eddie likes to (riddlethem) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-08-07 22:52:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | door: dc comics, riddler, stephanie brown |
Who: Eddie and Stephanie (Part Two of Two. Continued from here.)
When: Recently!
Where: Dream land~
What: Shared dream about growing up together. Alternate universe style.
Warnings: Some swearing, mention of tough childhoods, violence. Pretty mild.
Eddie gave her a sideways look with a familiar smirk. “Like I’d let you take all the credit for this.” The smirk turned soft as she kissed his cheek and pulled back to give him that tiny look of nervousness. His head tilted to the side, a question that was never fired about whether or not they should actually be doing this. No, no. They weren’t built for behaving or even misbehaving like normal kids. If something went wrong, and it most definitely would probably go wrong, Eddie could count on Stephanie fighting it out until the end. He liked that about her, though. Eddie waited until she was at the wall and about to climb. “Hey. Seriously.” Eddie’s voice laced with worry and caution before it made a funny, unexpected flip. “We’re pretty goddamned awesome.”
He watched her climb all the way up and then skidded off towards the other side of the building. Warehouses like these had giant ka-thunking switches that turned off all the lights. They were in a corner with a mess of wires and other electrical things that most thugs didn’t care to learn because most thugs in Gotham didn’t realize that the smallest things tended to flip the scales. He waited near a window closest to where the maintenance room was and waited. He didn’t actually believe that Stephanie would do as they planned. In fact, Eddie knew that was actually the least likely outcome of the night. She would think on her feet like she always did and Eddie? Eddie would figure out a solution for every outcome he could think up.
The button alerted him first and he immediately started to crawl through the window just as the shots were firing. He could feel his adrenaline pumping through his lean body and feeding him a dangerous high that pushed him to walking into danger for her. In seconds, he jimmied the cover off the electrical panel and used all his body weight to pull down the giant levers to plunge the warehouse into darkness. All of the goons’ phones started beeping wildly and flashing bright green, blocky text asking them riddles. Stephanie’s dad thought he was so smart leaving clues. He lacked the love for mind games that Eddie had and would never, ever come close to his super genius prowess. If only Arthur knew that he was going to get beat by a pair of teenagers.
The goons started freaking out, first at the lights turned off and then their phones acting as if they were hacked. They weren’t (Eddie was only advanced enough to develop jamming devices), but idiots usually jumped to the worst conclusion. Arthur screamed for them to calm down and Eddie grabbed all the electrical wires he could and yanked them out of their sockets so that they weren’t lighting the place up any time soon. The gunfire slowed down as the goons tried to either crack the riddles on their phones or use the light as a way to see and Eddie used the opportunity to do something even more stupid. He crawled towards Arthur’s work table.
On his hands and knees, he slipped past the goons and reached to snag a bunch of random papers from the table and then tried to make his way to the door. “Hey, the fuck do you think you’re doing?” One of the goons asked, managing to grab Eddie by the back of his coat and lift him up in the darkness. Kicking and twisting to try and get out of the man’s grip, Eddie had a choice between dropping the evidence and reaching for his tiny can of pepper spray or counting Spoiler to save the day.
For Eddie, it wasn’t even a choice. After knowing Stephanie for so long, they could count on each other to take the right cue. “Riddle me this, dingbat.” Eddie’s voice was exceptionally louder and geekier than it was normally. “What do you call an eight ton baboon about to get his head kicked in?”
Meanwhile, as Eddie crawled his way into the warehouse, Spoiler still hung on that windowsill by the tips of her fingers. “Dear God,” she said aloud, “I know I haven’t been the best of your children or whatever, but I totally promise that I will like, go to church and donate during the collections and never ever let Dean get to third base if I don’t get shot. See, I’m not even asking to dodge jail. Okay? Okay.” Her fingers were starting to ache, and she didn’t know exactly how much longer she could hang there before they said screw you and gave up. God, why did she think this was a good idea? She could have gotten the information in hundreds of other ways. She could have just let it be. She could have just gone to the police directly. Whatever the case, she was about to get shot and thrown in jail or worse, and Steph was cataloguing her dying wishes. Eddie would get the decoder ring, definitely.
But, suddenly the lights went out, and the little blonde in purple grinned behind her mask. Count on Eddie to get her out of a jam. She’d definitely have to make this up to him later. And as the gunfire died down, she managed to pull herself back up to the ledge she perched herself on before. Except now, the window was mercifully blown out, and Spoiler took this as an opportunity to jump in on the action going on below. A bang rattled as she landed sloppily on a metal walkway above their heads, and guns were pointed up. She cried out as a bullet nicked her arm, the pain a fire she’d never known before then, but she pushed through. She had to push through. Eddie was in there somewhere. She had to find him. The phones freaking out shed minimal light around the room, enough for Steph not to stumble too much.
A mumbled string of curses to herself almost gave her away, but she managed to land somewhere close to the cluster of goons and Eddie. Grinning at the loud voice, she quipped back, “You! Jerkface!” And, thankfully, she could make out the outline of the brutish thug, so she swung a fist at the back of his head, then kicked as hard as she could to the back of his knees. The mook let Eddie go, and before he could collapse, Steph grabbed him by the elbow and started to run towards the door as the gunfire rained on them. She didn’t think of what Eddie might have gotten, or who might have recognized his voice, or how much her arm hurt like a bitch. She just knew they needed to get out of there ASAP.
Eddie knew the noble thing to do would be to close his eyes and wait. Instead, he stared. He stared through the greenish dark into the goon’s eyes as Stephanie came down hard on him and grinned. It was a good thing no one could see his face behind that mask, especially Stephanie. There wasn’t any need to remind her of the bad things that swelled up in him when a bully got his just desserts. The bad things that could have taken hold. That begged him to abandon everything and everyone to prove who was really the smartest kid in Gotham. He felt his senses swirl, the hair on his arm prickle the way it did when he saw Stephanie flash him a smile from across the hallway and he ran. The smallest victory planted a funny little notion in his head that they could keep doing things like this. They could keep defying adults and morons until they got what they deserved.
Outside and a mile of running from the warehouse, he pushed the papers he stole from Stephanie’s father into her arms. He was shaking, wide dark eyes full of victory. “I got you- I-I” He stuttered, pulling his mask off along with the hat so he could hold his knees and breathe. The little Nashton boy had always suffered from panic attacks, even before his mother died and his father started beating him. “I love running. I love- I think that’s my favorite part of doing something crazy.” He said to his shoes slowly, breathing deeply as he calmed himself down like a jigsaw puzzle he had put together a thousand times before. Eddie wanted to tell her that he loved her. Right then, smashed between shoving her father’s plans into her arms and declaring his love for running. His teenage heart sure that he loved her. Sure that if he said it she’d love him back.
Sure, for only 1.3 seconds. Then the doubt pushed its way in. Forcing him to steady and look up at her with that big, nerdy grin and dark hair curling over his brow. No, she just needed him. There was a difference between loving and needing. She needed him like Carl needed answers on the math tests. She needed him like she needed that teddy bear tucked in the corner of her bed, stretched limbs and matted fur from years of holding tightly for comfort. He was her teddy bear math genius, not some dashing hero in the night.
For the next two years, being needed was enough. When Eddie Nashton was fifteen he stopped going to school and the feds found his gossip blog boss and the basement he was living in. They had Eddie’s information in a giant binder of impressive criminal records and they had his dad behind bars for negligence. And, someone, someone out there decided to give Eddie a chance. Instead of locking him away in juvie, they sent him to a sort of technical boarding school with all kinds of savants, geniuses and fellow troublemakers. There he actually learned. He actually wanted to be taught.
There was only one problem: it was in Star City far, far away from Stephanie and the Gotham he loved so much.
They made up for it with letters, stealing computer time in the library to chat and phone calls. Now sixteen, Eddie went down to the common room for his weekly phone call that he was never late for. Not even once. Dressed in a prep school sweater vest, long sleeves and slacks, Eddie actually looked more than a street rat. He didn’t grow as tall as the other boys, but he was never awkward and always finding trouble to get into. Eddie was the one who pushed his roommates to go throw rocks at girls windows, run underground hacking rings under the guise of a chess club and skip class for a video game tournament. He sent her a picture of him months ago with a cheap trophy pressed to his cheek for winning a Starcraft contest. His button up shirt loose and half untucked, his tie falling off his neck, his newsies cap off at a tilt and those big brown eyes lit up with all the energy buzzing through his body. He wanted her to think he was happy. He wanted her to know he had a world outside of Gotham now.
He took a seat in the corner of the room far away from the other students and dialed her number. Calling Stephanie made him a little anxious. His friends always teased him about it, telling him that worrying about some chick in Gotham with a boyfriend was easy the lamest thing Eddie could do and the second the girls he was hanging around found out they’d think he was pretty goddamned lame, too. As lame as it was, Eddie couldn’t ever let his old life go. He couldn’t let her go.
As Eddie spread his wings outside of Gotham, Stephanie tried to do the same within their city. After that first night of crime fighting, of being stupid brave for the sake of something right, she couldn’t shake the thrill from her bones. It felt good to rectify the wrong for the right. It felt like a puzzle piece finally slipping into place. Like she had found her calling in life. After mishaps and stumblings, she managed to get her way into Batman’s outer circle. Enough that he wouldn’t shoot her down on the spot for crime fighting in his territory, but hardly garnering his approval. He wouldn’t train her right now, but Robin. Oh, that Robin, he was helping her learn, train, get better. Steph trained by herself, of course, and when Eddie was around, he had given her pointers, created little bits of tech, assisted when she went in to investigate something. But being taught by someone who was taught by Batman himself was worlds different, almost as good as being trained the Bat, and though she’d received countless chidings, she was slowly but surely garnering the respect she craved. While Eddie was away at his hacker genius school, Steph built up her physical prowess, her sparse detective skills, her tenacity (like she really needed to do that though). Robin imparted every bit of knowledge he had to help Spoiler become a better crime fighter.
She wasn’t just some criminal’s daughter anymore, or some poor kid who grew up surrounded by the mean streets of Old Gotham. No. She was Spoiler.
Of course, all good things must come to an end, and her streak of crime fighting came crashing down one night after school when she saw two pink lines appear on a plastic stick. Steph had been feeling under the weather for a while, but deftly ignored the possibility that it was that. See, she and Robin, who she found out was Tim Drake, were in a weird sort of flirtation and clearly becoming more than friends. But, she’d slept with some jackass named Dean, her first boyfriend and someone she kept fooling around with after the fact. Partially because of boredom, mostly because of an inane sense of jealousy and something missing when Eddie left town. She wouldn’t admit to a soul, including and especially Eddie, that the reason was the little Nashton boy that left her in Gotham to fend for herself. She wouldn’t admit her feelings because they didn’t exist, right?
Months passed, and she stopped being Spoiler, though she didn’t tell Eddie exactly why. (Something along the lines of her mother finding out, that was it.) She told Tim, who was there from the beginning, who supported her (though laid his opinions on a little thick sometimes), and her mother was an immense support, too. Her father, mercifully, was locked away again. After getting out on a technicality over the paperwork after the wonderful work she and Eddie had done all those years ago, she and Batman took him down for good. (For a while, at least.) She had hands to hold, she had horrible influences gone, but every single week, she wanted to tell Eddie what was happening. But, it was selfish of her. He seemed happy, really happy. She had tacked the picture he sent of himself on the corkboard over her bed, next to their tickets to their favorite movie and the decoder ring dangling there, as a reminder that she couldn’t ruin this for him. She couldn’t let him worry about his pregnant friend back home when he was out living his life.
It was that picture she was staring at when he called at the precise time he did every single week. She was seven months along by then and could rest her arms on her stomach as she picked the phone up. “Hiya, Eddie,” she said warmly, in a tone exclusively for him, watching the decoder ring sway to and fro on its string as the fan blew in the room. “How’s your week been?”
Eddie smiled when she answered, sinking into the beanbag chair until almost all his body was swallowed up by it. “Oh, you know. Same old, same old. Martin tried to beat me at Battleship, but he doesn’t know there’s a reflective surface behind where he sits.” He whispered into the phone, cupping the receiver so no one around him could hear. Even long distance, Eddie liked to have secrets for just him and Stephanie. Things about people she had never met that were still taken incredibly seriously.
Then his voice went back to normal with a cleared throat. “I get a week off for spring break. I was wondering if your mom would let me come stay for a while? I heard Dad moved out of the old apartment ages ago and it’s not like I have any other friends in Gotham to put me up.” Eddie rambled, eyes rolling up to the ceiling as he pieced together memories of spring breaks in Gotham with her. Playing in the park, working on school projects at the last second, buying a dollar’s worth of cheap plastic eggs and hiding them around the apartment building for each other. It was kid stuff, he knew that, but he missed it so much.
Steph simply smiled as he recounted how he cheated out one of his friends. He had always been like that, even when they were little. Too smart for his own good, too quickwitted to let someone try to defeat him. “Eddie,” she chided softly, trying to sound stern, trying to sound oh so disapproving, but failing miserably. This was what she looked forward to during the week filled with working on school from home, marathons of daytime soaps, and lamaze classes. This little bit of escape from Gotham and her problems. A moment to pretend that everything was the same as it was when they played dinosaur explorers in her bedroom when they were little kids.
But, it was never that simple, was it? The question caught her off guard, like he had punched her in the chest to knock the wind out of her, and she exhaled slowly as he rambled on. How could she cover this up? How was she going to explain this one away. “I, uh, I’m not sure. I think we might be going away. Mom wants to go on a vacation. To visit my grandma.” Yeah, great work, Stephanie Brown. It hurt her immensely to try to push him away and convince him not to come back to his proper home. She missed him more than words could articulate, and she wanted nothing more than to have him here with her during this time. But, even as she felt the lie crumbling around her, she stuck to her guns. “I don’t know, Eddie.”
Eddie was so busy daydreaming that he didn’t hear her hesitation at first. After that second pause and her shaking I don’t know, he snapped back to reality and sat up in the beanbag chair. “What?” He asked weakly, mind running a roulette of reasons why she wouldn’t want him around. That story about her mom had to be complete crap to start out with, which meant there was something or someone that was getting in the way of friendship time. “No, I get it. Super genius going to cramp your style. Who are those girls you’ve been trying to befriend? I bet they have names like Becky and Krystal with a K. They’d hate me.” Eddie didn’t even bother trying to hide any kind of bitterness in his voice. Sharp, geeky and in refusal of being treated like some chump she was stringing along because she felt obligated.
He felt a prickling, numb pain in his shoulders that wrapped around him in an uncomfortable hug. Eddie dug his heels into the ground, scraping the bottom of his shoe against the worn out carpet. “Maybe I shouldn’t come back. Maybe I won’t for summer, either. I have friends here.” Eddie fell back into the beanbag chair, pulling his legs up so he could lay in it with the phone pressed hot against his face. “They told me to stop calling you. No one here bothers to call people from back home.” He was an upset boy trying to sound cold, but even over the phone he had the worst poker face.
The weakness in his voice was like a dagger through her heart, and she frowned deeply, glancing back to that decoder ring swaying in the artificial wind. She hated hearing that sound in his voice. She vowed to herself years ago, back when they were young and invincible, that she would never hurt him the way that she’d seen others do the same. Oh, they fought constantly, butted heads constantly, but this was different. This wasn’t a matter of opinion or clashing about what was right or wrong. This was hurting him through a lie of omission. Stephanie had deliberately kept something from him, and now she had to dig herself out of this hole.
Still. “Oh, stop that.” She scoffed with a roll of her eyes, very adolescently offended even when she was clearly in the wrong. “You don’t believe that for a damn second, Eddie.” His jab stung deep, about having friends who told him he didn’t need her anymore, and a noise rumbled in her throat was the confession she didn’t want to voice. “Do you wanna stop calling me? Am I ruining your geek cred then? So sorry.” Her voice was accusatory, sharp, angry, but underneath that, he could tell that she was stung. “Eddie, of course I want to see you. I miss you. Don’t you miss me?” The little blonde suddenly sounded six instead of sixteen, a young girl jilted by her best friend. “It’s just--it’s complicated. I’m sorry.”
Eddie was easily riled up, especially by her, so the moment her voice turned sharp with anger so did his. “You miss me? Really?” His voice hit an impossible high, cracked and then jagged back down. “How can you say that if you don’t even want to see-” His loud ranting was cut short by a teacher yelling at him from across the room to quiet down and Eddie grabbed the receiver of the phone to mutter a soft, polite sorry to the adult in charge. The Nashton boy was already in enough trouble for his daily shenanigans, the last thing he needed was another mark against him. “You’re going to get me kicked out of school.” He whispered back through the phone, turning on his stomach so he faced the corner of the wall the beanbag chair was positioned in front of.
“If I get kicked outta school I might as well stay here instead of returning to Gotham. I’ll just sell my body to rich entertainment mogul ladies. I won’t enjoy touching their wrinkly, sunbathed dirty pillows. But, it is what I must do to survive.” She could hear him wiggle his eyebrows over the phone, falling back on cracking wise to defuse his own temper. Eddie really did want to scream at her sometimes, scream and then maybe make out a little, but that was unfortunately pure fantasy. Their yelling matches never ended with anything quite that nice.
He stared at the white wall in front of him, listened to his classmates chat about school or D&D behind him and sighed. “If you’re in trouble, you should tell me. I can’t do much here, but you know I can still obtain quite a bit of information over the web. And, my cheering up skills are impeccable.” He sounded a little worried, like he suspected she started Spoilering again without telling him or her father was up to something. “And, yes. Of course I miss you. I wish you were here. All the time. I wish you were right here. These dorks don’t appreciate a good dirty joke. They get all awkward and seize up like I grabbed their mom’s butt or something.”
She started talking over him before he even finished his angry, riddled little rant. “Yeah, well you aren’t making it easy to miss--.” A frustrated noise rang from her as he apologized to the teacher, really pissed off that he would accuse her of not missing him at all. Of course she missed him. She missed him every single day of her life. Even with Tim there to support her, or her mom to hold her hand, she wanted her best friend around to tell her everything was going to be okay when all was said and done. Even if that wasn’t true, she wanted his reassurance. His support, his humor, his love. But, Steph was scared she wasn’t going to get any of that from him now.
Begrudgingly, she smiled at his joking. “No one’s going to pay for your chicken legs, you little green hooker. Not even the desperate Metropolis types,” she teased, not aggressively, not meanly. Just trying to make it a little more normal, a little like it was when he was still in Gotham. Her life was so different now without him there to constantly bother her with his friendship every day. Maybe it was unfair of her to try to hide this all away. Maybe he should have been the first person she called. Maybe she should have told him months and months ago, before she’d blown up like a balloon and couldn’t go out on patrols anymore. “They’re useless if they can’t take a good dirty joke,” she said weakly. She rubbed her eyes. “I miss you so much, Eddie.”
For a second, she pulled the phone away and took a steadying breath. Told herself that it would be alright. She stared out her grimy window to the cold skyline of Gotham and told herself he’ll be fine. “Okay. I have to tell you something. You aren’t allowed--don’t freak out, okay?” Her voice cracked just a little, though she wasn’t crying. Just nervous, mostly. There was a long, drawn out pause where she almost chickened out about the entire thing, and she took another breath. “I’m pregnant. Seven months now.”
Eddie grinned when Stephanie said that she missed him. Even if it was clearly from a place that hurt, that she wished wasn’t there. He wanted to feel needed. Safe, trusted. Things that normal people wouldn’t ever in a million years associate with him. He kicked his sneakers into the ground, scuffed white rubber hitting the hard carpet before he rolled over and laid on his back again. When she paused to gather up courage, Eddie was off in his own head. Wondering if he could pull another I miss you, Eddie from her without an audible roll of her eyes. How many of those dumb dorks had girls from other cities miss them? How many of them had the same kind of conn-
His mind stopped dead cold when he heard the word pregnant. Circuits closed. Servers blooped off. Blue screened brain virus. “Wh-” Eddie started and then she went for the final blow (finish him!) seven months. Seven months she had been keeping this from him. Seven months she had been making up paper thin excuses about not going out as Spoiler. Seven Months. “Oh my god.” He defied her order to not freak out within seconds. Less than seconds. He wiggled in the beanbag chair making a loud, ruffling noise like someone was throwing bean bag chairs into a tornado. “Wh-” He was on his feet, running out of the common room like he was going to throw up, cellphone pressed into the palm of his hand as he sprinted outside and out onto the front lawn.
“WHAT?!” He yelled at the nearest tree. She could hear him, even from the palm of his hand. She could hear stomping, an ill-fated kick to the tree that earned a pathetic ow and then more pacing. Finally, he brought the phone back up, exhaling through tight lips as he tried, tried so hard to not yell at her. “Seven months? You’ve been keeping this from me for seven months? I mean technically it was probably more like six since it takes an av- still.” He cut the rambling short with a snap of his fingers. “You know I would have done anything to help you out. Anything! Drop out of this school. Raise money to pay for its college loans. Are you keeping it? Who’s is it? No. You know what? I don’t want to know. What were you afraid of?”
Stephanie knew it was going to be bad. Oh, she knew deep in her bones he wouldn’t be congratulating her or immediately offering support. No, he was going to fly off the handle as he was wont to do, even as a little child. Big, dramatic fits and grudges held for days upon days. Days that felt like lifetimes when he was angry with her. But, knowing how he would react and actually having him blow up at her was completely different. Steph was taken aback, and the whimper on her side of the phone indicated how much this stung. Oh, god, did it sting. His reaction, his anger, it felt like he drove his hand right into her chest and twiiiiisted her heart. She felt a lump in her throat and tears welling up in her eyes and a wibble in her lip that she just couldn’t control. Eddie was the most important person to her in the entire world, he had been as long as she could remember, and to have him so angry when she was the one in trouble? It felt like heartache, it felt like betrayal, and it tasted like a sadness that she hadn’t been aware of in a long damn time. Sure, her mom was angry with her when she found out the news, and Steph could taste the disappointment from Tim, and what the fuck ever to Dean, right? Eddie’s reaction, however, was what her world teetered on, or so she told herself, and maybe that was part of the reason she didn’t want to tell him. Save herself from the panicky heartbreak that she was suffering right then and there.
The little blonde normally in purple didn’t say anything at all as he threw his tantrum. Only tried her hardest to control the wibble of her lip or the dryness in her throat. She stared and stared at that decoder ring, and finally got up to tug it down. It didn’t fit on her puffed up, grown fingers, but she rolled it around in the palm of her hand as her head cradled the cellphone to her shoulder. “Eddie,” she said weakly as he clearly did something stupid to hurt himself, flopping down on her bed with a choked sob. Clutching that plastic little ring in her fist so hard she could have bled. “I didn’t--no, don’t start tha--I wasn’t trying--.” Steph tried again and again to talk over him, to plead her case, but there was no break in his running freak-out until he was finished. “I did it for you!” she shouted over the tail-end of his rant. “I don’t care what you would’ve done! You’re away and doing something, and I didn’t want to ruin it! Okay? I didn’t want to ruin the only chance you’ve got because I got my stupid ass knocked up.” She gritted her teeth, unjustifiably pissed off. “It’s Dean’s by the way, and I don’t know if I’m keeping it. And thanks for your concern,” she continued with a snap.
What started out as an angry rant began to twist into something closer to a panic attack, a feeling he hadn’t experienced since he was sent away to this school. His usually busy mind filled with all its information and riddles turned to white static, ears warming as he felt a sensation close to his head popping off and floating away into the wind. Eddie’s knees buckled and he fell sloppily to the grassy lawn like a discarded toy. His whole body felt hot and his arms and toes rushed with a needling pain. “You don’t get to be pissed off. Shut up, Stephanie. You don’t get to be pissed off.” He whispered through her rant, voice thick and sharp with enough hurt to push over the cellphone waves back to her in Gotham.
Eddie shook his head, seeing a funfetti array of colored dots over white behind his eyes and laughed back a small sniffle. He could imagine Tim Drake at her side making everything better and he was suddenly aware how really insignificant he was in her world. How small, unappealing he must have been to her this whole time. Except, Eddie decided a long time ago that he was going to be important one day. When they let him out of this school, he was going to achieve things no one in their ghetto of Gotham could ever dream of. And, it used to be because he wanted to make things better for him and her. It used to be that he really wanted to make her proud. Now, things were different. If she didn’t want him, he was only focused on being the best.
A moment passed and he tried to sort out what he felt and thought like a mess of tangled string. It wasn’t just that he had to deal with the real life consequences of her sleeping around with other guys. It wasn’t even that he was afraid for her, so afraid that the snapped comment about his concern made him give a pained whine in the back of his throat. It was that she was keeping something from him for so long. And, for what? Some kind of lame self sacrificing nonsense because he was having a good time out at code academy? “Were you going to have it without telling me? If you gave it up, would you act like nothing happened? This whole time...” He laughed again, dark, hurt and a little unhinged. “You would have. That’s okay. Tell you what, Stephanie? I’ll tell you what.” Suddenly the sharpness in his voice overpowered any kind of pain or worry for her. It was terrifying and menacing and dangerous almost as if they were pretending to be good guys and bad guys again on the playground. She was always the good guy. He didn’t mind being the bad guy. “Let’s act like you never told me, since that’s what you want, right? You want me to stay over here and be happy with my friends? Okay, let’s even take it a step farther. Let’s pretend we don’t even know eachother anymore.” His voice rose back up, fury bleeding through in all reds instead of his usual crafty green. “I would have done anything for you and that baby. But, you want me to be selfish. I can do that. Easy peasy.”
Easy peasy.
Eddie woke up with a nnuggfffah and blinked around his empty apartment. He fell asleep with his headset on, reclining in his oversized, overpriced gaming throne with a packet of red vines on his chest and controller in his lap. Matilda was on the couch snoozing away and barely even twitched her ears as Eddie sat up. It bothered him that the dream was so vivid. Each detail clearly played out in his head better than a memory of the day before. It bothered him more that he couldn’t talk himself into calling Stephanie and telling her what happened.