This is what I've done, and what I'll do to the rest of the chapters: I will merge some chapters together to make them longer, and fewer! But it's still the same story :)

I just want to thank whoever gave me my first comment on this story! He/she wrote it as a guest so I can't give them a shout out. But thank you, either way, for the comment and I will try and keep it up! :)
And thank you SweetCaroline1572 for the favorite and for following this story!

Hi! I just want to thank "guest" that is commenting the chapters! I love reading them : ) And thank you taylorthedkboi for following my story! Happy reading.
Also Branbee and keveddfan104, thank you for favoriting and following this fiction!

Demons within

Kevin
"What the fuck?"

"How could he do that?"

"Douche bag!"

"What the hell is wrong with you, asshole?"

"Go, just go, Kevin. Come on."

Nazz pushed Kevin in front of her, making him walk faster through the hallway. She had seen the look on his face; she had seen something that no one else did. She saw that he actually felt bad about what he had done for once, and tried to get him away from the commotion to help him.

All the people standing around him either booed at him, called him every name in the book or tried to tend to the boy sitting on the floor by the lockers. The boy that Kevin had just smacked in the face. It wasn't the first time Kevin punched someone, but it was the first time he had been physical with him.

"What is going on here?"

"Kevin just beat the crap out of Double D."

"Shhh…" The person who'd asked the question looked at Kevin with an alarmed expression on his face, while the one who'd replied to the question only shrugged – she just didn't give a damn about what Kevin thought about anyone anymore. As if she had lost all the respect she had once had for him.

"That's not fair, Sarah, you don't even know what happened." Nazz said in a low voice before she and Kevin had passed the whispering couple.

"Do I need to?" she snapped, took Jimmy's hand and tried to get closer to Edd in the middle of the crowd.

"Great job, Kevin. You've finally done it – the whole school hates your guts."

"Get lost, Jonny!" Nazz pushed Jonny out of their way, grabbed Kevin's arm and dragged him into the locker room leading to the indoor sports center.

"My name's Dragon!" Jonny shouted after them.

"Jesus Christ, everybody's going crazy over this." Nazz mumbled as she shut the door to the locker room and locked it. She watched Kevin sit down on a bench, lit a cig he had found in the pocket of his school jacket. "What the hell, man?" she asked him.

Kevin breathed shakily; it didn't seem like he was going to say anything, but he said through perched lips: "He had it coming."

"Are we talking about the same guy here? That was Eddward Vincent, Kevin. Double D; do you remember him? Only a mad person would hit someone like-"

"Shut up!" Kevin exploded and rose up from his seat, cigarette hanging from his dry lip. "If you don't leave me alone soon I swear to God I will have to punch you too!"

"Hitting a girl? Is that where this is going? Well that is just perfect, asshole!" while she gave him a game about what he had done, Kevin opened the door to one of the stalls in the locker room and flung the toilet seat open. "Are you even listening?" she yelled and ran to stand outside of the stall, door still open. "Oh, what the- Kevin! That is so inappropriate on so many levels! We're in the middle of a conversation and this is the girls' changing room!"

"Yeah, yeah…" he muttered while watching the yellow stream hit the water in the toilet bowl.

"Can't you just take this seriously? Hey, I'm talking to you, asshole!" she clapped her hands together in the rhythm of her words; trying to get his attention.

"You know what, cheerleader dork?" Kevin pulled the zipper up on his black skinny jeans and turned to the blonde upset girl behind him. He pointed at her with one of his long fingers and gnawed the inside of his cheek. "I've been called 'asshole' so many times that I consider that as my middle name, already. You're just an annoying little fly to me, and if you don't shut the hell up and leave this room-" he got closer to her and she immediately took a step back. "- then I will ignore the fact that you don't have a dick between your legs. Got it, princess?"

Nazz swallowed the stingy feeling of tears in her throat and said in a calmer tone: "This is your last chance. I might be your only friend in this and you know that. Enough is enough, Kevin. Don't push me away."

Kevin smiled a crooked smile, with his upper lip curled over his yellowing teeth, licking the side of his corner upper teeth with the tip of his tongue. He chuckled, looked up in the ceiling and rolled his eyes. "You're not my friend. You've never been my friend and you will never be. Stop chasing the dream of being the girlfriend of the Captain of the football team; because that will never happen, loser."

"Loser. Dork." Nazz repeated. "Expand your vocabulary, will you? And you just lost a great chance today."

"I rather dodged a bullet, I'd say."

"Okay then. Fine! I'm outta here!" Nazz unlocked the door, swung it open, stormed out of the locker room and slammed the door with a loud bang behind her.

Kevin bit his cigarette off by the filter, flicked the lit part into one of the sinks and spitted out the filter in the trash bin. He wasn't planning on leaving any time soon. I bet those dweebs are out there with pitch forks and torches, he thought.

He went into one of the stalls again, shut the door and sat down on the toilet with the lid down. He did everything in his power not to think about this past event but he just couldn't cut his masochistic, self-harming thoughts. With trembling legs, shaking hands and rapid breath, Kevin sat on that toilet until the school bell rang and didn't know how to react to what he had done but to try and forget about it. What else could he do?

Remorse… what a morbid, pathetic feeling…

All of a sudden the door to the locker room opened and voices came streaming into it. "I'm fine, really. I'm just gonna clean up, alright?"

"You're sure you don't need to go to the nurse's office?"

"Yes, I'm positive. Thank you, Eddy. See you in class in a minute, okay?"

All the muscles in Kevin's body tensed up, it was almost as if he stopped breathing not to get caught. But why, though? Why did he get nervous now all of a sudden? It must be because of all these strange feelings he had been feeling these last twenty minutes…

"Oh, geez, this will look ugly tomorrow." Kevin jerked, not prepared on Eddward talking to himself. "There's no blood, at least." He sighed.

It took a few seconds before Kevin had his second small heart attack. Edd shrieked bloody murder and the sound from water splashing down in the sink hit Kevin's ears and toilet stall.

"A cigarette butt in the sink; that is just so insanitary!" paper towels were being pulled from the dispenser and several cheats fell down into the bin. "Filthy, filthy…" Edd muttered. "Oh… looks like I need to change the bag now."

If that dork is going to stay here all day then I'll have to kill someone! Kevin thought and couldn't help but feel like he was going to be stuck in here for a long time.

Eddward
Once Edd was finished with cleaning up the mess that he thought he was responsible for (there had been water all over the floor as well); he looked at himself in the mirror again. The skin around his left eye looked even more swollen and stretched now than what it had done when he first came into this changing room; and he knew that it was only going to get worse by nightfall. He sighed to himself and sat down on a bench in the middle of the room between the sinks and the toilet stalls.

Edd was used to having bruises and small wounds on his knees and elbows every so often (even though he was cautious by nature he found himself tripping over things on a daily basis), but this was the first time that another person had caused him something as big as a black eye.

Heck; his two best friends were regularly fighting each other in his direct presence, but they never laid a finger on the smartest guy in the trio. Edd's two best friends; Ed and Eddy; always made up after they had fought, but it almost always ended in a fist fight between them two. But whenever they got angry at Edd, they just didn't go further than to yell at him… maybe it was Edd's ability to calm people down that saved him every time?

This time though, outside in the hallway, he had failed to do so and received a big and hard fist right on his left eye. Edd felt more surprised to have received a punch, rather than what he felt that it had hurt. He was used to people liking him and thinking that he was some kind of saint… well, not a saint, that would be silly! But whenever somebody needed help with something they usually came to him for advice. Everything from homework to relationship problems, even though he had never been in one himself. So he would never dream of being pounded on by someone he hadn't talked to in so many years; and he stood clueless as for what he had done to upset him.

He didn't hate Kevin for what he had done, certainly not! It was almost like Edd brought all of this on himself, he thought that maybe he had crossed some line or said anything inappropriate. That was something that Edd usually did; he blamed himself for things other did and forgave them almost immediately.

He hadn't talked to Kevin in several years and Kevin had never so much as to say anything mean to him in return. They had lived across from each other on that Cul-de-sac their entire life (well, almost; Edd didn't move to Peach Creek until he was about four years old) and Kevin hadn't even looked to Edd's house in the last three or so years. The thing that had happened between them today, the wall that was built up between them but that was now broken, must have been due to something Edd did or said, but he just couldn't figure out as of what.

Something happened inside Edd's body. His stomach pulled together, as if it clenched to his insides, making him nauseous. The surprise and adrenalin had subsided and pain was shooting from his left eye into his whole face and made him feel dizzy. He quickly stood up and tried to splash some cold water on the damaged area, but nothing seemed to work.

"Oh, dear. Maybe I need to go to the nurse's office after all." He said to himself and grabbed a hold on the sink in front of him, tried not to lose balance and fall.

But he didn't have time to even think any further when he looked up from the sink again and into the mirror. A lightning struck the top of his head and spread all over his body in just a split second when he noticed that someone stood behind him. And it wasn't just any person… it was the school bully.

Kevin.

For a few seconds they just stared at each other; Edd's pale face into Kevin's bored facade. His red baseball cap was as always turned backwards and a few strands of ginger hair poked out of the hole in the cap. His face ripped in half by a wide smile and his eyes looked deep and fiendishly into Edd's.

Edd saw that this encounter wasn't going to be a peaceful one; he had actually torn the wall between them; and Kevin didn't look apologetic at all so Edd was forced to think fast. He found the exit sign in the corner of his eye and hurried over to the door; but the second before he put his hand on the door handle Kevin's hand had been much quicker – instead of reaching for the handle Kevin had reached for the lock. He locked the door with an echoing click.

"Well, well, Sockhead…." Kevin said while taking a step closer to Edd, making Edd to back up into the sink. "Looks like it's just you and me now."

Only Eddy called Edd Sockhead nowadays, but he knew that Kevin didn't mean it in a friendly matter. "Wh-what are you going to do, Ke-Kevin?" Edd stammered.

"Why, you turned the whole school against me so I guess that you need to pay the price."

"I-I-I don't even know what I did…"

"You know fucking well what you did, Double dweeb!" Kevin shouted and Edd ducked with his arms above his head.

Kevin was famous for beating kids up on a daily basis on this school, and anyone that tried to stand up for themselves got the worse beatings. So Edd had two choices; he could try and fight Kevin (and that would definitely not end well), or he could just give up, let Kevin do his worse and maybe be able to crawl to the nurse's office when it was over.

Edd thought about his possibilities and felt the nausea hit harder than ever. His eye was throbbing of pain and his head spun like a carousel out of control. How could he possibly handle more pain? He wasn't used to having this much and now he was preparing for more.

Without being able to stop it he felt tears stream down his face and he started to sob uncontrollably. He pulled down his ski hat over his face, not wanting to see what was coming for him.

"What are you doing, dork?" Kevin backed away in surprise. "Stop crying!" Edd jumped from Kevin's sudden outburst and heard steps stomping over to the toilet stalls. He looked up when he heard Kevin punching the wall inside the stall and calling names for every punch: "Dork! Dweeb! Loser! Wimp! Fag! Poindexter!"

Edd had never seen the football team's Captain this furious before. Now I have done it, Edd thought to himself, this time Kevin will murder someone; and that someone will be me.

Kevin

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Kevin hadn't done much during summer break except for riding his bike around the neighborhood. Almost all the neighboring kids had gone for long camping trips with their parents or visited families in other states and cities. Kevin was the only one left on the Cul-de-sac, well… Him and the Eds.

They were this unbreakable trio of best friends who hardly let anybody from the outside into their little group. Kevin had once tried to become one of them, but he gave up after a while as they didn't show any sign of wanting him to be one of the originals. He found himself to be the one to call them all the time; the only time they wanted something from him was when they wanted Kevin to give them jawbreakers. Kevin's father worked at this factory that made these almost mythical big caramels, so they always had an unlimited supply in their garage – that was the only reason the Eds wanted anything to do with him.

Well, fuck those guys. Fuck them all the way to hell.

Kevin's birthday party had been in the beginning of the summer since all of his friends were going to be going away, but that party had been a bit awkward seeing he was slipping away from them either way. It was like he was growing apart from all of his childhood friends who he didn't have anything in common with anymore. And half of them were going to switch schools after this summer anyway, so they would all split up.

On his actual birthday in the middle of the summer, Kevin was all alone in his dark bedroom; curtains shut. He laid on his bed, throwing a tennis ball in the air and catching it, and thought about his loneliness when the door opened.

"Happy fourteenth birthday, Kev." His mother said, walked past his bed and opened the blinds, letting the sunshine pour into the messy, ordinary teenage boy bedroom. "Your dad and I have a special gift for our special guy."

"Oh, yeah?" Kevin muttered. His parent's gifts hadn't made a very big impression on him since they gave him his bike seven years ago… Last year they thought that he would be happy to know that he was going to become a big brother in a few months; but they had been so wrong about that. "What will it be this time?" he asked his mother, almost so quietly that he was the only one hearing it.

"Come on, pal, it's in the living room." Said his father. He gave Kevin's mother and smile, and she looked playfully at her husband.

Kevin sighed, but he was so tremendously bored that he followed them anyway out of his room. As they got to the living room Kevin noticed that something was wrong with it. Instead of the coffee table that usually stood between the couches, there was a big moving box standing on the floor.

"Sooo… you're telling me that we're moving?" he asked his parents.

"Don't be silly, honey! Open it." His mother said. She bounced up and down out of excitement. Kevin wanted to offer her to open the gift instead of him, but rolled his eyes and got closer to the box.

He opened the first flap with a sigh and the second one with a groan. But as he reached for the third flap something small and wet touched his fingers. Kevin backed away with a shriek and a firm grip around his fingers with his other hand.

"Just open it, silly!" his mother laughed.

Kevin crept closer to the box again, carefully opened the third flap and the light from the ceiling lamp shone down into the box, reveling what was in it. "Holy shit, dude…" he whispered.

"Happy birthday, son." His father said behind him, arms proudly crossed over his chest.

"Happy birthday, Kevin! Don't you just love it?" his mother cheered, clapping her hands together.

"I, uh…" Kevin looked down on the white puppy that barked and snarled, trying to get out of the box and closer to Kevin, looking up on him with pointy ears and small, almost all black eyes. "I mean… it's a dog."

"Yeah! You can name her, honey." Said his mother. "She's all yours now."

Something bubbled inside of Kevin, no; boiled. Did his parents really think that he was that pathetic and lonely that they got him a dog as company? "What am I supposed to do with this?" Kevin asked his parents and turned around. "It's just a stupid dog."

"Watch it, boy." His father warned him and his mother's eyes were watering.

"I thought you'd like it." She said quietly. "You've been acting so strange these past couple of months; and now all your friends are gone for the summer and-"

"Like it? I hate it! I hate you, and you and I hate Calvin!" Kevin stomped back to his room. "I hate this house and everything in it!" he slammed the door after entering the room and fell down on his bed again.

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"Dork! Dweeb! Loser! Wimp! Fag! Poindexter!" Seventeen year old Kevin kept punching the wall with his right fist without noticing that it started to crumble underneath his knuckles. "You dumb little shit! Stupid son of a… FUCK!" He stormed out of the stall with all of his attention directed at the school's smartest student who was sliding on the wall with his back, and down on the floor, tears still dripping from his chin. Kevin punched one of the lockers, making the thin sheet metal door creek open as it had bent inwards like a tin can. "God dammit, Edd!" he yelled. "You're making it hard for me to make fun of you!"

Edd pulled his legs up to his body, hugging them with one of his arms around them and kept the ski hat half hiding his blackening eye with the other hand. He shivered and cried. "I-I am sorry, Kevin. I didn't mean… I didn't mean to-"

"Stop apologizing, twerp!" Kevin pulled his red baseball cap off of his ginger head and threw it on the ground. "What is wrong with you?! I am the one acting like a maniac and you apologize to me?"

"I- I'm… I…" Edd stammered.

Kevin let out a deep sigh, picked his cap up from the floor and walked over to the terrified boy, all hunched up by the wall next to the door. He never thought that he would do something like this, but Kevin sat down on the floor next to the sobbing Edd. He pulled one of his legs up to his body; the leg closest to Edd, to build a wall between them so that they didn't have to look at each other; and asked:

"How did you ever survive this school?"

Eddward
"How did you ever survive this school?" Kevin asked him.

"Wha-what do you mean?" Edd asked. He calmed down a little as he noticed that Kevin spoke to him in a much more relaxed tone.

"What I mean, dork, is that you're being too soft. You apologize too much, you know? You need to step up, be a man. I mean, how old are you now? Sixteen, seventeen?"

Edd sniffled a little, tried to wipe his tears on his sleeve and glanced at the bully next to him. "I'll turn seventeen in two months, only three days before you turn eighteen. Don't you remember that they used to merge our birthday parties into one a few years ago?"

"Yeah, I forgot all of that." Kevin murmured through clenched teeth and pressed his fingers against his eyelids; looking like he was fuming a little again. "All I'm saying is that you're almost a man now, and you need to grow up and stand up for yourself, kid. That's exactly what I had to do when I started here. Do you think that I hid and cried whenever they started to smack me around? Hell no! I had to fight them every damn day the first year. I know you're a junior, but you get my drift, right?"

Edd was shocked over how this all had turned out. And he had never heard this story before. He remembered the time when Kevin, Nazz and Jonny started Peach Creek High, while he, Ed and Eddy still had one year left at Peach Creek's junior High. And Rolf had already finished High school when Kevin started here. Kevin slowly changed through that first year and stopped riding his bike and walking his dog in the neighborhood. He regularly and more increasingly came home with blood dripping from his nose and his hair all messy; and he snapped at everyone who tried to ask him about it.

Since Nazz and Kevin had been inseparable for so many years, the kids of the Cul-de-sac tried to get her to spill anything about their new school, but even Nazz fell clueless – she and Kevin hadn't been friends for a couple of years either so she didn't have all the inside info. All she knew was that the seniors had been rough on Kevin, and when it finally was time for Ed, Edd and Eddy to go to the High School (one year later); they saw a Kevin they'd never met before.

He was the King of Peach Creek High. He was the Captain of the football team and everyone was either afraid of him, wanted to be him or wanted to date him. He was the biggest bully of all time and he always teased Edd's two friends to the brim of them losing it. Eddy had had his fair share of Kevin's rough housing; even Ed had been punched in his face but he didn't seem to get affected at all by that, only that he was terrified of the older teen, but Double D on the other hand… Kevin never looked at him in the wrong way, never said anything mean to him and he sure as hell had never touched him before.

Something during that summer break all these years ago or something on this school had changed the old Kevin. And now he was going to tell Edd the story of how he became the person he is today; he was going to tell him how it all started.

Kevin cleared his throat when he continued: "The only person I knew when I started on this God forsaken school was Nazz, but she didn't talk to me anymore, as much as I didn't talk to her. I was all alone and those bloodhounds to bullies sniffed me out, made my life a fucking hell. At first I didn't know what to do so I just let them do it. What should I have done? I was fourteen and they were like three years older than me and big. I was tall, yes, and had a little muscle to me but I couldn't do anything against three football jocks with a bloodlust like sharks…"

Edd listened intensively to his story. He didn't know this side of Kevin and didn't know that he had it. But, he thought to himself, I guess that we're all just human after all.

"I had to do something you know? So I started to work out. Every day, every waking minute. I just pushed and pushed until I thought that I had it." Kevin glanced down on Edd; puberty had made Kevin slightly taller than the younger teen that once had been taller than him. "They broke me down on the first try, and it was brutal." he chuckled from the memory, clicked with his tongue and looked straight at the younger student. Edd looked at Kevin who'd lifted his red baseball cap and pointed with his finger. "See this scar going all the way from my right eyebrow to the ear? Yeah, they cracked my skull open. Five tacks in the skull and nineteen stitches to close the wound up."

"Oh, dear…" Edd mumbled, feeling nauseous again. But this time he wanted to vomit from the picture Kevin put in his head.

"Yeah, oh dear, alright." Kevin agreed. "They all got expelled so I never had my chance to take my revenge on them. But that only taught me the greatest lesson of my life."

"What was that?" Edd asked.

"That you can never rely on anybody to step up for you and be your friend; that only you have your own back. Never trust anyone. We are born alone and we will sure as hell die alone."

"But you're not alone." Edd whispered. "You have friends from the football team. Aren't they your friends?"

"Those guys?" Kevin snorted. "Do you see any of them here now? I have no friends, double dweeb, I have subjects and they do whatever I want them to."

"I'm sorry for that, Kevin."

"For what?" Kevin suddenly sounded wary, and his thick eyebrows dropped down over his light green eyes. "Don't you dare feel sorry for me, dork, or that will be the last thing you'll ever do." Kevin stood up on his feet again, started pacing in the room. "I thought that you were cool, and now you've ruined it again."

Edd didn't dare say anything. What he wanted to do was to apologize again over how he had angered the neurotic teen… again, and he knew that that would only make matters worse.

"That was my piece of advice. Now, cherish it." Kevin said. He unlocked the door and exited the changing room without another word, thus concluded the discussion.

Oh, well, no need to linger any longer, time for classes. Edd stood up as well, had one last look in the mirror and turned around to open the door, and when he left the changing room and went down the hallway, he passed another door on the way. He stopped dead in his tracks, slowly turned his head and read the sign on the door he had just passed.

Boys' Locker room, the sign said.

Edd turned around once more and read the sign on the door he had just left – it said Girls' Locker room.

He blushed as he hurried down the hallway. Damn all these infrastructures making everything look identical!

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