A jump from modern day to the early 1990's when we meet a young, aspiring rockstar Eddie Munson at the heart of the Seattle grunge scene. I had the huge honor of being included in the Tattoo Cover-up Valentine's Day Special episode of Gutterballs by @dr-aculaaa and I'm still emotional about it, to be honest. This wee contribution is dedicated to Drac, as well as all of the Gutterballs friends I'm proud to know because of this fandom (coming for you, Daria.)
word count: 1.4k
18+, smoking weed, the term 'bitches' used affectionally, mention of heartbreak, allusions to mental illness, a supposed one-night stand that became more, mention of addiction, that one friend who can find anyone online, hurt/comfort. Reader (Betty) has a good friend named Shelby, which is actually my cat in real life.
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You picked at the label of your beer, waiting impatiently for your friend to pull up something on her laptop.
It was the recent episode of Gutterballs that had spurred your Sherlock Holmes friend into action. You said something in passing about how it’d be impossible to find the rest of Eddie Munson’s lost loves that were mentioned on the infamous podcast, and then she’d lost sleep wanting to prove you wrong.
“So. Here’s Abi and Chelsea,” Shelby motioned for you to come and look over her shoulder. She clicked on search tabs one at a time, including one for Ashley, causing a melancholy smile to quiver at the side of your mouth. “Pretty,” you nodded. “Eddie always knew how to pick ‘em.”
“This one looks dangerous,” she pointed to Jo, adjusting her glasses. “They all seem totally cool, actually.”
You scanned the various results from her internet sleuthing. “Which one is that?”
“Oh, that’s Meg,” Shelby clicked on a social media profile, and then pulled up a video of a chef with purple hair preparing something on the morning show.
“Fuckin, Meg,” you said under your breath in your best Eddie voice.
“Doesn’t she own that restaurant in Chicago we couldn’t afford to go to?” Shelby pinched her joint from the ashtray and took a drag, enlarging photos from their menu, concentrating. “I wonder if they accept Groupon.”
You stealthily followed Abby on social media from your private account and planned to buy some of her watercolor paintings. Funny enough, you already knew Emily. The two of you had been part of a mutual friend group for years, and so when Eddie mentioned them being a bitch you had to snort a laugh because…yeah.
“Nice work, Columbo,” you patted Shelby’s shoulder. “You found all of them in under 24 hours. I shall make you a commemorative plaque out of dry macaroni.”
Checking her phone, your sleuth friend mumbled to herself as she went down a rabbit hole of social media comments.
“Not all,” she slipped her bottom lip through her teeth a few times. “Took me a while to find Rose, they go by a different name on social media. The drawings they do are badass, and they like that same actor you do, the one with the Minecraft head.”
“So, I’m the only one out of all of them who didn’t do anything with my life? Nice.”
“Hey,” she said in mock scorn. “I bet none of these bitches can say they’ve had absolutely every career that’s ever existed. It takes a special kind of ingenuity to change jobs every 6 months. Plus, you wrote and published a whole-ass novel.”
“It only sold 37 copies,” you muttered. “Ten of which were to you and mom.”
You held your breath after that, watching the screen, waiting for the one name you hadn’t been able to connect a face to yet, but instead, Shelby slumped on the barstool with a defeated sigh. “Daria might be the one that got away. Haven’t found even a crumb for who or where they might be.”
“Damn,” you said softly. …where are you, Strigoi?
“How does Eddie even pull partners this hot?” Shelby asked, turning to dig for her Visine. “Wasn’t he the one who bragged about being able to burp the alphabet?”
Laughter bubbled in your throat at the memory; the type of laugh that immediately made tears burst from your eyes. You wiped your face in a way that was more of a slap and turned to stare at the gloom settling into the pines outside the window.
“He has a way about him I suppose.”
“I think you should call him,” she blurted, offering you a hit off the purple kush, but you waved her off. “If only to figure out the Daria mystery.”
“Oh yeah? Just call him? Just like that? Oh, hey Eddie I know it’s been almost three decades, but what’s new?”
“I mean, sounds legit to me.”
Remember those rainy days, Squirrel? Remember…
You tossed and turned early the next morning, reaching for your phone to scroll and help push away intrusive thoughts. How many things you’d fucked up, how many friends you’d lost to time and death and sloppy choices.
Maybe not all was lost…
Seattle, early 1990’s
“My lady is here with us tonight,” Eddie rumbled into the mic, gesturing to you from where he stood on that rickety old stage in front of a rowdy crowd at The Crocodile Cafe. Alice in Chains had played there, as well as Mother Love Bone and Mudhoney, back before they were household names. “This next one's for her.”
From your seat at the bar, you locked eyes with him, beaming with pride, but also shaking your head. “I hate you,” mouthing the words made his dimpled grin grow wider.
“Betty Spaghetti…. My beautiful Aquarius twin.”
The ink on your matching Aquarius glyph tattoos were still covered in Aquaphor that night. You’d spent the past two weeks trying to figure out how this chatty Indiana boy had managed to become a permanent fixture in your life.
“I don’t want anything serious,” you’d said into his mouth while your hands were all over each other in the dive bar bathroom the first time you met. Bonding over booze, blow, and the shared trauma of losing a parent, you recognized that emptiness mirrored in each other and wanted to fill it.
“Cool, neither do I,” he mumbled, shoving his jeans down his hips.
But he’d been lying through his teeth, and he confessed that to you a month later down on the wharf, handing over a little squirrel made of shells from the pocket of his leather jacket. He’d been sneaky and bought it at Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, a place the two of you liked to go to visit the mummified remains of a dude named Sylvester.
There was no major foundation for giving him the nickname Squirrel, one day it just happened. He was on the couch in his boxers, stoned out of his gourd, shoveling pretzels into his mouth at such a manic rate that his cheeks looked like they were about to burst.
“So, you knew I was the one back then? In a dark bar after 8 shots?”
He looped his arm with yours as you walked. “Uh-huh, still do,” he leaned in closer. “Still do.”
At that moment, during those days, you worried that you wouldn’t be able to breathe without him. You were both so young, too young to fully comprehend the impact of that time in your life in later years, or what a trauma bond even was.
But then the day came that you’d come to realize would always arrive for you eventually, and that was the time to move on: to other experiences, other people.
You didn’t know at the time that it could be done any other way, and so you made a real mess of things.
He made several attempts to get in touch with you, including the time years later when he found out from your mom that you were in rehab. He wrote to you, but you never wrote back, never returned his calls.
He wasn’t trying to stir up the old flames or get back together; by then, that ship had sailed, and the Eddie Munson you knew never stayed single for long. But he did want you to know that you weren’t alone, that you would always have a friend in him. That he’d meant it when he said he’d always care about you.
Returning to the current reality, you chewed at your thumbnail, staring at the phone number Shelby had written down for you on a yellow legal pad. How she’d managed to get a hold of Eddie Munson’s private cell number, you’d never know.
You were about to end the call after the second ring, flustered, thinking it would be better to send a text, when just then—- he answered.
Eddie recognized the area code, but never thought in a million years that it would be…
“H-hey Squirrel, it’s me.”
Dead silence made your heart flop. Maybe you should say it’s a wrong number, maybe this was a mistake. What if he considered you a lost love, but he no longer wanted anything to do with you? He did cover up the tattoo, after all.
“Well, well, if it isn’t my Betty Fuckin’ Spaghetti,” you could hear the joy in his voice, could hear his wide smile cracking into seasoned laugh lines. “I’ve missed the shit outta you.”
Summary: You're sitting down to listen to one of your favorite podcasts when you hear your name as one of a long line of Eddie's loves, and you have a moment of reflection.
Note: This is a very very very late post in dedication to one of my fandom loves @dr-aculaaa (who is very much on hiatus but still deserves all of the love us resident weirdos have to give) and not only one of my favorite fics Sunday Morning but the offshoot she made for Valentine's Day: Gutterballs.
IT STARTS OUT SWEET BUT ITS A LITTLE ANGSTY AT THE END. SORRY DRAC. WE SORT OF TALKED ABOUT THIS. THE TIMELINE.
You can find my masterlist here.
Please do not interact if you are not 18+.
Enjoy!
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You're sitting on the floor.
To be completely honest, you shouldn't be on the floor. You knew that, your doctor knew that, your team knew that. In fact, they yelled at you when you got down there, legs akimbo in a way that was comfortable for you to sit in but uncomfortable for them to look at, so you could start ripping the sleeves off of this fucking jacket.
You're alone in the studio now, hours after everyone left.
It's just you, a bottle of Tums, your favorite fucking jacket, and the dulcet tones of the man who gave it to you coming from your phone.
“Welcome back to another episode of Gutterballs! My name is Eddie Munson..."
As if he had to introduce himself.
"Nerd," you scoffed fondly.
It's your Wednesday night ritual. Well, not the jacket or the floor or the tums...Gutterballs. At the least, you owed it to your former client; at the most, you owed it to your ex.
And Eddie Munson was both of those things.
Although "ex" is a relative term.
An ex wouldn't still send you a gift basket full of goodies every award season when you barely took care of yourself, the way Eddie did for you.
An ex wouldn't shoot an email with wardrobe recommendations when they hear about some charity concert or something, like you did for Eddie and Corroded Coffin.
Still telling me what to wear Jo?
He would email back almost immediately.
Doesn't seem like anyone else is. I saw you at Lolla Ed. Not cute.
Would be your response.
You don't think I'm cute anymore?
That would go unanswered though.
Until next time.
Because you were exes.
But an ex didn't keep the jacket their ex got them because it was their favorite. Exes didn't take apart said favorite jacket because it got a rip in the sleeve, and then plan to just cut two new sleeves for it. Nor did they spend the last 20-ish years mending the jacket that their ex-slash-former-client got them as an apology for a spontaneous kiss before a red carpet.
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The CFCA awards ceremony wasn't the band's usual haunt but they had composing credits for a film score that was up for nomination. It was a big deal. Something that would take them to a new caliber of their career; not just rowdy rockstars, but well-rounded musicians.
So of course, they were running late.
Their suits all needed a bit of alteration, Eddie was chattering nervously as you hemmed his pants, Gareth drummed a beat on his leg with two of the hangers from your roll rack and Phil, the band's manager, yelling for you all to get a move on.
"Do you want them to look good or not!" You yelled right back. "I'm not having them go up for their award looking like shit Phil!"
"Yeah remember the Grammy's," Jeff pointed out. "That's why you got us a stylist in the first place."
"You'd have thought you paid them to be here or something," Phil grumbled at you from across the room.
"I do pay," you shot up at Eddie with a conspiratorial smile. "With my sanity."
This was your schtick. He let you dress him in whatever dark-romantic victorian-gothic-inspired outfits your former-Catholic heart could dream up, and in return you let him be the spieling midwestern boy that he really wasn't allowed to be anywhere else. Because yeah the band was in charge here really--they were the talent, the money--but Eddie didn't like the whole pomp and circumstance of celebrity. Not anymore, according to him at least.
"The drugs are fun until they're not," he told you once. "We're just...guys from Indiana."
So you'd let them be that in the safety of your studio, shithead manager be damned.
You severed the thread with a swift bite of your teeth and wished the guys good luck with hugs before sending them on their way.
But Eddie...Eddie chose that moment to kiss you.
Well, you kissed each other.
As everyone walked out of the studio to get down to the car, you kissed each other.
And you froze.
Both of you.
Because it was a romantic, world-ending kiss. A kiss of declaration. A kiss of familiarity. The kiss you gave someone when you loved them for a long time and didn't know how to tell them.
Only...you hadn't loved each other for a long time.
Had you?
Hadn't said anything of the sort at least.
That wasn't love...was it?
He left for the awards ceremony and you absolutely spiraled questioning it all. You thought about all the long walks down State Street discussing ideas for this event and that one. The way he got you a membership to the Art Institute so you could sit in front of Salome and Hercules for hours and be inspired. The nights that he just couldn't work on lyrics anymore, so he would come over to sit in absolute silence save for the droning sound of your sewing machine.
The aches of the world were just a little bit easier when you could be near each other, whether it was being inspired or talking shit or sinking further into oblivion.
Was that love?
Eddie must have spiraled too. Because he showed up at your studio past midnight, disheveled and with a green Marshall Field's bag in his hand. A bag containing, you'd find out later, a black wool and leather coat that sat in a window that you'd noted looked nice months ago. One he made the guys make a special stop for before the award ceremony so he could get you to make up for fucking up your professional relationship.
The apologies were stuck on the tips of your tongues though.
And there was a beat before some silent decision was made.
And your lips came back together again, solidifying that decision, even though the words weren't said.
---
“Today on Gutterballs,” Mrs. H’s announces on the phone, breaking you from your reflection, “our lovely listeners at home are in for a real treat. As we record and discuss topics such as first loves, lost loves, and, as you can see, from our current location -body modifications."
“First we have… A spool and thread for Jo."
"She used to poke my ankles like a voodoo doll when she hemmed my pants. I still have the scars, if you wanna check ‘em out. I think that was her way of saying I love you."
Yeah that was the way it was with the two of you.
All the ways you said I love you without the words being said.
And they would never be said.
But that was another story.
"Yeah," you agree with Mrs. H belatedly, seam ripper making quick work of a line of stitches. "Lost love sounds better than ex."
