Chapter 14: The Visit
[Beacon Hills Memorial Hospital — Long-Term Care Wing, Thursday, October 6, 2011, 6:22 AM]
The bed was empty.
Jackson arrived at the care facility eleven minutes after Derek and found him standing in Room 114 — Peter Hale's room for the past six years — staring at a stripped mattress and a bare nightstand. The IV stand was pushed into the corner. The window blinds were open, letting in grey morning light that made the room look like a photograph that had been partially erased.
Derek's hands were at his sides. His posture was the kind of still that preceded either violence or collapse, and Jackson couldn't tell which direction the energy was moving.
"When." Derek's voice.
"I don't know." Jackson stepped into the room. The floor was clean — recently mopped, the antiseptic smell sharp and fresh. No personal items. No flowers, no cards, no evidence that anyone had visited the occupant of this bed for six years except hospital staff. "He's gone."
"I can see that."
Jackson approached the nurse's station, which was staffed by a single woman in floral scrubs whose nametag read JENNIFER. She was middle-aged, tired in the way healthcare workers were tired — permanently, fundamentally, with coffee serving as structural support.
"Excuse me. Peter Hale — Room 114. Can you tell me when he was discharged?"
Nurse Jennifer looked up from her computer with the expression of someone who'd been asked this question before and didn't enjoy the repeat.
"Three days ago. Monday morning. He signed himself out."
Monday. Three days ago. That's — I expected him to still be in the catatonic act. The show never specified exactly when Peter became mobile. I assumed it was later, closer to the school attack. He's been out since before I even decided to tell Derek.
"He signed himself out," Jackson repeated. "He was ambulatory?"
"Walked out on his own two feet. Polite about it, too — thanked the staff, signed the paperwork, dressed in street clothes." Nurse Jennifer's voice carried the particular note of someone describing something that defied medical expectation. "Six years of severe burns and minimal responsiveness, and then one morning he's up, dressed, and asking where the nearest exit is."
"Did someone bring him the clothes?"
Jennifer hesitated. The hesitation was professional — patient privacy, HIPAA, the institutional reflex to protect information. Then she looked at Derek, who was standing in the hallway with an expression that communicated family in a way that bypassed bureaucratic objection.
"A woman came to see him last week. Before he checked out. Blonde, mid-thirties, well-dressed. She was here for about an hour. The next day, a bag of clothes appeared in his room. Day after that, he walked out."
Jackson's blood temperature dropped three degrees.
Kate Argent visited Peter Hale. Kate Argent — the woman who burned his family — walked into this hospital and sat with the man she'd tried to kill. And then Peter received clothes. And then Peter left.
That meeting shouldn't have happened. In the show, Kate and Peter don't interact until later — until Peter's already revealed himself, until the endgame. If Kate visited Peter before he went mobile, that means either Peter was already lucid and playing possum when Kate arrived, or Kate's visit triggered something.
Either way, my timeline is wrong. Peter's been free for three days longer than I calculated. Three days of an Alpha werewolf moving through Beacon Hills without anyone tracking him.
Derek was staring at the bed rail. His right hand rested on the metal, and as Jackson watched, the fingers curled — slowly, deliberately — and the steel bent under the pressure. Five crescent indentations, perfect impressions of a werewolf's grip, pressed into the hospital-grade chrome.
"Derek." Low. Careful. "Not here."
Derek released the rail. Looked at his hand. Back at the bent metal. Then he turned and walked out of the room, past the nurse's station, through the double doors of the long-term care wing, and into the parking lot.
Jackson followed. The morning air was cool — October in Northern California, the sun still low enough to cast long shadows across the hospital's east-facing facade. Derek's Camaro sat in the fire lane, because Derek Hale parked wherever he wanted and traffic enforcement was the least of his concerns.
"A blonde woman." Derek's voice was controlled in the way a dam is controlled — holding back volume that would destroy everything downstream. "Kate."
It wasn't a question. Jackson confirmed anyway: "Fits the description."
"Kate visited my uncle. The man she burned. She walked into his room and sat with him." Derek's jaw worked. "Why."
Because she's a predator. Because she came back to admire her work. Because Kate Argent is the kind of person who visits the wreckage she's created and calls it closure.
Or because she wanted something from him. Information, leverage, access — Kate doesn't do anything without a reason, and visiting a burned, comatose werewolf in a hospital bed has a reason I can't see yet.
"I don't know," Jackson said. It was the truth — the first fully honest answer he'd given Derek about anything. "But Peter left after her visit. That's not a coincidence."
Derek absorbed this. His gaze went distant — processing, calculating, the internal machinery of a man who'd been trained since childhood to think about threats in terms of territory and pack and survival.
"She's at the Argent house," Derek said. "Chris's sister. Staying with the family."
"I know." Jackson leaned against the Porsche. The metal was cold through his jacket — the early morning hadn't warmed anything yet. His stomach was empty again; he'd left for the hospital without eating, and the acid was starting to make its presence known. "Kate being in Beacon Hills and Peter going mobile in the same week isn't coincidence either. She burned his family. He's killing everyone connected to the fire. At some point, those two trajectories intersect."
"She's on his list."
"She's at the top of his list."
Silence. The parking lot filled it with morning sounds — a delivery truck backing up, a car alarm chirping twice, the distant whine of the hospital's HVAC system cycling. Normal sounds, wrapped around a conversation about murder and revenge and a six-year-old fire that was still burning.
Derek opened the Camaro's door. "I'm going to the preserve. He has places — places the family used. Caves, cellars. I can track him."
"Alone?"
"I know the preserve better than anyone alive." He got in. The door shut with the particular solid thunk of American muscle. Through the window, his eyes were grey and flat and his jaw was set in the configuration Jackson recognized as hunting mode.
"Derek." Jackson spoke through the closed window. Derek's head turned. "Don't engage him. Track, observe, report. He's an Alpha. You're a beta. Solo engagement—"
"Is suicide. You've said that." The engine started. "I'm not going to fight him. I'm going to find him."
The Camaro reversed out of the fire lane, shifted into drive, and peeled out of the parking lot toward the preserve. Jackson watched the taillights disappear around the corner and stood alone in the hospital parking lot at six-forty in the morning with an empty stomach and a timeline that was rewriting itself faster than he could track.
Peter's been free for three days. Kate visited him before he left. Those two facts change everything I thought I knew about the Season 1 endgame. The show never showed this meeting — either it didn't happen in the original timeline, or it happened off-screen and I never knew about it.
My meta-knowledge just developed its first major crack. And the crack is in the worst possible place — the intersection of the two most dangerous people in Beacon Hills.
He drove home. Ate two bowls of cereal standing at the counter, the way he always did, and the Cheerios tasted like cardboard and the milk was almost expired and it was the most normal thing that had happened to him in twenty-four hours.
The iPhone buzzed in his pocket. Lydia: Two days, Jackson.
He read the message. Set the phone on the counter. Stared at it.
Two days until her ultimatum expired. Two days until Lydia Martin — who was already the smartest person in any room she entered — was freed from the relationship that was currently her only reason for restraint.
I need to end this first. On my terms. Before she detonates it on hers.
He picked up the phone and typed: Can we talk? Tomorrow evening. I'll pick you up at seven.
The reply came in four seconds: Fine.
Jackson finished the cereal, washed the bowl, dried it, put it away. The routine was comforting in its precision — the same motions Margaret made, the same kitchen, the same rack. He was learning to love the small architecture of this borrowed life even as the larger structure shook.
The burner phone sat silent. Derek was in the preserve, hunting a ghost who was three days ahead of them, and Kate Argent was somewhere in Beacon Hills with a secret meeting under her belt and motives Jackson couldn't predict.
The script is rewriting itself. And I don't have the new draft.
Note:
Please give good reviews and power stones itrings more people and more people means more chapters?
My Patreon is all about exploring 'What If' timelines, and you can get instant access to chapters far ahead of the public release.
Choose your journey:
Timeline Viewer ($6): Get 10 chapters of early access + 5 new chapters weekly.
Timeline Explorer ($9): Jump 15-20 chapters ahead of everyone.
Timeline Keeper ($15): Get Instant Access to chapters the moment I finish writing them. No more waiting.
Read the raw, unfiltered story as it unfolds. Your support makes this possible!
👉 Find it all at patreon.com/Whatif0