So… yeah more Date Everything! reincarnation AU brainrot whoops.
Eddie wants to hate you. He wants to stay away. He should stay away. It’s not your fault everything you do reminds him only of pain. And yet, it still tips him over the edge. He drinks too much whiskey one night (neat, not a cocktail, not again) and is black out drunk at the Breaker Box while Volt is busy on stage. So you bring help Eddie get back up to their apartment. You’ve never been there, and yet you know it, deep in your bones, and you guide Eddie to his bed like you’ve done this a million times before. You fill up a glass of water from the tap— how do you know exactly where they keep their dishes?— and leave it by his bedside. His eyes are closed, and his breathing has evened out, and you can’t help but reach out and brush his hair out of his face like you used to do
You leave the Breaker Box with a kiss to Volt’s cheek and a request to check on Eddie. He asks if you’d like to stay, but you shake your head. You’ve butted into their lives enough for one night; you have a feeling Eddie will not want to see you come morning. “He needs you,” you say, interlacing your fingers with his and pressing a kiss to his knuckles. And Volt just stares at you like he’s seen a ghost, like he has a thousand times before, and you leave for the night.
You come back the next morning, though. Bright and early. You don’t know why, but your body tells you it’s time to wake up, and your feet take you back to the Breaker Box. And even though there is no one inside the club, and the doors are locked, you somehow know exactly where the spare key is and you let yourself in, and walk right up to whatever daily maintenance work needs to be done, because Eddie is going to be hungover this morning and you know how he is when things don’t get done— You stop midrepair, and frown. You don’t know how Eddie. You barely know the man, other than the fact that he can’t look you in the eye on his best days and can’t stand to be in the same room on his worst. And yet. And yet.
Your hands take you through the morning, because you can’t think, you can’t afford to think, you donmy know what to think. The repairs take you longer than usual a long time. It’s no wonder Eddie has been looking worse and worse everytime you see him.
You hear noises from upstairs, an argument breaking out between Eddie and Volt. And it could not more obviously be about you. You try to sneak out, to not draw attention to yourself, to not eavesdrop, but you’re not exactly subtle and you hear their argument halt right before they come down to see you, frozen in your tracks like a deer in headlights.
Eddie looks at you and he suddenly feels inexplicably human again, and his carefully buildtwalls start to crack. “Sorry,” you say, mortified. “I’ll just go—“ but it’s Eddie who catches you by the hand, inspecting your calloused and grease-stained hands, and he asks, “How did you know?” And you freeze in your tracks, but you’re not sure how to answer the question, so you’re just left looking up into Eddie’s pleading, desperate face.
“See?” Volt says, triumphant and pleading. “It’s you.” But that really isn’t fair, to put the weight of a long lost love onto your shoulders, even (especially) if they think it is you. It’s a lot of pressure to live up to a lost lover, and made even worse by the fact that they both keep looking at you like they expect someone else. Some nasty things are said, you run out of the club feeling like you’re wearing someone else’s clothes and sleeping in someone else’s bed, like you’ve stolen their life somehow.
