Chapter Text
The screams of someone doomed to death was something one had to grow accustomed to in Ed’s line of work. It was a tedious process, sure, but not impossible. Very similar, in fact, to dealing with a significant other’s snoring — it was there, you expected it, eventually, you got used to it. Ed hadn't quite reached that point yet, which is why when the first desperate, croaking peal of an agonized wail reached his ears, his eyes shot open and all of his muscles tensed in preparation for a knife in his chest or a gun in his mouth.
A little surprisingly (and more so thankfully), no such thing happened. Instead, upon ripping his eyes open, he was greeted by a dark surface, blurry and distorted without his glasses but still recognizably the ceiling of his bedroom.
Through the piercing wail that was still ringing in his ears, another sound pushed through, accompanying the sudden movement next to him as a shadowy figure bolted upright, their head whipping from side to side and indistinct features painted with a mind-numbing array of emotions.
“What the hell? Ed? Ed?”
In the weeks preceding that moment Ed had awoken innumerable times to find someone else in his bed. Invariably, they were never really there, but it had never failed to give him a start. This time, however, there was no creeping panic or subconscious disgust at the prospect of an imaginary bedmate, but an overwhelming sense of safety and relief upon hearing that all too familiar voice emanating from that all too familiar face that was now taking over everything in Ed’s line of sight.
“Ed, Christ, what’s wrong? Can you hear me? Ed?” Oswald cried, his tone and expression correspondent in their gradual increase in hysteria. “Ed, Ed, it’s okay, calm down! Ed, breathe!”
“The light,” Ed gasped, abruptly breaking the continuous stream of what he’d only then realized was his own screaming. “The lights, Oswald, the lights—”
Oswald’s shoulders slumped and his expression slackened with a wave of relief that might have been contagious if Ed wasn't scared stiff of something he couldn't see or comprehend. There was just something terrible there, he knew there was, and the thought of scanning the room in search of it made his eyes well with horrified tears, the sight of which spurred Oswald into action.
“The light — shit, of course, Ed, I’m sorry!” he rambled, stumbling out of the bed and across the room to the light switch. “I-I-I turned it off sometime in the night because I couldn't get to sleep and you seemed so peaceful I thought it wouldn't matter — There! The lights are on, Ed, it’s okay, it’s okay,” he said with a dry, desperate laugh, as if the idea that this situation was anywhere near remotely okay was something worth laughing at.
Something even less humorous was the realization that even with the overhead light glaring in Ed’s eyes, he found he still couldn't move. It was a frightfully sobering sensation, that inability to move one’s extremities no matter how hard they were trying. He was transfixed, his eyes locked on Oswald’s face upon his return to the bed, his lungs aching for a breath he couldn't seem to get — a fact that Oswald seemed to pick up on in no time.
“Ed, it’s okay, I’m right here. I’m here, Ed, you’re okay. Here, here — can you hold my hand? Can you do that for me, Ed?” he asked, offering his upturned palm as if presenting Ed with a gift, curling his fingers twice in a strange, informal beckoning gesture. “Just…grab my hand.”
It was such an absurdly simple request that Ed could have laughed if he hadn't been shaking with silent screams. Objectively speaking, reaching out and taking Oswald’s hand should have been as easy as breathing (which itself was gradually seeming less and less easy), but the minute he’d tried to move his hand, he was stupefied by how heavy it felt, as if his blood had turned to lead in his veins.
“Ed?” Oswald asked, his voice weak and shaky, his hand slowly falling to the comforter with the realization that Ed (regrettably) wasn't going to be able to fulfill his request. “What is it, what’s wrong?”
In his current state of bemusing immobility, Ed was shocked to find that he had an answer to such a question.
“I’m terrified,” he choked out with a sobbing breath, finally breaking down and letting his inadvertently contained wails break free, welling up and out of his throat like an emotional volcano.
“What can I do?” Oswald asked softly, his voice so small and broken that Ed only sobbed harder.
“The room. Look around the room — i-is there anyone there?”
Oswald frowned, and despite his paralyzing fear, Ed could see why. It was a ludicrous request, for surely if there was someone else in the room Oswald would have noticed them. But, in spite of the older man’s befuddlement, he obliged, sitting up and turning his head owlishly to examine every corner of the room.
“No, Ed, there’s…there’s no one here. It’s just me.”
A nagging voice in the back of Ed’s head strongly disagreed, but he took in a shuddering breath and forced himself to nod stiffly, grateful that Oswald would humor his embarrassingly juvenile worries.
“Hold me again. Please,” Ed said, gnawing on his lip in a futile attempt to control some of his sobs. If Oswald was a little hasty to comply, Ed hadn't taken the time to notice before the smaller man was pulling him up into a slumped sitting position and wrapping his arms around him in a facsimile of the viper grip Ed had longed for earlier that night. He’d never been held in such a way, so closely, so desperately, someone who actually cared about his well-being holding him in their arms and shushing him softly and combing their fingers through his curly, matted hair in an overwhelmingly comforting gesture. It was a novel experience, just enough of everything he’d been starving for that he found his arms were light enough to reciprocate, wrapping loosely around Oswald’s thin frame and clinging to the silky fabric of his nightshirt.
“Is this helping?” Oswald asked in a hoarse, hushed voice.
“More than you could know,” Ed replied with a shaky sigh, tucking his chin against Oswald’s shoulder and burying into his neck once more.
“Less scared?”
“Mmhm.”
“Good,” Oswald breathed, and Ed could feel his relief, filling his chest with each beat of Oswald’s heart against him, loosening his muscles with every deep, controlled breath Oswald took.
“Do you think,” Oswald began, but trailed off, clearing his throat and trying again. “Can you tell me what the hell you’re even dreaming about?”
Ed laughed softly against Oswald’s skin, the smaller man shivering against him because of it, an expected and secretly welcome reaction, one that some starving part of Ed lapped up greedily.
“It’s nothing,” Ed mumbled dismissively.
“Nothing wouldn't make you cry like that, Ed. Nothing wouldn't have you screaming bloody murder in your sleep,” Oswald retorted, easing his grip on Ed and pulling back to meet his gaze.
“No, that’s just it, it’s… nothing,” Ed clarified with a thoughtful frown, pushing his hair out of his face as if the sweaty curls were blocking his train of thought. “There’s nothing in the dream that should be so upsetting.”
Oswald’s brow was furrowed, a sure sign that his interest was piqued, and he shuffled farther out of the hug, leaning forward intently and giving a small shake of his head. “Describe it to me?”
“It’s a hall.”
“A hall?” Oswald echoed. “Like…Like my hall, like the one outside?”
“No, it’s…uglier and wider and impossibly long — endless, I’d say. It isn't even a house, it’s just that one hall, rotting and dank and so, so unbearably lonely. So silent.” He paused. “Except…Except it’s not. Not silent, that is. I can…I can hear something, something so far away I can barely make it out and yet so close it’s almost deafening,” he said breathlessly, fisting his hands in his hair and tugging, worrying his lip between his teeth and closing his eyes against that noise. “White noise,” he continued, “it’s like white noise, scratching at the back of my head, and all I can do is run from it and the floor is caving in under my feet and the walls are repeating and there’s nothing behind me but it’s following me, Oswald. It’s everywhere.”
“Does it ever end?” Oswald asked, sounding so genuinely concerned that Ed opened his eyes again to meet his fiery stare.
“Sometimes,” he said, slowly lowering his hands back into his lap. “Sometimes it does. It did earlier and it did just now.” He dropped his gaze anxiously, rolling the sheets between his fingers. “It’s worse when it ends.”
“Worse? Worse how?”
“Worse because I…wake up, sort of. It’s painfully meta — a dream within a dream, I might say if I were more of the poet I am at heart. Everything’s the same when I ‘wake up’ — the room is the same, the weather, my clothes, but I’m…not alone.”
His eyes flicked up briefly, just a fleeting glance at Oswald’s face to see if he was taking him seriously. In that transitory moment, Ed had never seen a more serious gaze.
“Isabella’s there.” Oswald sucked in a slow breath through his teeth, a soft hissing noise that grated on Ed’s eardrums. “Kristen is too. They both are, in separate corners of the room, and they’re talking to me.”
“What are they saying?” Oswald said, his voice low and dangerous, a threat buried in there somewhere but too well concealed for Ed to bother dissecting it.
He shook his head vaguely. “Things they've said before. Isabella’s saying over and over again how I’d never hurt her, Kristen’s calling me a psychopath. It’s like my last nights spent with them are playing on repeat, a goddamn skipping record and I have to deal with it.”
“You shouldn't have to,” Oswald growled, placing his hand on Ed’s knee and giving it a reassuring squeeze. “It’s not your fault, Ed, it’s m…It’s not your fault.”
Such reassurances were often spoken easily with no ounce of sincerity, so Ed could hardly blame himself for his insecurity when he glanced up to scrutinize Oswald’s gaze. He could always measure the authenticity of the man’s words by the truths his eyes told so forthrightly. Some said it was a weakness, and before, Ed might have agreed with them, but recently Oswald had been gaining more control over what his eyes revealed, and if he kept it up, Ed could certainly see it as an overpowering advantage. To lie so convincingly, to sell it using every part of your body was something Ed had never been able to master, and watching Oswald learn to do so was euphoriant, for lack of a better term.
This time, however, Ed could see that there was no lie in Oswald’s expression, and he was slightly ashamed by himself for his surprise at being met with such a heartfelt and intense stare.
“Kristen was my fault, though,” he objected, if for no other reason than to combat the faith Oswald had placed in him that he knew he was more than undeserving of. “I should have taken that as a warning sign not to fall in love again. I’m too destructive. Too dangerous. I kill anyone that could ever have a chance at loving me.”
“That’s not true!” Oswald insisted, seizing Ed’s face in his hands and keeping their eyes locked so that Ed couldn't convince himself that the words were merely empty assurances by avoiding Oswald’s unfairly candid expressions.
“It is true, Oswald. I loved Kristen, and maybe she loved me, and I killed her. Pinned her to the wall and choked her to death.” Oswald’s expression flickered and fell, drifting back to patient and attentive concern like a tree shedding its leaves. “I loved Isabella, and she loved me, and she’s gone.”
“But I—You—You didn't kill her!” Oswald said, shaking his head and grinning as if he’d just won an argument.
“I could have. I almost did. I’m a dangerous man, Oswald. Better to be left unloved.”
“No one deserves to be unloved, Ed. Certainly not you!” he added with a strained chuckle. “You've done some bad things, Ed, sure — everyone has! — but worse men than you have been forgiven and accepted by someone. You are worthy of love, Ed, and you will get it. There’s someone out there for everyone.”
“So…You’re saying that Kristen and Isabella weren't those ‘someone’s?” Ed challenged, promptly feeling more than a little contrite about his bitter tone.
“Maybe not,” Oswald said after a moment of wordless mouthing, “but if that’s the case then you needn't worry about never finding love.”
“And what if one of them was that ‘someone’? What if I killed the only person I could ever be happy with?”
Oswald lowered his gaze and chewed on his lip, looking up at last with a sort of broken glimmer in his eye. “I doubt life would be so cruel as to give you that someone and then take them away from you by your own hand.”
Ed scoffed and smiled a tight-lipped, insincere smile. Oswald’s naivety was cute, and perhaps something along the lines of boyishly charming, but it was naivety nonetheless, and Ed could hardly put up with it.
“This is Gotham, Oswald. Any modicum of mercy life may have has never shown its face here.”
It was as obvious of an end to a conversation as one could get, leaving no room for argument and plenty of room for nearly unbearable tension.
Hasty to move on, Oswald withdrew his hands, and Ed withdrew one of the two aforementioned airplane bottles of Moscato from his nightstand and downed it, hardly stopping for a breath. It was far more dizzying than it should have been, which Ed promptly blamed on his empty stomach and rapid consumption, but it didn't stop him from extracting the other, taking a few sips and passing it to Oswald, who eyed it warily before accepting.
“Not to throw stones, but…this isn't really the healthiest coping method in the books, Ed,” Oswald said tentatively, taking a polite sip from the bottle in his hand before setting it down on his respective nightstand.
“Less of a coping method and more of a sleeping strategy,” Ed replied stiffly, shuffling back down into the covers and rubbing his eyes.
“There are a lot of…safer ways to do that, I’d imagine. I can make some calls and get you stronger sleeping agents, Ed — ones you won’t have to pair with alcohol. I can do it now, in fact, if you’ll just let me—”
“No,” Ed said sternly, shocked by his own commanding inflection and even more so by his body’s instinct to lunge forward and grip Oswald’s wrist, pulling him back onto the bed. “Stay. Please.”
“Ed,” Oswald began, frowning uncertainly, “it wouldn't take me five minutes if I just—”
“Stay,” Ed said again, tugging Oswald more insistently, pitching him forward onto the bed with a startled grunt.
Oswald groaned dramatically, yanking his arm out of Ed’s grasp in retaliation and moving to get under the covers again. “Fine, I’ll call them later — and you won’t stop me, then!” he barked, jabbing a finger in Ed’s chest.
“Of course not,” Ed said with a complacent smirk, turning on his side to face Oswald, who settled down with a theatrical huff. Despite his exaggerated display of annoyance, Ed could see the glimmer of contentment in his eye, a sliver of something pure and authentic that warmed Ed’s heart and stretched his smile even wider.
“Hey, Oswald?”
“Are you gonna ask me to hold you again?” Oswald griped, eyeing the offending party out of his peripherals.
“No, actually,” Ed said with an embarrassed laugh, scratching his head. “I was just…gonna say thank you. For everything you've done.”
At that, Oswald turned his head completely, facing Ed full on. “For everything I've done? Ed, I've…I haven’t done anything.”
“But you’re wrong,” Ed said with a smile, hoping to convey what he meant with that one small twist of his mouth and yet knowing all too well that emotions could never be so simple. “You've done more for me in these past few hours than most people have my whole life. You stayed with me when I asked you to, held me when I asked you to, checked up on me when I didn't ask you to. You cared for me, Oswald. That’s more than I could ever ask for and far more than I’m worth.”
Oswald blinked at him stupidly for a moment that seemed just short of being far too long before casting his eyes down and taking Ed’s hand in his with a soft, uncertain smile.
“I care more for you than you could ever know, Ed.”
“And I for you, Oswald,” Ed returned with a much bolder smile, lacing his fingers with Oswald’s and squeezing his hand. “No one could ever ask for a better friend than you.”
- - - -
Ed was not one unfamiliar with the Biblical portrayals of Hell. Certainly it was something he had long since wished to keep trapped in his past where many other renditions of Hell lay dormant, but occasionally the memory arose, and almost always he was able to stamp it down, tie it up, and send it back to the furthest recesses of his memory where he contained everything else unsavory in a stainless steel vault.
This time, however, when the bitter memories arose and the words that preached of fire and brimstone, demons and eternal torment reared up defiantly in his mind’s eye, he couldn't force them away. They remained, incessant and pernicious, growing clearer with each passing minute, growing louder with each beat of his heart.
As unable as he might have been to once again condemn them to his memory vault, he presently found another and possibly more effective rebuttal than his go-to method of deflection. Here, standing in a wide and rotting hallway, the air dank and musty, he found that he could instead debunk those horrendous images ingrained in his mind of a world beneath all of existence, impossibly low and unfathomably traumatic. “That is not Hell,” he could say with a disdainful scoff. “This is.”
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before…
The dream was always the same: The dark walls peeling in stained, curling strands of sun-bleached paper, the floorboards moldy and rotting and wet with an unknown substance, and the panic that permeated the air like electricity, prickling at the back of Ed’s neck and coaxing forth his tears with little to no effort. It wasn't a house of nightmares — he couldn't call it that, because it wasn't a house. It was a tunnel, a vast, endless expanse of decaying hallway that stretched on and on either side of him and on and on forward and back. This was it. This was Hell, and Ed could smile knowing that he’d finally solved the mystery of that seemingly inevitable nightmare that had plagued his conscience since his already hellish childhood.
So he started to walk.
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token, And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”
All he ever did — every night of every day of every week since his world ended with Isabella’s life — was walk. Down that hall, where the walls repeated but the floor never creaked in the same place. Down deeper into that bottomless pit that surely fell all the way to Satan’s throne, where he would be sat laughing, faceless and dark and piercing Ed with eyeless sockets, the embodiment of all things evil. Ed had never truly believed that description.
(True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?)
Possibly the one thing about this tunnel (or hall or hell or hole) that irked Ed the most was that he had no conception of which direction he was trekking. It mustn't be down, nor up, either, for surely he would feel that somehow in his body. So it was no descent into Hell, nor ascension into Heaven (not as if he had ever believed he’d be welcome there to begin with). It was just…a hall. Not a maze, even, because it would have had an end. Not a labyrinth, either, because it would have been too entertaining. Just the endless, endless expanse of empty hall, stretching on and on over the horizon if there was a horizon to reach.
Every step Ed took made his stomach sink just a little more, made him sicker, weaker, almost to the point that he could feel the color draining from his skin as one might strain the water from a rag. After the 156th board to creak (because Ed was counting — of course he was — with nothing else to do), he began to notice a subtle unsteadiness to his lumbering gait.
Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning, Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
Truer words were never spoken, Ed remarked without opening his mouth, for it was busy smiling. There was a tapping — the only sound that ever accompanied him on his journey — and it was most definitely louder than before. Just barely, ever so slightly, such a slight increase in volume that no human could ever catch it.
(The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute.)
But, my apologies I must offer, Ed thought to no one in particular, for it is less of a tapping than a dripping. A very distant dripping, of course — unreachable, even, of course — but dripping nonetheless.
“Surely,” said I, “surely that is something more at my window lattice; let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore—”
There was something else that Ed found especially irksome about this endless boundless ceaseless tunnel or channel or shaft to — or from — or in — Hell.
“—Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore—”
What he loathed possibly more than walking in a world devoid of direction was exploring a world where everything to explore was just beyond your grasp. That dripping, for example, drip, drip, dripping like a bleeding pig, drip, drip, dripping like a gutted carcass, dripping on the floor, ruining the floor.
“Tis the wind and nothing more!”
I’m afraid, my friend, I must disagree, for there is no wind here.
(Now this is the point. You fancy me mad.)
Madmen know nothing, yes, of course, but didn't I read somewhere that madmen possess inhuman strength?
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore; Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he; But with mien of lord and lady, perched above my chamber door — perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door — Perched, and sat, and nothing more.
Somehow I fear that speculation did not end well for me.
(Yes, he had been trying to comfort himself with these suppositions: but he had found all in vain.)
Oh, then I see that madmen have no ears. How should they, when that wise men have no eyes? Ed smiled faintly. Wise men like Jim Gordon, blind as a bat and dumber than a bag of rocks, who thought there was a reason why Ed had done what he had done. Wise men have no eyes, of course, but policemen have no brains.
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door — bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door, with such a name as “Nevermore.”
Ed stopped walking. Not necessarily by choice, he felt it necessary to clarify, but because the tunnel that he had walked every night of every day of every week since his world had ended, seemed to have ended as well. Ended or cut off, Ed couldn't rightfully say, for there was no wall or door to stop him in his tracks, but an endless abyss of Hell, darker than nothingness and more sinister than a snarling beast, beckoning him forth in a mother’s lull with promises of well-deserved damnation. And from that expanse of all-encompassing emptiness, his own voice echoed back at him, distant and lost somewhere between the past and the present, Purgatory and Hell.
“We deserved it, and we deserve it again. Look at what we've done!”
Only Ed could see nothing (did that make him wise?). Nothing but that cold emptiness that seemed so strangely welcoming, like a mother’s warm embrace, like a soft, sweet kiss, like waking up to a smiling face. Things Ed felt he was missing out on — not with a sort of childish yearning, but with the sort of stone-cold dread one gets when they’re late for an appointment. Like he had these things waiting for him, staying so still and patient, and he was preoccupied in this hallway by possibly the only escape he’d ever be offered: To step off these mind-numbingly creaky floorboards (which it had taken 769 of to reach this point, Ed had concluded) and let himself fall or float or swim to wherever that nothingness took him. Was there something in nothing? Or were those the words of a madman? Surely not, because madmen have no ears, and Ed certainly did — ears that were picking up on something through the maddening monotony of that faint and elusive dripping.
“I loved her, Oswald. And you killed her.”
(Now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the sound of the old man’s heart.)
“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil! — prophet still if bird or devil! By that heaven that bends above us — by that God we both adore — tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn, It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore — Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”
Ed jumped.
It was after a very unpleasant awakening that Ed let himself relax into his mattress, soaked in sweat and tears and restricted by his twisted sheets. Such awakenings he’d been enduring for the past few weeks — or closer to a month, now, he couldn't tell — and invariably it was the same. The same nightmare, the same panic, the same startled jolting that rendered him conscious and dreadfully unhappy to be so. The same presence in the bed next to him, cold, unmoving, lifeless.
Such a familiar image the phrase “imaginary friend” brought to mind, but an image that was subject to change, Ed had learned over these past few or four or more weeks. An image commonly associated with a child — Ed understood that all too well. What he also understood was that he was no child, and there was undeniably an imaginary friend in his bed with him every time he scared himself awake. A friend in his bed, two in the corners, and one looming over him, around him, in him. His friends, or so to speak, for he doubted true friends antagonized someone as relentlessly and cruelly as his did to him.
“Wakey wakey, Eddie,” one of them taunted as if on cue, the voice sparking inside of Ed, sending chills over every extremity, a sensation not unpleasant but most certainly unwelcome.
“Every day it’s always the same,” another one of his friends piped up, their voice tinny and almost artificial, carrying through the air from the corner like a putrid odor — the sound was sickening, so Ed figured the analogy wasn't too far off. “You’d think I’d have had the sense to sleep with someone with more…originality.”
“You would think,” the Other repeated mockingly, his too-loud and yet painfully nonexistent footsteps trailing off towards the foot of the bed. “Every day the same boring charade — scare yourself awake, stay stock still in your bed, wallow in your self-pity. Honestly, Eddie, I wanna have some fun!” he said with a dramatic flourish, slapping both hands on the bed and not disturbing it in the slightest.
“Leave me alone,” Ed growled, his voice hardly sounding like his own, deep and hoarse and begging for mercy.
“I understand your fear. It comes from a place of love.” That was the second to last friend. She never said too much.
That just left the one lying adjacent to Ed in the bed, emitting cold, wet, reeking air — the one he could actually feel, ironically, for it was the one born of all the half-empty pill bottles and caddies on his unorganized and cluttered nightstand. This one often did say too much, so it was a surprise for him to remain so silent at such an opportune time to poke fun at Ed’s ever-worsening mental state. He just stayed still, as still as Ed, but even quieter, even colder.
“You've been rotting in that bed for two weeks,” the Other said, all playful pretenses shed, all cold, threatening, brooding severity now. “I can’t even go out on my own because your stupid head is filled to bursting with that poison! Honestly, the one time I tried, I spent half an hour retching.”
“A damn shame, I’d say,” the second friend from the corner chimed in. “What a waste.”
“Agreed,” the Other said with a disappointed sigh. “A waste of a pretty decent body. I could have had so much fun with that.”
“No love lost with his brain?”
“His brain,” he scoffed, and Ed could hear him pacing, back and forth, back and forth, breaking his loop to charge over to Ed’s side of the bed, so close that Ed could almost make out his face — a reflection of his own. “His brain is a laughing stock!” the Other roared, jabbing a finger against Ed’s temple. He hardly moved with it. “He’s turned it to mush with all those drugs and all that alcohol. He can’t even get one complete thought out of his mouth. It’s all scrambled messages in there, jumbled sentences, obscure references to poetry, of all things.”
“I never took him to be a poet,” the second friend mused.
“He left you a cupcake with a bullet in it — only a poet would do that.”
Through all these weeks, Ed had grown rather resigned to the treatment he received. It was expected — one of the many displeasures of waking up from those dreams of Hell, fantasies of a world almost better than his. One of his least favorite aspects of the waking world, however, was when his hallucinations — no, sorry, friends — conspired against him. He couldn't get rid of them, couldn't tell them to leave when there were no bodies to walk out the door. How ridiculous would he seem screaming at an empty room? That’s why he hardly spoke. That, and — though he regretted to admit it — the Other was right: He couldn't get a complete thought out. His mind was an indiscernible haze of words that were not his own interwoven with the words he wanted to say. It was all poetry dashed by the mind of man. How ironically poetic.
“What do you suppose we should do with him?” the second friend spoke up, and upon forcing himself out of his own mind, Ed realized she and the Other were staring down at him. He could see them, though the rest of his dull world was blurry and unrecognizable. They stood out, stark against the nondescript backdrop they were cursed with: A face much like his own but stern and proud, and a face he’d known what seemed so long ago, pale and fair and framed by gorgeous red hair. His Someone who turned out not to be his Someone at all.
“Oh, I’d say he’s beyond help, now. That’s always the thing with junkies: You leave them to their own devices for too long and you come back to find there are no devices for them to be left to anymore.”
“So, what? We just let him die? That’s a mercy you hardly seem capable of.”
“Oh, please, nothing so civil. We let him kill himself. Slowly. Destroy himself from the inside out. Does that seem a mercy more to your liking?”
“He strangled me. I couldn't breathe. And I had to listen to him monologue about how dearly he loved me. The mercy to my liking would be for him to die the most painful death we can manage…But I suppose this will suffice.”
They spoke of it frequently, their desired methods of killing him. So much so he was hardly fazed by it anymore. Admittedly, it did hurt — just a little bit, just a small pang in his heart where the understanding that no friend should plot your murder brewed on a low flame and the truth of his situation lay undiscussed. He was dying. They all knew it. They joked about it, of course, but deep down in some secret place where Ed hadn't lost all sensibility, he knew they were terrified. Deep down in that secret place, he could feel it.
And he was terrified too.
“You two always were so quick to give up hope,” another voice came, a clearer voice, a hitherto unheard voice, the one Ed had been so impatiently waiting for, and hearing it made his eyes burn with unshed tears.
He rolled his head to the side — an action that was far too difficult — and let his eyes settle on his soggy companion, covered head to toe in aquatic grime and muck, every inch of them so blatantly lifeless that it never failed to make Ed physically ill. The only part of their pale, slimy, drenched body that retained any hint of life was their eyes, as sharp and piercing as ever, as green as the pieces of seaweed that clung to their once impeccable suit.
“Please,” Ed began, his voice breaking pitifully around a poorly contained whimper, “why can’t…you…jus’ go away?”
The final friend (the only one Ed truly felt he could call a friend) smiled a venomous smile, their gaze so obviously pitying that Ed knew his skin should be crawling, but no part of him seemed attentive enough to react accordingly.
“Oh, Ed,” his friend said with a sigh. “There’s really nowhere else for me to go. You've already killed me!”
Ed doubted there would ever be another set of words that could make him sob so suddenly. Deep, pathetic, wailing cries, cries only a dying man could produce, cries of a man who wanted a second chance at life, wanted to change things, to relive things. A man with so much remorse he could drown in it.
It was real, this world. Agonizingly so. No dream within a dream, no reality too meta for its own good. It was real and Ed, though surrounded by his friends, felt lonelier than he ever had. Eternal torment. Well-deserved damnation. Only a dying man would accept that fate.
And so Ed did.
With open arms.