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Stiles ran a hand between Derek’s shoulder blades. “So, here?”
Derek leaned back into the warmth of Stiles’ hand, even though there were enough blankets on the bed that it was plenty warm already. “Yeah.”
“Hmmm,” Stiles leaned forward to press his face into the spot, “it’ll be so weird. I mean, you know, it’ll look different.”
“That’s the point.” The tattoo was supposed to be a memorial. Memorials stood as a reminder that things were different, that nothing would be the same again, so deal with your changed world as you wish, but know it’s here to stay.
Tracing a looping finger around the area, Stiles murmured, “you still thinking the swirly thing? The, um, triskele?”
Derek nodded, his hair mussing against the pillow.
“Three little curlique things,” Stiles mused, “it makes sense.”
It made a lot of sense. When the idea first occurred to Derek as he was picking up turnips, (“no, it’ll be great Derek, I’ll make a stew. A stew. Isn’t that exotic?”) at the grocery store, it came as a shock how much it made sense. Something permanent to commemorate the fire. It would hurt. Tattoo artists that knew how to deal with werewolves put wolfsbane into the ink, to counteract the healing process, and the pain too made sense. Seemed appropriate. And it would have to be something with a pattern of three. His father, his mother, his brother. Derek refused to consider another mark for Peter, who was still alive, damn it all.
They forgot, sometimes, living across the country from his hospital bed, but Peter’s heart still beat, so he didn’t need to be treated like he was dead just yet.
Flinging a leg over Derek’s hip, Stiles leaned closer in, until the whole side of his face was pressing against Derek’s back. He’d packed on extra muscle in the years since he’d been bitten, but Derek couldn’t shake the feeling that Stiles was light against him, hollow boned like a bird. Force of habit from years of being careful not to snap something important left Derek with the permanent impression of Stiles being fragile. He had told Stiles that once, and Stiles just wrinkled his nose. (“I’m not a fucking hand-crocheted doily. You could send me through the washing machine and I’d be fine.”)
Laura slammed open the door of their apartment a few days later. Without knocking, of course. No matter how many time she’d seen Derek and Stiles in compromising positions, she maintained that it was her duty as an older sister to never knock, and she would be loath to give it up.
Derek really hated her, sometimes. They could be in the throes of passion, and any small noise had him looking around frantically, making sure that there was no cackling sister in sight.
She flung her bag onto the kitchen counter. “Der-Bear, Stiley-wiley!”
“Stiley-wiley?” Stiles mouthed at him incredulously.
She climbed over the back of the couch they were sitting on, and plopped down right between them. Their furniture took quite a beating from her. Derek had never really noticed back in Beacon Hills, when their parents had been the ones replacing the furniture, but he sure did now.
“I was talking to Joey, from the DiSanto pack, up on the West Side,” Laura rattled out as she scrolled through the notes section of her phone, “and he gave me the number of a guy at Forever Tattoo, on 31st, who can give werewolf tattoos. You have to talk to him special ahead of time, but apparently he’s as good as you can get in New York. I’m texting you the number.” Once her fingers finished flying across the keypad, she looked up at Derek seriously. “Joey said they they really do hurt. None of us have ever had wolfsbane poisoning before, but apparently it is not a cakewalk.”
“I know.”
“I can come with you, if you want.”
“It’s fine, Laura.”
Laura snorted, miffed. “What is the point of being an Alpha if you don’t do what I say? You have the blue eyes, Derek, I’m pretty sure that means you’re supposed to listen to my every order.”
“Technically,” Stiles cut in, “you didn’t make an order, it was an offer.”
She sighed. “I suppose it still is just an offer. But Derek...”
“I’ll be fine, Laura.”
After she left, Stiles fixed Derek with a steely gaze. “I will be coming with you, and that is an order.”
Derek really didn’t want Stiles coming along. It would probably make the whole experience less painful, but Stiles didn’t need to see Derek get his back practically torn open with wolfsbane. One day, Stiles would get too much put on his shoulders, and it would crush the laughter out of his eyes, and Derek never wanted to see that happen. But Stiles also had that look on his face, and Derek knew that if he denied Stiles just then, he would be waking up cold for the next week, with the most disgustingly pungent Old Spice Stiles could find sprayed over the bed.
So Derek walked, accompanied, through the door of Forever Tattoo. It was... unexpectedly neon. Jangling K-pop chirped through speakers overhead, and where the walls didn’t hold pictures of tattoos, they sported cartoon animals with disproportionate heads that danced around fantastical landscapes. Someone in a corner with purple hair was getting spongebob tattooed across their side.
A guy at the counter popped his head up when they walked in. Derek was surprised to find, as the guy briskly walked around the counter, that he was no taller standing than sitting.
“Which one of you is Derek?” he asked.
Derek raised his hand, then felt silly. He wasn’t in school anymore, he didn’t need to raise his hand.
“Hi Derek, I’m Derrick,” smirked the guy, like they were sharing a joke. Derek didn’t think he could find someone wearing a hoodie with panda ears on it unfunny, but apparently he could. “Mine’s with an I though. And this is your friend...”
“Stiles. So you’re his tattoo artist extraordinaire?” Stiles inquired, shaking the guy’s hand.
Good. Let him talk. Derek was starting to feel nauseous, which he knew couldn’t be from anything physical, so he was probably nervous, and Derek didn’t like talking while nervous.
“Don’t mind Derek here, he doesn’t like to talk when he’s nervous. So, Derrick with an i, where are we going?” Stiles asked politely as he squeezed Derek’s arm reassuringly.
Forever Tattoo had a back room filled with big, clear tupperware bins covered with labels like “gloves,” “sterilized wipes,” and “extra pocky.” It smelled overwhelmingly of sanitizing alcohol, but at least the caterwauling of electronic synth in the front room was somewhat muffled. Derrick led them around a small mountain of boxes to an extra tattooing couch, crammed up against the orange cement wall like an afterthought.
“I know, super sketch,” Derrick plopped onto a small rolling stool, and propped one of his feet on it while he rummaged through a cart of supplies, “but if you start screaming, we want you out of the storefront. Go on, sit down, Derek with an E. And Steve, you can, uh, pull up some boxes.”
“It’s Stiles,” Derek growled.
Derrick pulled on a pair of latex gloves. “Oh yeah? Where’d that name come from?”
Derek had never seen anyone act so chipper as they prodded around a cart of torture weapons. To be fair, he’d never seen anyone else prod around a cart of torture weapons, but he was still pretty sure that Derrick was a one of a kind brand of weird.
“Uh,” Stiles was busy trying to find a box that looked like it could support his weight, “it’s a nickname, or it used to be, before I changed my name when we got married. My last name was Stilinski, and my first name was a Polish name that was passed down in the family, but neither of my parents could pronounce. So. Stiles.”
Derrick mused, “I guess as nicknames go, it could be worse. I was Ricky for a long time before I got people to start calling me Der-Bear.”
Derek really didn’t like the other Derrick.
“Oh stop rolling your eyes, Derek -with an E, not you Derrick. My Derek’s sister calls him that all the time, and he hates it,” Stiles laughed.
“No way, man. Der-Bear is an awesome nickname.” Derrick’s eyes glazed over. Derek wasn’t sure if he wanted someone incapable of focus etching a permanent mark into his skin. “My girlfriend calls me Der-Bear all the time. It’s great. You wanna see a picture of her?”
Stiles said he did, and Derek silently bemoaned his life choices from the couch as they cooed over a picture in Derrick’s wallet. Derrick shoved the picture in Derek’s face too, and Derek was greeted with a picture of a girl with an oversized bow in her hair, comically pursed lips, and two fingers held up in a peace sign by her face.
Derek also picked better significant others than the other Derrick.
The other two men chatted happily away while Derrick traced the outline of a triskele onto Derek’s back. Stiles had just finished a story about the time that Derek, in high school, sprinted towards the bleachers in the middle of a lacrosse game to give a late coming Stiles a kiss hello, and then the team lost, because Derek was the lead defender and too busy making out with Stiles in the stands to stop the other team from scoring.
Derek was relegated to bench warming duty for the rest of the season, but still made better decisions than Derrick, who shaking a cylinder of ink mixed with wolfsbane. Derrick was a terrible, terrible person to choose a job that involved piercing dozens of tiny holes into people’s skin.
“Okay,” Derrick said suddenly, “I think we’re ready to go. Stiles, does the positioning of the outline still look good?”
“Wh- oh, yeah. I didn’t even notice you’d finished getting ready.”
“Well,” Derrick shrugged, rolling the sleeves of his panda themed hoodie up, “it helps to be friendly and chatty with the clients. Particularly werewolf ones, because you guys freak out and start clawing at me if I don’t establish myself as a friend first.”
Stiles got up to sit on the floor in front of where Derek, lying on his stomach on the couch, could see. “Is it that bad?”
Derrick grimaced. “Yeah... wolfsbane is nasty, and werewolves never seem to have any pain tolerance. I think it has something to do with them usually healing the second they feel any pain. They dunno what it’s like to hurt, and then keep hurting. Anyhoo,” he piped, switching the tattoo gun on with a whirr, “here we go!”
When Derek was eleven, he found a small bag of wolfsbane inside of a box in the bottom of his parents’ closet. It was marked with a warning label, but Derek was eleven, and curious, and wanted to look cool in front of Stiles, so they took the bag, found a comfortable tree stump in the woods, and Derek stuck an exploratory hand beyond the ziplock. Bumpy red and black hives started sprouting immediately, and they ran back home, where Derek’s mom ran his hand under water for a solid thirty minutes while giving him a few choice words about stupid boys who wanted to show off and be dangerous. (“You don’t even have the ‘everyone else was doing it’ excuse, Derek. I’m really disappointed in you right now. Stiles, you too. I’m counting on you to be the brains here. Also, let go of his other hand, Derek’ll need it to keep this compress on.”)
That memory ran through Derek’s head as the needle dug in right above his spine, and it occurred to him that a minor skin rash was nothing compared to having the stuff inserted directly into his skin. He was dimly aware of Stiles hanging onto his hands, his ring a cold weight against his palm, and a forehead pressing against his, but he mostly felt like shoots of the bamboo plant sitting across from him in a butterfly adorned pot were being inserted underneath his skin and left to stay.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Stiles soothed softly after a while, “the center part’s almost done, it’s just the arms left.”
Derek choked out into the leather of the chair, “the arms are most of the design!”
“Shhh, shhh, you’ve just got to focus on something else, alright?”
How was Derek supposed to focus on something else? His wolf was screaming at him to rip the tattoo gun out of Derrick’s hands and then rip his head off of his neck. He was shaking so ridiculously that Derrick was bracing an arm against him to keep him still, and muttering something under his breath about how glad he was that the design wasn’t intricate. Stiles shouldn’t be seeing this. The sweat and the watering eyes and the pained grunts and groans didn’t have a place in the oasis of calm that Derek and Stiles had hacked out for themselves across the country from their childhood home.
He opened his mouth to say so, and what came out was: “c-can’t, Stiles. S’... everywhere.”
“Trust me, okay?” Stiles bit reassuringly at Derek’s wrist. “You can. Remember when I broke my arm in third grade?”
Derek groaned something in assent. The ambulance had whined and wailed outside the school, and there were so many well-meaning, but useless elementary schoolers gathering around Stiles’ prone body, curled up and crying underneath the monkey bars, that when Mr. Griffin ushered Derek through the crowd to Stiles’ side, Derek had been so overwhelmed he’d burst into tears right alongside him. Mr. Griffin, who had been hoping that Derek would be able to calm Stiles down so the paramedics would have an easier time, stood by helplessly watched the train wreck and kept looking around desperately for the paramedics to show up.
“Well, I was freaking out, and then I noticed that Mr. Griffin was freaking out too, and then I started wondering if maybe teachers weren’t actually superheroes, which got me thinking about, oh, I think it was the episode of Spiderman that was on that afternoon, and by the time the paramedics showed up, it took me a second to remember why they were even there.”
Stiles has felt like this before, Derek realized with a jolt. Felt these godawful fucking waves of pain that keep rolling and rolling through your body that never stop, the way that the pain curls around everything, until you feel like a block of clay with a wire wrapped around it, squeezing tighter and tighter. Until Stiles was bitten on that hotel balcony, he didn’t feel pain like a brief distraction of sensation, something uncomfortable, but tolerable in its brevity. That broken arm, that cut he needed stitches for when he was fourteen- Derek’s fists tightened as he realized exactly what Jackson had been doing to Stiles when he kept knocking him around in eighth grade. Those bruises, (while they probably hadn’t felt like his flesh was sizzling the way Derek’s was at the moment,) still stuck around for ages, and Stiles had been feeling it the. Whole. Time.
“Whoa there,” Stiles ran a concerned hand across Derek’s cheek, “why the long face? Now you just look sad, and that’s even worse. Um, puppies! Puppies are happy. You know, I was talking to Erica over the phone and she was saying that she and Boyd were thinking about getting a golden retriever or something. You know, dogs equal less stress equals a marginal chance that Erica’s seizures decrease a bit. Oh crap, seizures aren’t happy. Um, Steph said that they’re actually going to let her get her degree! How about that? Our very own Steph managing to make it through higher education. Sure, it took her two years longer than it took us, but by god, she’s doing it! And, her latest squeeze has actually stuck around for about three weeks of... squeezing. Poor word choice, I grant you.”
Then Derrick announced, “arm one is done,” and Derek’s pain came flooding back.
He let out a stifled shout, cut off when he muffled his face into the couch. It smelled like leather and accumulated sweat.
“Hey Derek-”
Cool hands running over his brow, a smiling face blurring into view.
“I ever tell you-”
Stiles. Stiles and the tiny smile lines barely visible around his eyes.
“-ran into that guy with the chewbacca hat again...”
Stiles, who could actually make it easy for Derek to not focus on pain.
One simultaneously physically and socially awkward cab drive later, Stiles was letting Derek lean on him as they stumbled through the doorway to their apartment. Stiles would have just picked Derek up if it didn’t mean putting pressure on his back, but he couldn’t, so Derek had to make do with being held up by Stiles’ shoulder.
Most nights, Stiles marveled at Derek’s habit of sleeping on his side, curled up, (“like you’re still a toddler, Derek. No, no, it’s adorable, don’t move,”) but that night, it really was the most practical position. He laid on top of the sheets and watched as Stiles bustled around, changing into his pajamas, ducking into the bathroom to brush his teeth, finger combing through his hair to work out any tangles. It was soothing, watching Stiles work through the old nightly rituals. Focus on something else.
When Stiles finished, he hesitated before climbing into his side of the bed. “Do you... mind if I take a look-see?” he asked, gesturing towards Derek’s back, which was facing away from him.
Derek could still feel the burning itch between his shoulder blades, and a few cursory skims of his hand across the area gave him the impression that it was swollen, but he thought Stiles would be able to handle the sight, even if it probably was quite gory.
He was right. All Stiles said was, “it looks good. It will, at least, once the wolfsbane works out of your system. Derrick with an I knew his stuff,” then pressed his lips briefly against Derek’s shoulder and then flopped onto his side of the bed, tired and heavy.