Fifteen, an Ed Edd and Eddy FF \ Supernatural/ Drama; Edd/ Marie
First in a series, written around the Purgatory Theory wandering around on the web that I didn't come up with, and proceeded to shamelessly alter.
I'm a fangirl, I can do that. True story.
Check out Marilyn Manson's Fifteen, on his cd, 'The High End of Low,' which is what inspired this piece of brain vomit.
Yesterday everything I believed in died... But today is my birthday...
Fifteen. A magical age, truly.
Edd whimpered softly from where he was curled up on the floor, blinking until the spots more or less cleared from his eyes and his stomach stopped trying to tie itself into knots. Fingers twitched limply to his right, attached to hands, arms that refused to respond properly, but at least he could still tell they were there... He ended up brushing the wood with his knuckles, but not really feeling anything; instead reaching for some unseen objective.
He was dead, he had to be.
He took the moment just to breathe, marveling at the paradox and hating himself for thinking of something like that at the moment. His bad habit, his hubris, was behaving as though this was all a mostly harmless science project, and even now it might kill him... He managed to push himself up on wobbly arms to shift his position so as to press his back to the wall…Though he prided himself on not letting it happen very often, that was just how he dealt with things he couldn't grasp outright. Make it into a problem, quantify it... Give it the possibility of a solution.
So, if he was already dead, it wasn't like he hadn't had his suspicions.
He had died once before, after all; between his father's stories and the past two years of more often on, less often off dreams, er, nightmares, there had to be something to the idea... 1986, house catches fire. An open gas line, presumably so for repairs, explodes, takes out half the city block, and suburbia is scarred forever. Fifteen year old Eddward Marion Hatch is sadly incinerated (or simply expired of smoke inhalation, father had been annoyingly unspecific. Still, dead was still dead to Eddward), not that anyone really knew he existed in the first place, (he had been a tad of a recluse, apparently) and therefore could care. Would care.
...Fuck.
Even though it hurt (everything hurt, really, at this point), he curled even tighter on himself, trying to will away the hateful thoughts and managing to fail miserably. So melodramatic... So he was bitter, what of it? He was technically dead because of some totally freak accident. He was entitled, right?
Freak. Almost in response to this violent mental snarl, another white-hot, violent spasm of pain tore through him, a bolt of electricity seemingly passing through his heart to his shoulders and back, leaving the kid choking and gasping, but mostly just exhausted and suddenly angrier than all hell. Hell, ha ha... Hate wasn't a word strong enough for the normally pacifistic Edd, when he or his friends were associated with... with that word.
Freak.
But... That's what he was, right? As far as he could remember, which admittedly wasn't that great at the moment, he was the only one of the cul-de-sac's kids who had any idea this wasn't the 'real' Peach Creek. Not that he knew the specifics of each of them... But not that he cared to, either. He was smart enough to know that. He blinked, starting to feel dizzy again and instantly thankful he was already more or less drooling from his sprawled position on the floor... Whatever version of things they were on now, anyway, damn Asmodeus... Letting his thoughts drift to his friends let him keep a grasp on himself, let him ignore his own choppy breathing, the stupid, crippling pain that had come from nowhere. Keeping Eddy and Ed's company was as likely as not to afford the same social ostracism as his own self-inflicted one, come to think of it... Not that he had ever minded. Really, he hadn't, even before he had found out about... all this.
I actually have friends here. And he may have just imagined it, but the pressure on his chest gave a bit at that thought. If he was dead, he didn't regret any of it, all the time he had spent with the other Eds. Friends he knew well enough to trust to beat on his door until he woke up at some ungodly hour on a snowy Saturday morning, use the key he'd seen fit to trust at least Eddy with what had to have been ages ago and let himself in... Friends, who forgave each other for their faults, or at least ignored them enough that it amounted to the same thing.
He shivered, eyes drifting, unfocused.
Or... Maybe in some universe more real than this one he was just utterly insane and all of this really was in his head, his body locked in a padded room somewhere, having to be force-fed pills or he'd bite off the doctor's hand- The creatures, the sticky notes... Gods knew he was neurotic enough to cover the bases without having to throw this supernatural stuff into the mix.
Not a terribly likely scenario, but still a possibility.
He tried it out in the back of his head, clearly out of it; I am crazy, I am insane. I am hopelessly neurotic, my parents are literally demons that communicate via sticky notes... Despite the pain, he felt himself snort with laughter at that. Yep, crazy.
I'm dead...
And, oh, yeah, this little episode was certainly not going to help anything... If he survived whatever it was turning out to be, which had turned out to be something very rude, by the by, what with trying to kill him and all...
Gods, maybe he really was crazy.
The weight that had been steadily building on his chest over however long he had been lying there (it felt like hours but could very well have been twenty minutes, hard to say in this empty house's damnable silence) abruptly increased, if it were possible, sending Edd into a wheezing coughing fit that threatened to break what was left of him into a thousand pieces... He choked out a full-on sob, focusing just on breathing until the pain had subsided to the point where it just made his ears ring and the rest of him want to puke everything he'd so much as considered eating in the last decade. But this eventually ebbed away, or he may have just passed out again, either way leaving him drained, sinking into the living room carpet...
He hadn't expected to die at fifteen, much less for a second time. In a daze, Edd considered this briefly before the rest of him collapsed, his head dropping to the floor with a dull thud, the only noise in his otherwise silent home.
A/N:
Er, yeah. Relax, Double D isn't really dead, per se... Well, its complicated.
I can't see the Eds as adults, kind of the same way I could never see Dib growing up for one reason or another. It's sad, I guess.