll find you. I always find you, don't I?" He could feel the fire starting to burn along his leg, trying to keep the pain off his face. "Ready? You hide, and I'll seek."

Nodding, Cora did as she was told and took off running for the woods. Peter focused his hearing to make sure she wasn't stopped by any of the Argents that may be lingering in the woods, and then he howled in pain as the rest of the staircase came down on top of him.

Comments

[impetere]

Peter doesn't come for her. No one does. The Hale house burns to he ground and all she can do is watch. She feels the loss of her alpha when her mother dies, almost like the world dropping out from under her and she wants to howl, to call out to the rest of the pack, if there's anyone left to come find her, but there are too many hunters, too many people, too much that she doesn't. She just hides and watches and waits and hopes that she isn't completely alone.

She watches as the paramedics take Peter away to the hospital. She doesn't know what else to do, so as discreetly as she can, she makes her way through the city and to the back door of Beacon Hills Memorial.

It's not easy to get to him while he's in the burn unit being treated, so she just bides her time until she can. She steals food from the kitchen and clothes from the pediatric wing, and finds an empty room to hide in until the hospital shuts down for the night. Once the lights come down and the footsteps through the halls lessen, she pokes her head out again, glancing both ways for any sign of life, before making her way back to Peter's room.

He's so still. It's the first thing she notices because Peter is steady, solid, but he's never still, not like this. Most of the burns are on one side of his body and he's not moving much beyond the steady rise and fall of his chest, aided by the tube in his throat. The tears start involuntarily, slipping down her cheeks before she can stop them and the backs of her hands come up to brush them away before starting to make her way a little bit closer. She doesn't know what to do, and this is normally the part where she would wait for him to tell her, but he couldn't tell her anything.

The burns on one side of his body are worse than the other, so she stays on his good side, stopping at the edge of the bed and glancing back over her shoulder to make sure that there was no one coming. Then one tiny hand finds his.

"Uncle Peter?"

She doesn't expect him to verbally answer her, but maybe he can let her know if he's still in there somehow.

[impetere]

Melissa McCall is nobody's fool.

Not that she thinks her incredibly charming patient is trying to play her for one, but if he thinks she didn't realize that there was something odd about this case, then he's not as intelligent as she takes him for. But the fact that he's recovering as well as he is from burns that serious is suspicious at best. The doctors don't seem to want to pay much attention to it, but she thinks it's odd. And she can't help but get the feeling he's hiding something.

Maybe it's just the way that his sheets are a little bit rumpled in a spot where no one seems to have been sleeping, or maybe it's just that mother's intuition, but it's starting to get to the point where it's bugging her. And when something's bugging her, she has to do something about it.

Tonight, she makes her way back into Peter's hospital room with a few balloons and a teddy bear tucked under one arm. She greets him with a warm smile, before moving to place them on the table across the room from him. "Someone dropped those off for you." The lie is a smooth one, as she glances back with a smirk. "Guess they want to make sure you get better."