This is the start to a wholly unasked-for sequel to wait for the season that I’ve been poking at for some time. It’s definitely even weirder than that already-kind-of-weird fic, so maybe give it a miss if you’re looking for the standard fare. Steve isn’t even mentioned in this snippet. I'll post something more normal soon, I promise.
From the living end of memory, the past seems inevitable.
You had to go through that terrible thing so that you could become the type of person who would survive that later, more terrible thing that most likely occurred in a thematically resonant way—and with a little determined creativity, the thematic resonances start popping up all over the place.
So then you arrive on the other side of the terrible thing, the second terrible thing, with your memories all worn smooth like rocks that have been jostling around in a pocket for years. They fit together now, no inconvenient angles or edges anymore. It’s all one continuous shape, the shape of how things happened, and you tell yourself that there was no other way for your story to go.
It was always going to happen this way.
It was always going to be the concrete; the buzzing overhead lights; the placid, thoughtful voice saying “Let’s see if we can get it to wear some clothes, why don’t we?”
Embarrassingly enough, that’s the first thing Eddie remembers from his new life. He’s seen clips of the grainy footage from the months before that, but when he tries to remember lurching around and sinking his teeth into some disgusting raw slab of meat, it’s like a black hole. His mind doesn’t even want to get near the edges. He feels irrationally like if he thinks too hard about it, his mind will decide that actually, sentience isn’t such a hot shit idea after all, and he’ll tip right back down and down and down.
———
Wayne’s old now, and it makes Eddie uncomfortable in a way he doesn’t really want to look at too hard.
Wayne had never been young, exactly; Eddie doesn’t remember a whole lot from back when he first went to stay with Wayne, just a lot of promises that it was temporary, promises that stopped coming after a while. But what he does remember looks a hell of a lot like Wayne when Eddie was nineteen or twenty: wrinkles, bald spot always hidden under some ballcap or other, grumbling I’m an old man but Eddie never truly believing it because somehow, over the years, he’d got to believing that Wayne would always be there. Fucking stupid! So so fucking stupid from Eddie, who on paper looks like someone who should know better.
Now Wayne’s actually old. Now he moves so slow, Eddie gets impatient just watching him through the lit-up window, doing the washing-up and puttering around the kitchen with stooped shoulders.
It’s easier on him if I don’t, thinks Eddie, but he already knows he’s lying as he thinks it. Or rather, he’s lying in a very specific way: it’s easier for Eddie if he pretends Wayne is dead, but probably not so much the other way around.
That makes him a pretty terrible person, he guesses, but then again—not exactly a person anymore. He doesn’t know how much that matters.
It would hurt him, thinks Eddie, tentatively, and that might actually be a little bit true. It’s just not as true as the other truth: that Eddie wants to keep Wayne locked in the box marked BEFORE because it’s too difficult to even think about explaining. That if Wayne’s back in his life, Eddie has to reckon with him as someone who will just continue to get older every single day until one day Wayne is as old as he will ever be.
It’s easier if he doesn’t. Doesn’t he deserve an easier life? Didn’t he go through purgatory? Hasn’t he paid and paid and paid? He should get whatever he wants, he should rip through the skin of the Earth to sink his teeth into the candy flesh, chew it up—
So yeah, he’s a monster in more ways than one.
———
There’s BEFORE and there’s AFTER, but really that’s just a narrative device. Really there are a lot of before-afters.
There was before-after Eddie woke up; that’s the big one, maybe. Then there’s before-after Eddie is Eddie again and could think in words like a human. Like a person. Then there’s before-after it becomes scorchingly, irreversibly clear that Eddie is neither human nor person.
And of course, there’s the before-after Eddie finds himself outside in government-issued sweatpants and a plain blue t-shirt, looking up at the gibbous moon for the first time in his new not-quite-life, and feels absolutely nothing about it.
It hits him later, kind of. He doesn’t even try to get somewhere safe (for whom?) to bunk that first night, just curls up in the nearest Greyhound terminal and felt sorry for himself, performatively. It seems like the thing to do. Woe is Eddie, friendless nightmare beast, freakier than anyone’d ever guessed he could be, and not in a fun way.
He hadn’t even—
Back before, like before he’d even died in the first place, he probably would’ve taken it harder. Hah. Harder.
But it hadn’t even occurred to him to reach into his own stringless scrubs and make baby Jesus cry, not for a long time. When it had, he’d felt oddly proud, as if that was proof that he's not some mindless beast at his core. That's probably not quite right, though. He thinks about it some more and decides it doesn't mean anything after all.
And then when dawn hits the Greyhound terminal, he belatedly realizes that shit, maybe he should’ve been thinking more about what vampires can and can’t do, traditionally, and he’s a little worried about burning to a crisp but it’s already too late, so he just rolls under the bench with the last of his consciousness and hopes like hell he looks too dangerous to mess with.
Somehow he’s okay; somehow the cops aren’t even called. This is by way of being an inference, given that once the sun is out for real, Eddie is for all intents and purposes no longer a participant in goings-on. But he wakes up in the orange light of the sunset and everything seems to be the way he left it, maybe a handful more Burger King wrappers and fresher eau de urine gathering in the corners. The slim roll of go-away-please cash is still in his white cotton briefs. He’s not in a drunk tank and nobody’s prodding him. Nobody’s even around. Cautiously, he wonders if it’s another freaky power they just never thought to check for.
He doesn’t feel much like testing it, and also it’s actually really fucking uncomfortable to be crammed underneath a bench like he is, so he crawls out and starts trying to pull together some kind of life.
———
“Eddie,” the labcoat says, while he’s still staring up at the night sky for the first time in almost a decade.
Yeah, that whole thing where he walked outside and looked up at the moon wasn’t actually that romantic. They didn’t exactly let him waltz out into the wide world with a bindle on his shoulder; they decontaminated him, made him sign a bunch of stuff, and had this labcoat in sensible shoes slip him a shifty fifty in exchange for promising to come back on a regular basis for “check-ups” that they both know aren’t for Eddie’s benefit. They pretend otherwise, because it’s nicer that way.
“What,” says Eddie. “I’m just saying, I dunno how the economy works nowadays, but I’m guessing fifty bucks isn’t gonna get me too far.”
The labcoat pushes gold-framed glasses up her nose. “You understand that we did not have to do this at all, right?” She doesn’t sound—she’s not being mean, or even condescending. She’s just telling him so he understands. “You do not legally exist.”
That’s all she says, but Eddie knows what she means. He also knows that this money’s coming with strings, and he wants to get the absolute most he can out of this while he still has something they want.
“Okay, but—”
The labcoat rolls her fucking eyes and reaches into her own fucking pleated slacks and pulls out her own fucking wallet, counting out two twenties and a ten gone soft around the corners. She probably gets paid real good. There’s a picture of a kid in the wallet, maybe five or six years old; it looks like a school photo with that weird cloudy blue-grey background. The kid looks happy. He’s grinning. His name is probably Chris or Lionel or Jacob. He’s probably in some kind of youth T-ball league where he mostly sits in the outfield and eats grass. He’ll probably get into a good college someday, maybe on a baseball scholarship after he gets really good at T-ball after all and hits the winning home run for his high school varsity team. It will be a whole different millennium and he will never, ever know that the Psych 101 class he’s skipping to dry-hump his English-major girlfriend was paid for by the three and a half years his mommy spent administering heavy-duty sedatives to Eddie so they could run all their little tests without Eddie getting bitey.
“Thanks,” says Eddie, because he’s got manners. He’s still got manners.
“We’ll see you in a month,” the labcoat says.
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“Oh, but you see, Kazansky,” the boy looks down at him and smiles. Engulfed by the honey-gold haze of a sharp summer sun, the sweetest, most reckless thing he’s ever seen. “I am dangerous!”
And there’s something about that smile, guilelessly fluttering across his flushed face like a hummingbird taking flight, that digs into Tom’s chest like the gentlest of knives. Cleaves its way between his ribs.
Fills his heart with light.
It’s strange, how quickly it all happens. How startlingly unremarkable it really is. How Tom takes a deep breath, lets the faint wisps of warm vanilla sugar trickle down his too-dry throat, closes his eyes, and just knows: he might’ve entered this quaint house in the middle of nowhere with a firm plan in mind to destroy any chances his father had of securing a betrothal (even if that meant stooping low-enough to make a thirteen-year-old cry) but hurting Pete Mitchell in any shape or form, wouldn’t sit right with his conscience.
Knows that there’s no reason why Mrs Mitchell should be so intent on finding her son a match at such short notice, especially when he’s so young. (Especially when she doesn’t seem like one of those parents that unfortunately, aren’t all that uncommon in the Navy: who think their omega children have little value beyond the connections they can help forge via bonding and marriage.)
Recognizes dire straits when they’re staring him in the face: the thinly-veiled distress in Mrs Mitchell’s dull green eyes; the worn dress shirt that’s almost two sizes too big for Pete — that he was probably supposed to grow into several months ago, but never did; the stale scent of grief and pain that clings to even the most carefully-polished surface of their home.
Finds himself thinking that maybe, it isn’t all that strange. Maybe, he could spend the rest of his life with this boy. Finding out what makes him smile. What makes him laugh. What is his favorite dream to dream.
In the end, it all comes down to this: Sometimes, you meet a person and it feels like you’ve known them your entire life. A quiet sense of belonging settles in your bones, and you realize you’d do anything to keep them happy and secure.
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Cringe warning: very bad Esperanto.
Mi povas mergi min en Esperanto čar mi ne faris multe da progreso ekde 2019. Mi kredas mi komencis lerni en 2019, sed mi rezignis dum (por?) unua jaro. Mi rezignis la hispana, la franca, la japana kaj la irlandano čar… nu, estas evidente kial. Tro da lingvoj lerni (por lerni? Lerni sentas malgxuste.)
Sed, mi restis kun la Esperanto(n?) čar gxi estas facila. Mi volas lerni lingvon por la sakeo (that’s… is that seriously the word? Sakeo? I joked once that Esperanto is 80% English words with -o and the end and 15% other languages with o- at the end, but I digress) de lerni lingvon. Homoj diras ke tio estas malbono kialo, sed, kial? Estas amuza… ne estas krimo amuziĝi.
Honeste, mi estis (estis for ‘have been?’ doesn’t feel right…) uzi Google Translate por helpi min, sed ne por lambastono. nur por kontroli se mia gramatiko estas bona. Ne estas, evidente, sed… mi estas nesekura pri gramatiko. Mi scias ke gxi ne estas bona, sed gxi estas probable pli bona ol mi sed mi ne uzis gxin.
Cxiuokaze… mi havas punkton kun ĉi tio; estas malfacila mergi en konlang! Jes, mi povus aligxi servilo de Discord, sed… la embaraso. Mi estus kiel, “Bonvolu… mi estas…” kaj havas furzo de cerba! Cerba furzo? (Googling how to stutter in Esperanto. Great.) (also I’m realising I said bonvolu instead of… oh my god? Am I seriously forgetting hello? Oh, Saluton!)
Cxu mi probable lernu la lingvon de miaj lando, la irlandano? Probable, sed honeste? Neniu parolas la irlandano en la nordo. Ili apenaŭ en la sudo. (Ne estas sude, mi ne zorgas se Google translate diras alie… ne sentas gxusta.)
Cxu mi havas punkto kun cxi tio? Ne. Sed, hej, diras al mi kiel CLAPPED mia Esperanto estas. Kaj, jes, mi eĉ ne provis traduki clapped cxar gxi estas pli amuza al ne.
Mi estas tiel malbona pri Esperanto. Mi devas fidi al tradukistoj por helpo. Mi uzas Google Translate por helpi kun tempoj kaj gramatikoj, sed la vortoj estas plejparte el mia cerbo, se tio havas sencon.
Mi ne havas kialon pri ĉi tio. Mi supozas, ke ĉi tio estas testo de miaj kapabloj. La rezultoj? Tre malbona, sed, hej, mi afiŝos ĉi tio, ĉiuokaze.
Edit: after writing this post, I got an easy, actually video about languages recommended… lol
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