Back home, Derek lost shirts to blood stains and tears with a frequency that made him wonder why he even bothered trying to do laundry at all. That still happens here, though not as often. Some of his shirts are strewn about the forest here, he's sure, from the times where he shifted and had no interest in going back to track them down.

"Maybe a little of both," Derek tells her, not wanting to tell her that he usually just throws them away because he knows that he'll never get the blood out.

He takes another drink from his glass and he can already feel the wolfsbane traveling through his veins. It seems to dull his senses just a little, but when you have senses like his, that's not always a bad thing. It makes it easier to focus on the little things, like the way Sookie's skin feels against the pads of his fingers where his hand rests against her hip, fingers slipping just under the edge of her shirt.

She looks at him, calls them stubborn survivors, and all Derek can do is nod. He's lost every single person he's ever loved, and he sometimes wonders if there's a limit to just how much he can take. Will it ever be so much that he just stops functioning, shuts down, because it's just too much.

Sometimes it feels like all he knows is loss, and it's a thought that makes him swallow hard and pull Sookie tighter against him. She's real, and she's here, and Derek clings to that. In this moment at least, he isn't alone.

"The tragedy of it all," Derek repeats quietly, huffing out a breath and knocking back the rest of his drink. "Sometimes I think that I'm so busy surviving that I forget that I'm supposed to live."