edison is the (carnivalking) wrote in repose, @ 2015-11-23 02:23:00 |
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Entry tags: | *log, eddie nelson, muerte graves |
eddie/emily: pre-repose goodbye
Who: Eddie and Emily
Where: New Jersey
When: a while ago before Repose
What: saying goodbye
Warnings: pretty tame!
If there was a funeral, no one invited Edison. The right hand of the father to all those little vigilantes was a crook, after all, and he wasn’t deserving of a ceremonious goodbye. He could imagine all those rebellious children huddled around an empty grave, saying absolutely nothing to each other before having a race to see who could leave first. To be fair, Eddie didn’t know what he was going to do, either. How do you say goodbye to someone that was the captain of your ship? A vessel that was currently sailing hard and fast into razor sharp rocks with no lighthouse in sight? How was he supposed to lay someone to rest that kept him running all these years through the most bleak and awful days?
There was no right answer, so Eddie went for an old standby: deletion. Whenever a fellow hacker went down (death, government, etc), those who felt respect for him or were feeling marginally charitable that day, went in and deleted everything that was remotely personal. Sometimes it went as far as anything that made the anon seem like a real person. Like crying over a bad day, getting food poisoning, sitting in a chatroom for fifty hours straight just because they didn’t have anything better to do. Eddie’s friend wasn’t anything like that. But, he did have plenty of secrets. So, Eddie spent the day deleting details on how to build his gadgets, he deleted plans they had made to improve the city, he even deleted conversations they had about the mobs, about a certain Cat, about his kids. He deleted everything he could find from dawn until dusk.
He wanted to believe that once it was done, he’d come to terms with loss. But, it still felt like he could touch the communicator in his ear and annoy his old friend. It felt like he was just across town, working on their next plan of attack. But, he wasn’t. He was gone. And the city was going to turn into a bigger shithole than Edison had ever seen. His friend would have wanted him to stay, to fight, but leave that to his children. Leave it to the people who still believed they could make something beautiful out of this broken town.
Without his friend, his brother, Eddie could feel himself rotting from the inside out. He’d be an informant for the mobs for the rest of his life until the neon behind his eyes went ping and turned right off. He’d kill, he’d steal, he’d do whatever it took to get ahead. He’d grow old shoving his friend’s kids into dirt. He’d die on a pile of gold and for what exactly? Oh, god. This city was going to eat him alive. It was going to tear him apart and never even miss the mangled, nerdy corpse buried at the bottom of the ocean.
He let a day pass before he made up his mind, but there wasn’t much back-and-forth. For the first time in Edison’s life, he wanted to get the hell out of the trash dump that was New Jersey. It’d be easy. He could sink the rest of his money on a nice, vintage airstream and find the next carnival that’d take him. He could go to California and work for Disney. Making people happy until he died, pretending that he didn’t completely fail in the city he used to love.
There was really just one thing holding him back.
Halfway through packing his things, Eddie went out on his balcony with dead plants and pinwheels. He breathed in the terrible New Jersey air and simply asked the night: “Muerte? Drink some wine with me and make a terrible decision?” His voice was sweet with hope even if he knew this was probably going to turn into some kind of goodbye.
Her kind was stitched together from secrets. What happened in this world, what happened in the next. What happened in that thread-thin border between the two. That was where her kind was created and destroyed, where they cut the cords of life that tied people down, kept them from being helium balloons escaping into the atmosphere. It was a thread that was sewn and woven through everything, some places and times more thickly than others, and so when he called, she was already there.
They'd met because he lived in a city that stitched even darker than most, and she was wound tightly around every soul that called it home. His friend and his friend's family knew her touch even if they didn't know her face, and she'd been there from the very start. She'd been with a boy whose parents were taken, with every orphan, with every lonely senior wasting away, every starving mouth, and she'd been with every cut-short, too-violent, grimy street-top ending. She was part of the city, and it was part of her, and so she'd been drawn to a man who loved it. Timeless eons, and it was one man that finally saw her in the shortened lives of its citizens. Saw her and wasn't afraid - saw her and knew her as more than simply what she was.
She was there before his voice cleared the air, perched on the railing of the balcony with a bottle in her hands. She was heavy boots and a mess of bleached blonde hair, thick eyeliner and lips that tipped up at their corners to say that she knew more than you did. She was the city in a way, irreversibly tied to it with every stitched and woven thread of herself - and so she looked like someone pulled from its streets, too tough for some to ever think of voluntarily knowing - at least until they were forced to. But Edison - Eddie - he was different. She held out the bottle to him, dusty and cool like it had just now been pulled from someone's cellar after a lifetime of years. Like a couple, celebrating the birth of their first (only) child - a son - had purchased it with the thought of sharing it with him as he became an adult. They'd gone with her when she'd reached out to touch them (both at the same time), never able to pull this cork. And the boy - the man - had never opened it himself. It had been purchased to celebrate his birth. The two of them would open it to toast him tonight.
She would toast him. Though her kind was made of secrets.
"What sort of terrible decision?"
Edison had already considered begging Muerte to bring back his friend or tell him if the man was truly dead. Any human without much sense of eternity or life beyond would think of the same, after all. Please, god, tell me the secrets of this world I don’t understand. Still, he didn’t do it. He knew she couldn’t anyway and he’d never begrudge her for being who she was, for following her own rules. Muerte had always accepted him, even the darker parts, so he was happy to do the same.
When she appeared, he thought hazily that he was going to miss that. Even if she did come with him, her abilities could be ripped from her and he’d never get to experience that rush of wings again. He smirked and smoothed his hand over his hair, thinking about pulling off her dark punk rock street clothes and chucking those boots off the fucking balcony before taking her inside. It’d probably kill him to make love to her, but it was fun to pretend like he’d do it anyway. That it was a wonderful way to die.
He dwelled maybe a little too long on dirty thoughts before reaching for the bottle and taking a swing of the booze. It tasted good. Old, rich, a good year. His dark eyes went wide with pleasant surprise as he rolled his lips together for the aftertaste. “Well, okay. Here’s my pitch.” Eddie took one more swing of the wine and then handed it to her. “First, logically, this place has turned into a shithole. All my colorful friends are either dead, sad or changed. The mobs have a strong hold on here that I couldn’t break, even with a mind such as mine. The only people who could help me break the mobs up are a bunch of idiot children and my ex who hate my guts and trying to grovel to them for another five years sounds like absolute hell. They’ll never treat me as one of their own, they’ll never trust me.”
Eddie took a deep breath. “That’s the logical reasoning for leaving this dump. The romantic? Close your eyes. Do it, seriously. Close them.” He waited for her to do so and then turned towards the balcony, sweeping his arm across the horizon. “Imagine us with a sweet vintage trailer traveling across this great country wherever we want to go. I was thinking of landing at Disney to work on their animatronics and tech, but I’d go anywhere you’d want. I’d keep running with you until we were dead and old and the only thing left of us was a beautiful silver airstream.”
She couldn't read his mind - that was one thing that didn't fall into her camp - but the look crossing his face was easy enough to read. She fought back the urge to tease him about it, to toe off her boots herself and slip off the clothing that hid too-pale skin from the air. But she knew it wouldn't be fair to either one of them, not when they couldn't do anything about it. For her part, she wanted to reach out, touch his face, twine her fingers with his, press her mouth to his, slip her hands beneath his own shirt and slide them up along his sides until she could pull his shirt off too. But any one of those things could be his end, found at just a simple touch from her, and it wasn't his time yet. She knew that much.
Instead, she gave the bottle over to him easily and watched the movement of his throat as he swallowed back the wine, ignoring the desire to press her mouth to the warm hollow beneath his jaw. She didn't know how well she hid her own desiring gaze from him, but she was focused again on the present by the time he handed the bottle back. She took a drink herself, letting the glass of the bottle rest against her lips for just a moment too long before lowering it again.
She nodded as he spoke, because none of it was untrue. She knew it all already, and she didn't need to reply. She knew, and she knew then what his next words were going to be. And she knew what her answer would be - what it had to be - but she still closed her eyes to imagine his vision. She imagined what it might be like, to be human and have the ability to pull up her roots, away from a city that was dying even without her help. It had been changing, somehow, no longer just the regular coming and going of lives, but with new added pain and hopelessness and desperation.
Opening her eyes again as he went quiet, she looked at him, saw that he knew as well as she did what she had to do. And say.
"I can't. I wish I could, I want to. But..." She shook her head.
Edison knew what the answer was and when she said no, he didn’t even flinch. “I thought my pitch was pretty good.” He said, proud at least that he could paint a picture for her of a place that wasn’t here and was still with him. Rejection was already a tough pill for him to swallow, so her adding on that little confession that she wanted to go with him made it harder. “Well,” a shake of his head, hand in the air like he tried his best and it wasn’t good enough. What else was new?
He paused, turning to one of the potted plants with a pinwheel sticking through the ground and he gently spun the painted metallic wing. “You know what would happen if I stayed here. I know I said I’d wait however long you needed to decide if you wanted to be with me but-” He glanced at her. “Things have changed. This place is going to kill me. Just like it killed him. Only, I think it’s probably going to take its time with me. I think it’ll take everything away from me first.” It was weird, talking about the city that was so closely connected to her. He wondered why he didn’t blame her. He wondered if he saw her as more of a force of nature than the cutthroat life people had to live below her. Or maybe it was just that he loved her and it was easy to take any blame away from her.
"It was. It is." His pitch was more tempting than it should have been, and turning it down, seeing the space where there could be something, hurt. And she knew it hurt him too, even without a flinch to her reply. She wanted to reach out, to take that hand that cut through the air.
But then he turned away, and not seeing the attempt to hide his hurt made it easier for her to step close, a presence at his back even if there was no warmth to betray how close she stood. The covered expanse of his back allowed her to reach out and (just for a second, never too long) press the flat of her palm to his shoulder blade. It was there and then gone again, not wanting to risk anything even with the barrier of fabric between them. "I know." It was a whisper that was only enough to be a breath against the back of his neck, and even with how quiet she was, it was easy enough to hear how the words tore at her throat. "I know you have to go, I don't want you to die here, but I can't. I'm tied here. I can't leave, just like I can't touch you…" They'd tried. She shouldn't risk that again. But it didn't stop her fingers from clenching at the material of his shirt.
“You could.” He shivered at the warmth of her breath and he wanted to turn and grab her, to hold her in a way he simply couldn’t. Eddie pushed against the railing, trying not to get mad or upset. It was illogical, he knew she wouldn’t leave the city that had become part of her. It was the ground her roots had grown into. She didn’t have the luxury of just running when things got too hard. But, god, it was difficult not being angry that he couldn’t take her with him. “You could leave. Aren’t you tired of this place yet? Don’t you want to try something new? With me?” His voice cracked when he said me. If he left without her, he’d have no one. Not the Cat, not his dead friend, not her, not even his ex. He’d be alone and after so many years of feeling loved and loving people back, he didn’t really know how to do that anymore.
Edison turned gingerly so she wouldn’t touch his skin on accident. They were close, way too close for the laws of this city and he still snagged his fingers on the belt loops of her pants to tug her closer to him. He didn’t look at her first, instead focusing on her large boots and the edgy sort of fashion she liked to have. Eventually, he glanced up, dark eyes brewing with hate and love, loss and fear. A mess, a tangled awful mess that needed to get sorted out. “You’re never going to find anyone else that’ll sing to you at karaoke like I do. Once I’m gone, you’ll never want to step into a karaoke bar without hearing me sing Atlantic City by the end of the night. Hell, I bet you won’t be able to go a week without humming it to yourself if you let me go.”
"I can't. I won't." That much wasn't negotiable. She wouldn't run the risk of hurting him - of cutting that thread that held him to life - just because she wanted (ached) to feel skin beneath her hands. "I feel like I'm going crazy with not being able to, but it's not worth it to risk that much. ...to lose you because I couldn't control myself for a few minutes." Her hands were at her sides, curled into fists to keep herself from reaching out.
The crack of his voice earned a pained sound from the back of her throat. "Eddie…" It was a plea, one to beg him to understand. "I want to go. I want to be with you. But this place, it's who I am." She swallowed hard, painfully around the weight in her throat. "It's what I am. There's no guarantee of what I'd be if I tried to leave here." Others had done it, had cut ties to their locations and existences, but they'd been younger, not as entwined with their places as she'd become. She'd lingered too long because there'd been no reason to try to carry onward. And once there was a reason, she was no longer able to let go.
She nearly let out another needy sound at the feel of his hands at her hips, pulling her closer, and she went easily. The expression in his eyes was met by sorrow in her own, grief and a cutting pain that she'd been hiding ever since she'd suspected that this sort of end was on the horizon for them. She shook her head. "Don't… please…" Because his words felt like a curse. A real one - the type that so many people liked to pretend didn't exist because it didn't fit their world views. But she knew better, knew the power that words and emotion could have. "Don't end it like that…"
“How else am I supposed to?” His voice cut in as she spoke, words layering over each other in a jumbled mess. He wrapped his arms loosely around her, careful not to touch anything except for goth black fabric. “You want me to wish you well? To assure you that this is the best way? Fine, Muerte. It’s going to be hard for you, maybe for a few years. Maybe even a few decades. But, whatever I am to you is going to fade after a while. You’ll forget about me, okay? And, all you’ll have is this fucked up city.”
Eddie thought that was a good line to make some kind of sweeping exit, but he couldn’t let her go. Even though she was some kind of New Jersey vampire who just finished stomping on his heart, he kept holding on instead of making the break clean. He paused, bowing his head to look at her body pressed up against his and he casually ran a hand up her hip. Dark eyes looked back up at her and he touched her face without fear, accepting that awful dizzy feeling he got from simple skin contact. “Wanna finish off that bottle of wine with me and mess around until I pass out?” His dark eyes went dull with fatigue, as if she were stealing the life away from him.
Her eyes slipped over from being sad into being hurt - angry. "You think this is going to fade that easily? That you haven't carved your way into me in a way that no one ever has before?" Her cheeks felt hot and cold at the same time, and it took her a second to realize that things were blurring because her eyes had filled with angry tears. "No one sees me the way you do. No one has ever made me want to leave this place the way you do." She paused, swallowing hard to try to get the next words to come, even though they came soft. "I know you have to leave, I can see it. But don't think that it isn't going to tear me up to watch you go."
She expected him to step away, almost surprised when he didn't. But she soaked up every extra second of contact, knowing that eventually it would end. His hand on her face earned another one of those needy sounds from the back of her throat, the skin-on-skin nearly burning and stealing the breath she didn't actually need. She knew he had no fear about the way his life started slipping away with even the smallest touch, and it ached that she had to be the one to eventually pull away just enough to break that contact (when all she wanted was to sink into more of it), keeping that fatigue from overtaking him completely. His question earned a laugh, surprised and broken from her throat, and she shook her head with the smallest smile. "You have no self-preservation at all…" But she thought about it, the things they could do until she couldn't help kissing him and stealing more of his life away than she should. Thought about the way she could watch over him until he woke again but be gone before he opened his eyes. It was cowardly to want to leave without him watching her, but she would take anything that made it easier to do. So she nodded, glancing over again at the bottle of wine, but not moving away - not until she had to.
His brain almost couldn’t register the warm dampness pooling against his thumb. Her tears didn’t hurt or drain the way touching her skin did. They were just tears and Eddie thought that was proof enough that she could go with him, that she was already changed even if she didn’t want to admit it. None of that mattered, though, he could argue with her all night about the right choice and it’d never change the outcome. Tomorrow he’d wake up alone, he’d do everything he could to get out of the city instead of cowardly accept defeat and stay to let the city eat him alive. “You’re going to be fine without me, Muerte.” He whispered and nothing in his voice said that he really believed that.
He dropped his hand as she slightly pulled away and his expression changed to a soft, street rat smile. “You have too much self-preservation. Come to bed with me?” Eddie reached for the wine, took a drink and then slipped past her, fingers holding onto the hem of her shirt to pull her forward and follow him. His apartment was massive and obviously a way to show his self-made wealth. Lately it was all thanks to playing info broker for the mobs, but back in the day he was one of the best thieves the city had ever seen. They were on the top floor made of brick and bookshelves. There were priceless things hanging on the walls and mementos here and there that would be sold off in the morning. In fact, the only thing that he really cared about anymore would fit in about two boxes under his bed and the thought of leaving this place with just that sounded freeing in the most beautiful way.
He pulled her past the workshop, the study corner, the lavish bathroom and into his bedroom. Walls were made of old brick, covered in posters from geeky sci-fi movies from the 50’s. Heaps of electronics and magazines were stacked in the corners of the room and in the middle was a large, wonderfully comfy bed that was much too big for just him. Eddie hadn’t shared it with anyone for a while, not in that sense, but this wouldn’t be the first time she was invited up here. Before things went really bad, Eddie was happy just having her lie in bed with him to talk and laugh and tell stories until he fell asleep. Sometimes he’d reach to touch her in the haziness of sleep and not care at all if it stole away the last of his fizzling energy.
Dressed in his customary PJ’s (nerdy t-shirt with bottoms covered in sugar skull designs), he took a seat on the edge of the bed. Edison looked up at her, reaching to touch her hand, turn it over and kiss the middle of her palm. It was starting to hurt, like broken nerves all over his face, but he didn’t care. “No boots in the bedroom.” He instructed.
She couldn't stop the laugh that slipped out at his reassurance that she'd be fine. She laughed, looked at him, and shook her head. "You're usually a better liar than that." It came out soft, like anything she said now had to be quiet to not ruin the waning moments they had together. She reached up, careful as always to not touch him any more than she already had been, and wiped her fingers under her eyes, shaking her head again (this time at herself) when they came away damp.
Her laugh came again, a little stronger though there was still something fractured under it, and she shook her head. "One of us has to think about it." There were times, even yet, when for all of Eddie's twists and tricks to stay alive, she suspected that he wouldn't entirely mind moving on if it meant they would have just a few more minutes to be together, skin-on-skin, closeness and heat before slipping away. It scared her more than anything else ever had, and so she'd tried to ignore it, but the thought always crept back in again. Now more than ever. She knew it was up to her, too, that she could be the one to draw the line and step away before she took too much of him. But sometimes it was hard to do it.
She'd been in his apartment more times than he probably even realized, sometimes there when he wasn't, and she loved every corner of it, every memory and memento that filled its rooms. She would be sad to see it pass to someone else, and she'd even thought of arranging it so that no one else would fill the rooms, that she could keep it for herself as a reminder of him (as if she'd need to be reminded). But the more she'd thought about it, imagining the rooms empty of him, slowly gathering dust, echoing with absence, a tomb for his memory, was so much worse than imagining someone else moving in. So she took her time, even as he was tugging her along, knowing that this would be the last time she'd be solidly within the exposed-brick walls with him, and wanting every second to last twice as long as it was.
Sinking into a soft bed with someone was something that she was pretty certain she wasn't supposed to enjoy (especially as much as she did), but his was always warm and always smelled of him and the laundry soap he used, and when he was in it, it was one of her favorite places to be. Even without being able to slide hands over skin, they'd still curled up there (the memory of her legs tangled with his made her sigh) and spent enough time just talking. She'd wanted more, still did, but she tried to hold to the sweet memories of what they did have.
She let him kiss the center of her palm and then frowned at the dullness starting to steal the spark from his eyes, and pulled her hand away again. She covered her worry with a tease, instead. "So fussy about my boots. I know you like them…" But she leaned down to unlace them, taking the moment (a long moment, thanks to the long laces) to steady herself. It was like a play where they were each acting and each knew it, but didn't call the other on. At least not too much. She didn't want things to end with shouting and bad feelings - she wanted a quiet night next to him and to slip away before morning. She wanted one more good thing with him. So it was easy to try to pretend, to pull off her boots (but nothing more, no matter the desire that licked at the back of her thoughts) and climb onto the soft give of the mattress, curl up on her side and look at him. Waiting.
There was a part of Eddie that really didn’t believe this was the end. He figured it was likely his own ego assuring him that any woman he cared for would pick him over self-preservation. But, no. Muerte was different. She thought before she leapt. So what was this feeling that what they had wasn’t close to being over? Whatever the feeling in his gut pointed to, it made it easier to pretend that they weren’t sad or broken up by this. He wanted a nice ending, something that didn’t end in yelling and slammed doors. Eddie wanted to be lovesick for her, even if it made him awfully lonely.
He watched her lean down, eyebrows raising slightly at the curves and angle of her body. When she looked up, Eddie smiled at her without even attempting to hide the want flickering behind his eyes. It was true that she needed to be the voice of reason here because if she let him, Eddie would likely put himself in a month-long coma if it meant he was allowed to kiss every part of her naked body.
“If I were to stay here longer, I’d invent some kind of way to touch you without dying. It’s difficult, you know, because snapping on latex gloves before taking your clothes off is incredibly creepy.” Eddie joked and laid down, pulling her to curl up closer to him. “No, I’d invent some kind of laser beam. Some kind of infrared light that negates whatever the hell your powers do. I’d figure it out, Muerte. If I had more time here.” He put his hand on her hip, carefully avoiding skin contact and leaned close enough to lightly kiss her. Soft and barely there at first, before he pressed for more out of a need for her. It was enough to make him feel a terribly static in his brain, slicing at nerves inside of his skull. He gasped, shook his head to clear it out and rolled to grab the bottle of wine to numb the pain.
She didn't know that Eddie felt like there was something more to come. If she had, maybe she would have started questioning her own feelings more, but she'd been doing her best to not plot out the thread of his life after leaving, not wanting to see if it was bad, but also not especially wanting to see if it was good. It was wilful ignorance on her part, as if closing her eyes and covering her ears would keep things from hurting. It was why she was pretending, for the moment, that curling up on the bed with him was like any other time they'd done it.
The heat in his eyes caught her voice in her throat, about to say something when she'd looked up at him, but it was gone in a second in the face of his desire. She wanted, again, to step close, erase the distance between them, and press against him without barriers, jealous of all the people who took for granted something so simple. It made her angry and greedy, reaching out for him as he laid down, and pulling herself closer. She didn't know how effective it was to keep fabric between them, if she wasn't still pulling a slow thread of his life away, but it wasn't the same sudden drain as it was to touch his skin. And he was still breathing, still alive and vital in her arms - so she'd take every bit she could get.
"I don't know. I think something Pavlovian in you would start to get off on the latex after a while." It was a tease, warmth in her eyes and doing her best to not think about the If I were to stay longer part of his thought. But she couldn't help it, the sadness eating at the back of her throat again as the words crawled out. "I know you would. ...I know." And while logic told her to pull back when the kiss was still barely a touch, when it grew deeper she opened to it, needy until that pained gasp as Eddie pulled away again. "Fuck." The curse slipped out without much thought, biting at her own lip and worry harsh across her face as she watched him reach for the bottle. "We should…" Stop. They should stop. But she couldn't get the word out. "Slow down."
He turned his head to look at her while he reached for the wine, fingertips touching the smooth glass of the bottle and he smirked. His dark eyes were lighter now, the color of dirty straw and his skin pale like he had died days ago. Eddie turned and took a drink of the wine, handed her the bottle and then laid back down on the soft mattress. Color started to fade back into his cheeks and his eyes went a shade darker. Still, his lips were pale and his body seemed noticeably weaker. “I don’t want to.” He said of taking it slow and stopping, but he didn’t try to touch her skin. Instead, he slowly ran his hand over her body as if he were trying to memorize it. He liked the curves, the slender arms. He liked closing his eyes and imagining what her skin felt like without it lighting his nerves on fire.
“What if-” Eddie couldn’t stop himself from trying to bargain. “One year we go down to Mexico together. I’ll let you come back here, I promise. It’d just be a few days. Sun, ancient ruins, tequila. When was the last time you’ve been to Mexico?” He opened his eyes to look at her, dark gaze back and filled with daydreams about a vacation they’d never have together. “You’d look so good in a sundress. You’d pretend to hate it because it’s not black, but you’d love the red woven patterns. And I’d like the way it looked on the floor of our hotel room.” He waggled his eyebrows at her and tugged her closer for another kiss.
Seeing what happened to him under her touch always made her feel guilty, unsettled, worried that she'd overstep and he'd be gone in the time it took for him to draw one last breath. But she didn't know how to not be greedy about it - about him - and the need to have his skin under her hands or his hands on her. She took the bottle from him and set it aside without taking another drink, sighing softly when his hands started to roam over her body. "I know," she whispered, "Me neither." But she shook her head, hair a mess against the bed.
And then she smiled, soft and sad, but getting drawn into Eddie's what if. "I've never been." How could she? She was tied to New Jersey, to the only place she'd ever known since… too long ago. She smiled again at the talk of "her" sundress, trying to picture what Eddie could see, getting distracted by the talk of hotel room floors. The eyebrow waggle was so him, and while it should have made her laugh, it only made a part of her ache, knowing it would be gone from her existence too soon. The sound she made into the kiss was both desperate and sad, and she sank into it for too long, hands curling into Eddie's shirt, only pulling back when she realized how much damage she must be doing to him.
Eddie’s fingers clutched onto her shirt, pulling her close as she granted him with a kiss. He liked needling Muerte to give into her feelings even if he’d never know how deeply she cared for him. Saints, gods, they didn’t feel comfortable giving too much of themselves to a mere mortal such as himself. And that’s what love really was. Giving broken, vulnerable parts to another person and then taking whatever they could offer. Eddie wished he loved her enough to stay, to accept a dark fate in this fucked up city. But, his self preservation won out. He knew, at least, that she wouldn’t want him to slowly waste away for her sake. Muerte would hate him if he tried that.
Still, he took advantage of her moment of weakness for him and kissed her back with hunger. He ran his hands through her bleached octopus hair, pulling her close to give the illusion he wasn’t dying in her arms. But, he was. From his toes to his mouth, it felt like she was slowly pressing thumbtacks into his skin. His body turned weak, bones barely strong enough to hold onto her and breath shallow. No amount of wine could numb the pain and he groaned painfully against her mouth before letting go.
“I think that’s-” He whispered and tried to open his eyes. “I think that’s all I got left for you, Muerte.” Eddie’s body didn’t recover as quickly this time and he struggled to catch his breath. It was like the worst kind of panic attack, the kind that he used to get when he could hear his father stomping up the stairs, but Eddie wasn’t afraid. He smiled and opened one eye that was washed of all color to look at her. “I love you.” He whispered and his smile grew with the words, like he was giving her something beautiful. “Goddamn it, Muerte. I love you so much.”
The pained groan that was pulled from him made her back away, suddenly not touching him at all. Still close - close enough to track the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, to see the slow and sometimes uneven twitch of his pulse at the side of his neck. She wanted to curl close, press her lips to it to measure its pace, but she knew that would cause even more problems, so she stayed away. Even then, she couldn't stop herself from reaching out, laying the lightest fingertips against his shoulder, the barest touch to his shirt.
"Shh…" She shushed him softly, trying to provide comfort even though she couldn't draw him close. "I know…" Her throat hurt with the words, even as quiet of a whisper as it was. "Just rest now, okay?" She didn't promise to be there when he woke, didn't give either of them that hope. He'd made his decision to leave, and she knew it wasn't one he could go back on. For his own sake. She had to stop being as greedy with his life and time as she had been. "Just rest…" She watched him as they laid there, making sure she wasn't doing anything else to harm him, making sure that he would be alright. It was too long, stretched out minutes before she said anything else. She didn't even know if he was still awake. And it was the barest breath of a whisper. "I love you too…"
Edison’s mind started to swim farther and farther away from the comfort of his bedroom. He let it wander, let himself believe that Muerte would follow him across the country, across the globe so he didn’t have to be alone. He let himself believe that she could hold and touch and kiss him without it killing him. Edison’s mind sank deeper and deeper into this lost dream, this fantasy and he blinked a loving gaze at her. “I’ll send you a postcard.” He promised, eyelids going heavy with exhaustion as his body tried to rebuild itself. He closed his eyes and rolled closer to her.
He sank deeper into the mattress and felt a sense of tiredness wash over him. He stopped trying to swim out any further and sank deep into unconsciousness like a rock. He thought he could hear her voice, he thought he could make out the words, but who was to say that wasn’t just another fantasy spinning around in his riddled mind?