"It shouldn't've had to be you." Even as he says the words, he knows there wasn't anyone else. This wasn't a job for the Argents, even if the Alpha pack were a bunch of monsters. This wasn't hunting, this was...this was justice. Pack justice, blood for blood, and there was no one for it but Derek. No one else could have done it. Scott couldn't. And Stiles...Stiles did bring kidnapped well, and that was about it. It was Derek's hands, but the blood guilt fell to him, too. It wasn't just Derek's to bear.

He can't quite look at Derek, sliding back into the mire of self-doubt and recrimination he's been drowning in the last few days, but he doesn't pull away from the touch of skin on his own. It is too intimate, that hand on his cheek, Derek's pulse under his fingers, but it's a lifeline he's clinging to without conscious thought. The touch of his Alpha, because he doesn't even think to disagree with Derek's words. Derek has come for him so many times already, and he's contributed in return everything he can. All his most clever ideas, and the beginnings of that pushy insistence that Derek stop with the brooding loner bit and acknowledge that he's just a guy doing the best he can. It's a touch that, if he were better, he'd read way too much into and possibly get too worked up about, because hormones, and then things would be weird. Weirder. As it is, it's just what's keeping him sane.

"Erica and Boyd are okay? Spending time with you is helping?" He hadn't forgotten the way they bolted into Derek's arms. Hasn't forgotten the way he'd wanted to join them. To comfort, and be comforted in return. Maybe that's what he's looking for now; that, and some sort of proof that his plan wasn't all bad. That something good came of it all. "I have some stuff for you to take back to them."