#ouch sorry

He should've screamed. He should've called for help. Instead he stared into Ed's eyes, desperate for an answer.

"Why?"

[From the "send 🔪 to encounter my muse after they've just killed someone" meme. Doesn't need to be a thread if you dont want it to be, I just thought the angst would be spicey]

Ed stared at the corpse. He felt... nothing. Not... vindication, not anger, not grief or... anything.

His eyes flicked first toward the child backing away down the alley into the dark street, curly blonde hair sticking out from under a plastic viking helmet. Ed dropped the shard of glass that had been digging into his hand. He didn't even remember picking it up, but there were several other bottles littering the street, so he must have grabbed one.

Was that his blood or...

The glass shattered loudly in the too silent street.

"Beo, I..." Ed started weakly. He'd promised both of them he would never expose Beo to violence. Not after everything e'd already endured.

The child turned and ran, disappearing into the dark.

Ed didn't dare chase after Beowulf. E wasn't safe with him anymore. He had no right to take care of Petra's child after what he'd done.

Ed sank to the ground, his body aching from the abuse he'd endured in the fight. He wasn't a fighter, he had no experience or training in martial arts or street fighting, but when he'd seem that man, drunk and pinning Beo to the wall with a predatory look in his eyes, when he heard the things he said he'd do... Ed snapped.

Ed could feel the gash in his side, his shirt sticky-hot and plastered to his side. That would need stitches, if not surgery.

The state was going to take custody of Beo since Ed was clearly violent and unfit to take care of a child. Or at the very least while the investigation was going on.

after everything ends and the dust settles and the grief and sadness sets in, the losers (or, what is left of them) visit his house to meet patty, to say a proper goodbye (because before their childhood bully turned murderer and a spider space clown were bot set on killing them and one thing led to the other and so they never really had much chance to before)

patty (wrecked with sorrow and grief and yet still the kindest woman the losers would ever meet) shows them all pictures of a stanley they never met, the stanley that was tore away from them. its 27 years of memories and milestones they weren’t there for. they sit on his back porch (only five of them now, where there should have been seven. empty gaps in their lives and hearts they’ll never be able to fill) the sun sets and the mosquitoes cover them in bites and they get wine drunk as they flick through pages and pages of stanley. old high school photos, his college graduation, pictures of his wedding, him at the grand canyon, the london eye, a wide grin on his face as he holds his favourite type of bird, all the cheesy photos he and patty took together.

((they take the melancholy trip down memory lane far too often these days, an easier way to catch each other up on the last 27 years spent apart that isn’t through tears and choked out sentences. bill had a terrible haircut through college and richie looks high in every photograph from his youth, they can see the growing loneliness in bens eyes over the years and mike just looks so so tired. bev had burnt half of her photographs, determined to be free of her father and her ex husband, doesn’t like to talk much about her wedding. they saw only a few of eddies old photographs, a brief trip to visit myra as they plan his funeral and god eddie had looked so miserable standing next to his mother in his wedding photograph and richie had cried so hard the losers had to drag him out of the apartment))

they tell patty that stan had seemed so happy, how sorry they are for what happened, for dragging him back into their mess and for dragging him away from her. patty (because its so obvious these strange childhood friends her husband had never mentioned feels all the pain and grief she feels just as worse) tells them he had said to her he always felt that something had felt off, that he was missing something big in his life he just wasn’t sure of what.

they leave late, tipsy and drowned in sorrow and childhood nostalgia. patty lets them keep their favourite photo of stan from their photo album and mike gives her a copy of the photo booth strip (“its the only photo we have of us all together, every thing else got lost to time”) they promise more meet ups, more exchange of stories of the stanley they knew, from his childhood (“so you don’t get spiders in you hair when you’re down here”) or of his and pattys years together (he had cried when he proposed, patty tells them, and they chuckle, leaving the night on a happy note)

"It's fine," he muttered. "I'm good, I swear."

Lexa stares up at her father through round glasses, blinking eyes that appeared twice their size behind such thick lenses. She exhales a shaky breath and scoots the bridge of her glasses farther up the nose they’ve been slipping down. She doesn’t understand.

Her father kneels beside her, expression even more solemn than it usually is. The dim light hanging overhead glints dully off his bald head.

“When is she coming back?” asks Lexa again, voice quieter. Much quieter than earlier, when she screamed and raged and her father left her alone in the house before calling her uncle. Uncle Gustus arrived and swept Lexa up in his arms and held her as she cried, and by the time she calmed down her father returned. Her mother still hadn’t, though. Not since she threw a vase and the glass crunched beneath her heels as she left towing a suitcase behind her.

“She isn’t,” her father says calmly. “She’s never coming back, Lexa. I’m so sorry.”