Swallow The Moon | By : GhostHelwig Category: +1 through F > Ed, Edd, and Eddy Views: 9514 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0 |
Disclaimer: I do not own Ed Edd and Eddy, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story. |
Disclaimer- I do not own or profit from Ed, Edd N Eddy or “Sweet Misery.” The Eds belong to the Cartoon Network and the song belongs to Michelle Branch.
The story, however, is mine.
Special thanks – again – to darthelwig. All this is pretty much her fault.
Rated R for objectionable language (and ‘cause chapter 1 was dirty).
I do not advocate bigotry or homophobia in any way. However, I’d have to be an idiot not to realize those things exist, and that’s why they are depicted here. If that or slash makes you uncomfortable, I’d advise you to leave now.
If anyone’s interested, the Eddy quote is from “Momma’s Little Ed,” the one where he and Ed write fake sticky notes. (Though I believe he’s said it in other ways in other episodes as well.)
Solid Ground
Double D stared into the mirror. He could no longer recognize his own reflection, and that scared him.
“I was lost…”
Whose eyes were those? So red they looked like they were bleeding – no, they weren’t his, they couldn’t be his. He didn’t have a look like that. He was never that… devastated. That… dead.
“And you were found.”
Usually when he was disturbed he ran for Eddy. But in his heart he knew that Eddy couldn’t help him with this. Not even Eddy could make that boy in the mirror any less of a stranger.
“You seemed to stand on solid ground.”
It was funny really. Double D knew he was the designated ‘smart one’ of their particular trio, but when he was in doubt or in pain or just in need he ran straight to Eddy. It would never even occur to him not to-
Until now.
And now who could he run to?
“I was weak…”
He needed someone, anyone. Just a shoulder to lean on, a heart he could cry to. Someone who could understand but not judge.
He thought of Ed, but as much as he adored the ‘loveable oaf’ he knew Ed would not understand. He would hurt, but he could not heal. And hurting him was the very last thing in the world Double D was willing to do.
“And you were strong.”
This he supposed was why people were always so leery of getting romantically involved with their friends. When you dated your best friend, who did you talk to and get advice from when the beauty started to fade?
He thought briefly of his parents. What a laugh riot they were. Parents? They were more just the people who paid the bills every month. Those sticky notes all around his house were all he ever really saw of his wayward folks ever since he could walk and talk without assistance. Sometimes when they hadn’t left notes in a while he’d write some for himself. It never truly helped, but it never hurt, either.
He realized now that the fake sticky notes hadn’t been needed since Eddy became his lover.
“And me and my guitar, we strummed along.”
But enough of this. He hated staring into the mirror, but he’d been doing it for a reason. Time to get to that reason.
He reached into the medicine chest and pulled out his mother’s small cache of makeup, one of the few things in the house that proved to him she had been a real woman once, before she and his father had become ghosts in his existence. Nervously, he searched out what he was looking for, and held it up to the light. Right color. Of course.
Slowly he began applying the cover-up to the bruise around his swollen eye.
“Sweet misery you cause me.”
He knew why this had happened. He could hear Eddy’s voice in his head, hear Eddy saying, “it was Kevin’s fault, as usual,” but he knew that wasn’t right. None of this had been Kevin’s fault. Eddy just hated him so blindly that he couldn’t see.
“That’s what you called me.”
Or maybe Eddy blamed him. He usually did. And, Double D had to admit, he usually let him.
“Sweet misery you cause me.”
“But we’re not kids anymore, Eddy,” he whispered to the stranger in the mirror with the dying eyes. “You were supposed to stop by now.”
“I was blind…”
It was his own fault, thinking that slowly becoming young adults actually made any of them adults, thinking they could grow so easily. Thinking Eddy could grow so easily. Eddy didn’t want to grow, not where it counted. He’d known that from the beginning. How could he have forgotten?
“But oh, how you could see.”
Eddy knew better. He knew people. That was something no book could ever really teach. It was a gift, and one of the many things Double D loved about him was that he seemed so blissfully, remarkably unaware of it.
“You saw the beauty in everything, everything and me.”
But what did Eddy love about him? What did he see that Double D couldn’t that kept him so enthralled? Why was Eddy with him if he still saw them as they’d been when they were children? For all the care he’d shown then, Double D had never been completely certain Eddy cared that much at all.
“I would cry…”
Unless Eddy still didn’t care. After all, the way he’d acted at the party-
Double D shivered. The memory of last night made his insides shrivel. The laughing, the jeering-
The ultimate betrayal of Eddy being the one responsible for his pain.
“And you would smile.”
And to see Eddy laughing, and grinning at him even though his eyes looked sick, even though he so obviously didn’t want to, but doing it because to not do it would make him less of a man in the views of the buffoons around them – that just killed him.
“You’d stay with me a little while.”
Eddy had tried to comfort him after, though, hadn’t he? He’d followed him, and stolen a kiss that felt like paper, like an obligation. But that had to be something.
Didn’t it?
“Sweet misery you cause me.”
If only Kevin hadn’t decided to improve upon the gay jokes they’d been throwing at him (Eddy, Double D’s honest mind automatically supplied, Eddy’d been throwing at him!). If only his way of improving on the joke hadn’t been subtly flirting with a clueless Double D. If only Double D hadn’t been so clueless…
“That’s what you called me.”
He’d hurt Eddy, letting Kevin (of all people!) flirt with him. But he was so new to this, he could never tell when someone was flirting or just being friendly…
But he could tell when someone was angry. And Eddy had been more than angry.
Eddy had been furious.
But why with me? Double D thought, feeling suddenly hopeless. “Why were you furious with me?”
“Sweet misery you cause me.”
He was remembering the yelling, now, so loud it hurt his ears even in his mind. Eddy yelling at Kevin, Kevin sneering, he seemed to remember there was a lot of sneering involved. And swear words that made Nazz turn positively pink, made her try to get the boys to shut up before Jimmy fainted from horror. Double D didn’t think they’d heard her; he was amazed to find that he had.
“And in my heart I see…”
And then Eddy whirling on him. He couldn’t really recall why – something Kevin had said had made Sarah squeal with indignation, and after more yelling from Eddy his best friend, his lover, his world, was suddenly glaring at him.
“…what you’re doing to me.”
Eddy spoke, called him a name. Double D remembered blushing hotly, all the way down to his toes, before he remembered what Eddy had called him.
“Fag.”
“And in my heart I see…”
But Eddy of all people had known already what he was. He hadn’t been calling him a fag when he spoke.
He’d been calling him a whore.
“…just how you wanted it to be.”
Double D tried to defend himself, but when you had to speak in riddles to hide the truth what words could be used to make your lover understand? He knew he’d stuttered, apologized – and that his apology had made Sarah run from the room in tears. She thought he was apologizing for being gay, but he knew the truth wouldn’t comfort her at all.
It hadn’t seemed to comfort Eddy either.
“Sweet misery.”
He thought now that apologizing at all had been a mistake – to Kevin and the others it was an admission of one sort of guilt, to Eddy a guilt of a whole other kind. But he couldn’t curb his words – they fell out of his mouth half-formed, trying to stop the falling he could see in Eddy’s eyes. How innocent he was, how innocent and dumb – the falling would’ve stopped much sooner if he’d just kept quiet.
“Sweet misery you cause me.”
When had the snap come, though? One would think he would remember. The break in Eddy’s eyes, just before the pain flooding into his own from a punch delivered by his lover – what had caused that?
Oh yes – he remembered now.
He had.
“That’s what you called me.”
“It isn’t what you think.” He’d said that, the stupidest line in the world.
“It isn’t what you think.”
“Sweet misery you cause me.”
Eddy just stood, looking down at him. They could’ve been in bed for all the softness in his expression at that moment.
If Double D hadn’t already been doing it, that look would’ve made him cry.
“And in my heart I see…”
Nazz, the girl who’d always intimidated him not because he liked her but because he didn’t and he knew he should, helped him up and took him home. If she’d spoken to him, he couldn’t remember it.
He could’ve stayed there, at home, all night. He could have. But he hadn’t.
Instead, he’d gone to Eddy’s, drawn the blinds, and waited.
“…what you’re doing to me.”
He should still be at Eddy’s, but he’d come home. He would not raid Eddy’s mother’s makeup, it was rude, but he needed to hide the visual proof of his own sin.
He couldn’t bear to look at it, to feel it on his face. He’d messed up, letting Kevin put his hand on his arm, on his waist. And he’d paid for it.
“And in my heart I see…”
Just as he deserved to.
“…just how you wanted it to be.”
Oh, he was glad Ed hadn’t been there, hadn’t seen his utter humiliation, his mortification. Ed had only been at the party for minutes before he left, saying that he wanted to get ready for the music to start. Double D had tried to tell him that the stereo was already playing music, but he’d just given him a strange look and left.
He’d thought he’d seen Ed outside Eddy’s house that night when he was gazing out the window watching for Eddy, but he knew now that that was just wishful thinking. If Ed had been there he would’ve come in, and though Double D was glad he’d missed the party he’d have welcomed Ed that night. Anything to put some fire into the frozen wasteland he and Eddy had become.
“Sweet misery.”
How cold it was now, being in Eddy’s arms. As cold as being alone.
He gazed a little more intently at the stranger in the mirror. Was that what Eddy saw when he looked at himself? A hollow, echoing shell? Or did he look and see the same old face, just a little older, a little more weathered?
Or maybe he saw what Double D did when he looked with his eyes wide open.
“Sweet misery.”
Maybe all he saw was pain.
Sweet misery.”
And the worst part of it was, Double D couldn’t tell anymore when it had stopped being okay for Eddy to hit him. He just knew that what once would’ve simply irritated him or kind of hurt his feelings now broke his heart. And that breaking shamed him.
“I was weak…”
A tiny voice in his mind begged him not to do this to himself, begged him to place the blame where it belonged. But that voice had grown softer over the years, quieting a little more every time his parents forgot his birthday or his best friend Eddy blamed him for another of their failed scams. By now the voice was a tiny bug in a huge world of thick, black guilt. He could ignore it if he chose.
He chose to now.
“And you were strong.”
After all, what would listening to it get him? If it wasn’t his fault that his eye ached and his cheeks still burned with humiliation and his chest felt heavy with pain, whose fault was it?
But he knew. He remembered who’d teased him because the others already were and improved upon their teasing because that’s what he did best. He knew who’d hit him so hard he’d landed on the ground before it even got a chance to hurt. He knew who’d felt betrayed and had thus betrayed him.
But why, Eddy? Why?
“And me and my guitar…”
But Double D knew why. Because Eddy’s reputation mattered more to him than anything or anyone-
Even him.
Shaking his head sadly, Double D picked up the compact he hadn’t even realized he’d dropped and replaced it in its designated place, should his mother ever lose her mind and begin to wear makeup again. When he had the cabinet door shut once more, his eyes caught on the boy in the mirror.
He was crying, his eyes an even deeper red, his dark hair plastered to his flushed but somehow pale cheeks, spider-legs on pink snow. He looked… glassy, somehow. He looked like a corpse just fresh enough to still be thin flesh hanging off small, brittle bones.
“…we strummed along.”
And Double D recognized him now.
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