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The music coming from the house is so loud that Derek can hear it as he’s turning in, even before he shuts the engine off. His Spanish still sucks, but this one he knows well enough; it’s one of Erica’s chore songs, something she rolls out when she’s loading up the dishwasher or folding towels. He gathers up the grocery bags -- plastic, because no matter how often they nag him, he never remembers to get the reusables out of the trunk before he goes in. Stepping carefully over the pumpkins squatting on the stairs leading up to the door, he hums, me sienta en sus piernas, me da de besitos.
When he pushes the front door open, there’s a burst of giggles in the kitchen, followed by Stiles’s urgent shushing. The music loses half of its volume, and then Stiles yells, “Don’t come in here yet!”
“Your disgusting ice cream is melting,” Derek calls back, and hears him mutter, shit.
After a hushed consultation between them, Erica calls, “Stiles is coming to get it from you.”
Derek rolls his eyes, but stays obediently by the front door until Stiles rounds the corner. His pale, hairy legs are bare between a pair of cowboy boots and a fringed red miniskirt. Derek frowns. “I thought you were going to be a dinosaur.
“Oh, I am,” Stiles says, pulling bags off of Derek’s wrist. “Jesus, what’d you buy, twenty pounds of rock candy?”
“All the shit you asked for,” Derek grouches. As Stiles staggers toward the kitchen again, he adds, “Plus enough beer to make this fun.”
“You don’t get buzzed,” Stiles objects breathlessly.
“Who said I’d be drinking?” Derek says, and when Stiles glances back in surprise, bares his teeth in a threatening smile before heading down the hall toward the bathroom.
Having Erica around makes using the shower a tense ballet around fifty precarious bottles of product. Derek wouldn't admit it under electrocution, but he thrills in the careless way she takes up space, every dirty mug and discarded pair of underwear saying that she considers this home hers. Secretly, he hopes it takes her another four months to find a full-time position, even though she’s already grousing about being bored. At least SFSU is only two hours by train, leaving Stiles able to make the trip to Beacon Hills on a whim; Los Angeles had Erica for four years, and now that she’s graduated, Derek selfishly wants to keep her to himself. The bass thumps through a mariachi song while he washes his hair, and then the playlist appears to come to an end, leaving him in peace while he soaps his armpits and groin.
Exiting the bathroom in a cloud of steam, he hears the wet smack of kissing, Erica saying, “You’re gonna smear it,” followed by Stiles’s grumble of protest.
The kitchen is a wreck. One or both of them has already gotten into the candy, and they predictably failed to clean up the pumpkin guts that they both swore up and down would be gone before Derek even reached the grocery store. There’s a riot of tacky nonsense strewn across the kitchen table, and Stiles is already drinking one of the beers as he dips a brush into a pot of glow-in-the-dark paint and carefully traces an ulna down the left sleeve of Erica’s tight black hoodie. The rest of the skeleton is complete, at least on this side, tibia and fibula stretching long and graceful up the backs of her leggings to the femur, pelvis and coccyx leading up to spine and ribcage, the scapulae like little wings folded over her real ones.
“You realize you could have bought this costume for twenty bucks,” Derek points out, toweling his hair.
Stiles takes a swig of beer. “Homemade is default cooler than store-bought. Plus, we would've had to customize it anyway. Show him, dude.”
“Don’t call me dude,” Erica says for the five thousandth time, and turns around.
Derek drops the towel and barely manages to catch it mid-air, staring. “Is that--”
“Yeah,” she says, grinning.
“But does--”
“Yeah,” says Stiles, and Derek does drop the towel, stepping over it to cross the floor, sinking down onto his knees in front of Erica.
The little skeleton is perfect, curled just beneath her ribcage.
“You’re,” Derek says, and looks up.
She slides her fingertips into his wet hair, eyes shining.
“Congratulations, dudes,” Stiles says, and then, cringing as Erica turns and nails him in the shoulder with a knuckle, “Fuck, ow.”
“Don’t think you get out of diaper duty just because it's Derek’s,” she threatens.
Derek leans forward and presses his forehead gently against Erica’s side, just above the wet paint of the hipbone.
“You’re gonna fuck it up,” Stiles complains, and then, as Derek reaches up and hauls him down by the front of the shirt for a kiss, “seriously, do you have any idea how long it took me to--”