So this is the part of the episode that made me want to tear my heart out and throw it into the sun. Because Derek considers Scott part of his pack. And for Derek, pack doesn’t just mean strength and power. Until Derek was sixteen, he lived with his pack of both werewolves and humans, and they were family and loved each other and took care of each other and because it was pack it was even closer than that, like an underlying current of energy that connected every person in that house. It was all he knew. All he knew. And it was taken away from him when he was so, so young. And he blames himself still for Kate burning the house down, killing his family, destroying his pack, leaving him almost completely alone, and almost certainly broken. It’s a bitter hurt that he’s held onto for almost ten years. And now—now he’s building a pack again, putting the pieces of his life back together in a formation that makes sense to him, something that feels familiar to him, and Scott is a part of that. So seeing Scott so close to death? It must have burned him from the inside, flames that remind him what he once lost and how he’s always so, so close to losing everything again. “Thank you” isn’t just for saving Scott. It’s for saving Derek, too.
