Chapter Text
Derek’s Friday starts off with a bang. Well, multiple bangs, if you want to get technical. The sporadic yet persistent clattering of metal against metal gradually filters into his consciousness until he’s half awake, but he doesn’t snap into full wakefulness until one particularly loud clang. His jolt of surprise sets off a brief tussle with his messy nest of bed sheets, which ends in an undignified tumble to the floor, barely cushioned by his sheets and a pillow.
By the time he manages to untangle his limbs and crawl on all fours over to where he unceremoniously tossed his clothes by his closet door the night before, his brain has recovered enough of its normal functions (bashing your head against the floor is apparently good for your head, who knew?) for it to register that the clanging is coming from the kitchen. The kitchen, where there are pots and pans and food and fire, oh God, so many ingredients for disaster, all at the mercy of his sister. He’s starting to get flashbacks of terrible childhood memories of being force-fed various concoctions which could probably have been classified as biohazards.
So Laura has decided to exercise her “legendary” cooking skills today. Great.
“Don’t do anything stupid! …Or try not to blow anything up, at least?” he calls toward the general direction of the kitchen, voice scratchy with sleep, but the only response he gets is a series of pointed metallic thumps.
With a sigh and a grunt of effort, Derek pushes himself to his knees and then reaches for the pile of discarded garments on the floor by his hand, and tries to disentangle his jeans, which seems to have twisted itself into a knot around some dirty socks and his favorite black button-up overnight.
After a minute of fumbling, his pants finally come free accompanied by a suspicious ripping sound. Derek squints at where the wad of black fabric has flopped to the floor while simultaneously trying to straighten out his pant legs. Then he freezes up and widens his eyes.
There’s a hole in his shirt. There is a giant gaping hole in his favorite shirt.
He drops his jeans and gingerly picks up the tattered shirt for closer inspection. He now vaguely recalls hearing what might have been several buttons bouncing and scattering on the floor last night, and possibly some ominous tearing sounds too, nearly drowned out by the moans and rhythmic thumping coming from the other side of the thin wall between his room and their neighbors', as he tried to undress as fast as humanly possible to get in bed and bury his head under the pillow. What had at the time probably just been a few missing buttons and a small, still salvageable snag in the stitches at the hem has become an enormous, jagged gash under the unfortunate combination of his drowsy fumbling and the prickly zipper on his jeans.
His mourning is cut short by a weak, erratic squawking coming from somewhere behind him. It takes him a while to identify the source of the sound as the digital alarm clock on his bedside table. The odd noise eventually trails off into faint beeps and then, after one final cheep, dies out completely. He stares blankly for a second at the blank display where the flickering digits have faded out with the sounds before he thinks to check his cell phone for the time.
It’s twenty minutes past the time he usually gets up. He has about fifteen minutes to get out the door or he’s going to miss the bus.
Derek promptly drops everything in his hands, heedless of the thud and ensuing chink of the poor alarm clock meeting its tragic end, and half skids to the bathroom, nearly running into the bathroom door in the process. He takes a one minute shower with ice-cold water, stubs his toe getting out, and narrowly avoids braining himself on the sink when he slips in a puddle of water (he didn’t bother with the shower curtain today).
He finds that he’s out of hair gel as he’s giving his teeth a perfunctory brush. He spits out a mouthful of toothpaste and glances at the bathroom mirror, tugging dejectedly at a tuft of drooping hair. His reflection is pale, eyes bloodshot with dark circles beneath; a smudge of toothpaste clings to one corner of his mouth. He looks hungover, except he didn’t touch a drop alcohol yesterday, because he was working.
Derek rubs furiously at his mouth and thinks murderous thoughts about his evil boss who drops last-minute emergency projects on people for fun, his lazy co-workers who dump all the work on him, his crazy ex who chose last night to send him a string of creepy, threatening texts, his very vocal neighbors who screw like rabbits at two in the morning, and most of all his satanic sister…
…who is cooking right now. Crap. Derek thinks he can already smell something burning.
He’s tripping back to his bedroom before he finishes cursing at Laura in his head. He throws on the first pair of underwear he sees and lunges for his jeans still lying in a heap by his bed. He wrestles with it and manages to pull it on after falling over just once, which is pretty good for him, all things considered. He then limps over to his closet, only to find it devoid of all articles of clothing aside from three socks, all different colors; his scratchy Hale family sweater (which he never wears); and a lone graphic tee (red with an ugly print of a flabby stomach on the front in bright green; a gift from Erica, as if Derek would ever buy such a hideous, obnoxious thing—not funny at all, okay—and which he also never wears).
Laundry is mostly Laura’s responsibility in their household of two, since Derek often works late at the company computer lab, sometimes even staying the whole night. (In exchange Derek cooks and cleans when he can, and suffers through her various schemes to the best of his abilities, which in his opinion is more than enough payment.) And Laura almost never bothers to put any of the clean laundry back in Derek’s room.
Muttering darkly under his breath, Derek snatches the garishly colored t-shirt and yanks it over his head as he stomps his way out of his room.
-
The kitchen looks like a warzone when he arrives. There’s smoke and strange splatters and misshapen cookware everywhere. He slips the instant he sets foot on the tiled floor and knocks hip-first into a cabinet, hitting the still tender four-day-old token of his first ever bus ride spot on. Derek hisses and rubs at the bruise, wincing.
“Whoops, that was probably egg yolk,” Laura turns around with a beatific grin, and then starts cackling as soon as she catches sight of him. “Nice beer belly, little brother. And you let your hair down today, that’s nice.” She does hand over a mug filled with steaming coffee when she’s done sniggering though.
Derek grits his teeth but accepts the proffered beverage, because coffee is coffee. “Thanks. And shut up! It’s not funny. You and Erica are idiots. And this is all your fault. I don’t care what you did this time, just give me a shirt, something that’s not so red and green and dumb.”
Laura seems torn between entertained and, strangely, somewhat shifty at that.
Derek takes a sip of the coffee to clear his head before looking at the carnage around him and adds, “I’m not helping you clean this up. How did you get egg yolk all the way ov—oh God, what’s that red stain? And why the hell is my good frying pan bent like—like that? …Okay you are replacing that; it was expensive. And is that the colander?” He keeps finding more things wrong the longer he looks, so he decides to stop looking and spare himself the headache. He turns to glare at his lunatic of a sister instead.
Laura has the nerve to shrug as if she hadn’t just wrecked their kitchen. “You weren’t up at your usual time to do your programmed morning routine, so being a wonderful big sister, I magnanimously decided to make you breakfast!” And then she mumbles something too quickly and quietly for Derek to catch.
Derek rolls his eyes and scowls. “You couldn’t have woken me up? And what was that last bit?”
Laura pouts. “You never let me cook!” And ignoring his, “For a very good reason!”, she slides a plate over the kitchen island to the side where Derek stands fuming silently. It’s filled with the charred remains of what can only be eggs, he supposes. “Scrambled eggs and bacon!” she announces brightly, brandishing a fork in his face until he snatches it away and uses it to prod distractedly at the rock-like scraps, and then she quickly adds, “And I didn’t do the laundry.”
He freezes mid-poke. “...What.”
“I forgot?”
Derek slams his coffee mug down on the counter next to the plate of charcoal, ignoring the slosh of coffee over his hand, which splatters a little over his shirt. “Not even an undershirt? What am I supposed to wear to work then?”
“Just wear what you are wearing now! Throw you suit jacket on over it if it makes you feel better. You’ll fit right in, Dee. For once.”
“We have a dress code.”
“Which is not strictly enforced in your department. I’ve seen your coworkers. I know for a fact none of them wear suits to work.”
“I hate this shirt,” Derek says petulantly, slamming his mug down a second time just to make a point. The cup handle promptly snaps off.
“Wow, I hate to say this again, but you have anger management issues, baby bro. You want some superglue? It’s your favorite mug, right?
It was. It was a gift from his mother. Derek stares dumbly at the now handle-less bright orange mug on the counter. He shakes himself and checks his phone again. “I don’t have time for this. I’m going to miss my bus.”
“Aww, you’re not gonna eat your eggs? Here, I made grilled cheese sandwiches too! You can take them with you.” Laura shoves some blackened squares of bread into his hand.
They are only a little better than charcoal, and the cheese inside is probably going to break his teeth, but he knows Laura uses up everything single scrap of food they have when she cooks, so this is probably the best he’s going to get, so he takes them.
Laura looks at him shrewdly. “Why are you so eager to take the bus all of a sudden? You hate buses. I can drive you if you wait a bit.”
“No,” he says tersely around the bitter tasting sandwich jammed in his mouth and buttons up his jacket over his now coffee-stained t-shirt. Well, now that he’s dressed for work, more or less, he has roughly seven minutes to get to the bus stop, which should be just enough. He grabs his laptop bag. “I’m leaving. Try not to break anything else.”
Laura scoffs but keeps looking at him with a calculating expression. Derek ignores her and slams the door shut.
-
He’s taken not two steps toward the elevator when the door across the hall opens and the main reasons he barely got four hours of sleep last night step out, one after the other. He glares his wordless accusations at them but quickly regrets it when the young woman makes eye contact and waves at him cheerfully.
“Morning, Derek!” She drags her husband toward the elevator as well, stopping right next to Derek, evidently intent on starting an excruciating round of pointless small talk.
Derek gives her a curt nod, then turns to stare despondently at the slowly ticking floor number of the elevator. He refuses to acknowledge their names, which he'd only learned last night, and which he would've happily gone on not knowing.
“You look tired, man,” the guy remarks languidly after sparing him a glance, and immediately returns his attention to his wife, wrapping an arm around her waist, leading her onto the elevator when the doors ping open at last.
Derek follows. “I was kept up late,” he says drily and throws in a glower for good measure.
“Aww, that’s too bad… O-oh. Oh! Um, you heard—?” She blushes prettily and giggles, punching her husband lightly on the shoulder. “You are the loud one. Apologize!” She tries to leer but only manages an awkward chuckle. She pinches her husband’s nose when he laughs at her, and he rolls his eyes and tickles her with the hand resting on her hip in retaliation.
Derek watches the scene of domestic bliss unfolding before him and wants to stab his eyes out. He turns his stare to the toes of his shoes instead as a tickle-fight commences between the couple, and begins contemplating the sorry state of his love life. The closest he’s gotten to getting laid in over two years is getting pseudo-groped by some guy on a bus three days in a row. The most pathetic part is, he’s actually looking forward to their fourth grope-and-depart session right now.
The elevator mercifully pings to a stop on the ground floor before his exhausted brain can form any more maudlin thoughts. He makes to get away but the woman stops him with a hand on his elbow, her other hand hooked around one of her husband’s belt hoops.
“A-ah, Derek, sorry, we got distracted just now. We really should apologize, though, for last night,” she bites her bottom lip and jabs the guy in the side. “We’ll buy you coffee?”
Derek ducks his head and mumbles something about being late for work.
“Uh, okay, yeah, seriously though, sorry about keeping you up, man. We’ll… try to keep it down next time?” The guy shrugs, grinning helplessly.
The woman hides a smile behind her hand. “Yeah. We’ll buy you some earplugs tomorrow. And the offer for coffee still stands, just let us know! Have a nice day!”
Derek inclines his head and can’t get out of there quickly enough.