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 scientist says, while he’s still staring up at the night sky for the first time in almost a decade.
Eddie doesn’t know her name, but they all know his. They all call him Eddie, not Mr. Munson. Not that he wants to be Mr. Munson—he thinks if one of them actually said Mis-ter Mun-son he would shrivel up immediately, slough his skin and slip down the nearest drain.
“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 scientist 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 cruel. 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 scientist 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. 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, then baseball, and then he 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 Chemistry-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 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 scientist says.
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🔥It's Nice Here in Rare-Pair Hell!🔥
I feel weirdly accomplished!😎 It's as if I have evolved to a higher level of fanfic authordom. 👑 Did a search and my fic was the only one on the site with this ⬇ particular pairing! (Mr. Compress/Lady Nagant)
Does this mean I get to pick the ship name? 😉
On that note, just for kicks and giggles, if you have a good ship name, put it in the comments! 🚢
(I already talked a little in a previous post why I decided on these two as a ship, but if you want to know more, look past the break for my explanation with gifs!)
Alright, so, cliff notes on my series "It Doesn't End Here.": Tomura Shigaraki died, which he decided was no excuse not to hang out and party with his friends. All the rest of the League except Mr. Compress (because he was safe in prison), ended up getting invited to Tomura's after-death party.
Which, you know, sucked for Atsuhiro Sako, aka, Mr. Compress.
But I wasn't about to let the poor guy live a crappy life in prison. So, as per the MHA tradition, he gets involved in villain reform! Also, as the only beneficiary of Tomura Shigaraki's will, who in turn inherited All For One's fortune (completely legally, with a team of lawyers to boot), he decides to put the money to good use and creates the largest non-profit in Japan.
I REALLY wanted him to embrace all aspects of his new life, so I wanted him to find a significant other and a kid. I really don't like to write OCs to pair with major characters, so I had to find a canon character. Also, important: Compress mentioned once that someone in each generation of his family had a quirk that was good for theft! So I had to include that in my calculations. Then I had a thought:
That would be VERY useful for stealing things, wouldn't it?
And WHO ELSE in MHA has magical hair? That also happens to be purple and pink? And who would be considered a villain, and also consider herself a villain for all the lives she took? Gee... I wonder...
Now THAT'S a woman. I figured they'd also get along, since they both hate corrupt governments and spent time in villain prison, they'd have a starting point to become friends, and things would progress from there.
If you read all this, A thousand blessings be upon you, starting with my favorites: May your pillow always be cool, May inspiration come upon you often, and May your pets live long, healthy lives.
Drink water and have fun ya'll!
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