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Robin spends a glorious month in domestic bliss after moving in with her girlfriend, Nancy, before she comes knocking on Steve’s door.
“You literally still have a key,” he says as he opens the door. “I told you to keep the key for this exact reason.”
She swans into the room with a flourish, face glowing in a way that he can’t begrudge her for as she practically floats over to the ratty couch in the den. “Well, Steven,” she crows, “while our personal space bubbles merged into one a long time ago, the fresh meat has yet to be exposed to my particular brand of clingy. I figured I’d at least pretend to be a respectful human at first.”
Steve snorts as he closes to door, coming over to sit next to – and practically on top of – her. “You?” he asks with a sly smile, reaching over her to snag the remote and switch the channel to something good for background noise, “A respectful human? Nance must be rubbing off on you more than I thought.”
Robin sighs, settling further into the scratchy-soft tweed of the couch. “You have no idea, Stevie,” she says. “That woman is a dream.”
Steve snorts. “Tell me about it.”
“I would love nothing more,” Robin snipes, toeing off her shoes and pushing her mismatched socks under Steve’s thigh. “But I’d much rather get the rundown on the new guy. Eddie, was it?”
Steve hums, shifting as her toes flex absently and stab into the meat of his thigh. Robin’s got pointy fucking everything and her toes are no exception. “Yeah, Eddie,” he says, shifting more of his weight onto her side in retaliation for the toes. “He kind of just showed up, but it’s been going pretty well. The neighbors have yet to complain about the screaming, but that’s the insulation for you.”
The two of them had originally settled on this place because the walls were crazy thick enough that Robin could practice her myriad of horn instruments in her room without too much of it leaking into other rooms.
Wait.
“Screaming?”
Steve glances up at her, puzzled. “Hm?” he says, and then, “oh, yeah, screaming, Eddie’s always, uh, caterwauling at all hours. Says it’s part of the job description, you know?”
Robin does not know, but she gets distracted by a new knick-knack on the mantle and forgets to follow up on that piece of information.
She’s there for a few hours catching up with Steve, but never actually meets the illusive new roommate.
“He’s kind of shy,” Steve admits, “And he works the graveyard shift most nights so there’s a fifty-fifty that he’s even active at the moment. You’ll meet him eventually.”
She comes over again the next week, and the week after that, and the week after that, but still no Eddie. He’s present in Steve’s stories and in tiny details throughout the apartment and while she’s yet to actually lay eyes on the man, what she hears and sees is enough to start a small ball of worry rolling around in her brain.
“He says it’s short for Abaddon,” Steve says over brunch one day, completely stone-faced as if this is a completely normal thing to say about a completely normal person. “But I’m pretty sure he’s making it up. I literally saw his full name on the contract and it wasn’t that. Couldn’t tell you what it was though, letters were being difficult that day.” Robin loves his beautiful brain and all of its imperfect glory.
“Abaddon is a demon,” she says, and Steve just nods along in a ‘well, there you go’ way.
“That tracks,” Steve says, and then refuses to elaborate .
“Don’t put that there,” Steve says another day while she helps him unload the groceries he’d needed to pick up on their way back from a shopping trip, “If you leave anything sugary out, Eddie will eat it all and then be bouncing through the walls for days. He’s like a sugar vacuum that chooses to make it everyone else’s problem.”
Bouncing through the walls?
She sets the empty grocery bag down on the counter and takes a few steps into the living room, looking over the room with a discerning eye. She’d noticed, of course, the small knick-knacks accumulating around the room, all small pieces of another person like a blinking neon “Eddie Iz Here” sign. But the ball of worry is growing bigger and bigger, like a snowball down a mountain in a cartoon.
There’s an unusually large number of candles in the room, now that she looks at it. There’s one on almost every surface, positioned in an almost deliberately circular pattern around the room. Steve has a sensitive nose, isn’t a big fan of most fragrances and sneezed in Nancy’s face the one time she’d come around to their apartment wearing a particularly floral perfume.
“You can light one, if you want,” Steve says, having caught her staring. “Just don’t let me forget to blow it out.”
“Are they yours?”
Steve comes in from the kitchen, looking at her oddly, “You know I’m not a huge fan of strong smells, Robbie,” he says, “they’re all Eddie’s, he uses them to cover the smell before I get back. I don’t mind a hint of it, you know, but he’s always coming and going. Too much, and the apartment starts to smell like eggs.”
“Eggs?” Robin asks, “you mean like sulfur?” and Steve shrugs.
“Sure, I guess, if that’s the scientific name for it. Really stinks up the place after a while, ergo the candles. It’s the worst when he’s here with his friend, uh, Azazel? Abaddon? Fuck, I can’t remember. Dude was basically speaking in tongues when I met him and it was so long ago I’m afraid to ask, you know?”
Robin knows, leading them down a tangent about the new girl at her work who always wears a different name on her nametag. It would be genius if it weren’t for the fact that Robin now can’t remember which of the names is her real one.
It isn’t until later, curled into Nancy’s side that it hits her why those names had sounded familiar.
She means to bring it up the next time she calls it takes two tries, but when Steve finally picks up the phone he’s obviously harried. “Sorry about that, Robs,” he says. “Eddie’s little hellspawn set herself and the couch on fire again so I had to take care of that.”
“What?”
“Kiki,” Steve says, and then with a sharp sound of realization, “Oh! Crap! Did I not tell you about Kiki yet? Yeah, she’s Eddies new impish little hellspawn. Says he summoned her into existence with the power of manifestation or some shit –”
What!? Summoned her?
“ – but I’m pretty sure he just found her in a dumpster or something. She’s a cute little ball of soot but she’s not very bright. Likes to spontaneously set herself on fire when she wants attention which is, like, fitting I guess.”
“Oh?” Robin breathes, a little distracted with how fast her mind is racing.
“Yeah, Eddie’s a deep cut kind of guy. Kiki is short for, uh, fuck what was it? Kikakee? No, Kikalee? Kikalee! Kikalee Cat. Some kind of like, Hellfire thing. Really fitting for a fucking soot demon.”
Holy Fuck. That snowball of worry? Yeah, fuck that. Avalanche.
Jesus Christ.
“I’m coming over,” she says, because holy crap. Holy Crap. What the fuck is going on over there?
“Sure,” Steve says absently, like he hasn’t just said the most absolutely batshit thing she’s ever heard. “Oh! Could you pick up a dozen eggs on the way?”
When she gets to the apartment, eggs in hand, Steve looks completely normal and aside from a small singe on the couch cushion, everything looks the same as it did the last time she was here. “Where’s Kiki?”
Steve shrugs. “She’s shy.”
Robin takes a deep breath and nods. She didn’t want to have to do this, but it looks like it’s time to bring in reinforcements. “I need to run to the bathroom,” she says, beating a hasty retreat to the guest bath to take a breather before she calls Nancy but as soon as she takes a step inside she freezes.
There is red writing on the mirror, the hand was scratchy and snarled, but the letters are melting a bit at the edges, leaving streaks of red all over the glass. It looks, Robin thinks with a sinking feeling, a lot like blood.
Retrieve The Unborn , the message says, and Robin has to swallow so she won’t scream.
She takes a deep breath and turns ever so slightly, but the breath chokes in her throat at the sight of more writing across the walls of the shower. In one corner, that same scratchy hand has written out a weirdly poetic metaphor relating a wedding to a funeral. In another, a solved math equation where the answer is 666.
But most terrifyingly, across the largest wall and in the brightest, drippiest red she’s ever seen in her life is a terrifyingly intricate pentagram.
Oh god.
“Steve?!” she screams, tripping over herself in her haste to get out of the bathroom. “Holy fucking shit, Steve!”
There’s a clattering from the kitchen where she’d left Steve which soothes her ever so slightly, but there’s also a surprisingly heavy thud from behind the door that used to lead to her bedroom.
Eddie’s bedroom.
Eddie’s here.
“What’s going on?” Steve calls, coming over to her with heavy concern warring with confusion in his tone, but Robin is frozen, staring at the door to Eddie’s room.
Steve calls her name, tries to get her attention, but Robin can’t look away from that door as shadows move across the gap at the bottom and the latch clicks as it’s opened.
Goodbye, cruel world.
The door opens, and Robin is expecting horns. Cloven hooves and bat wings are pretty standard demon fare too, right? Maybe black angel wings? Or, like, red skin?
But the person who stands in the doorway looks… human.
He’s about Steve’s height, but lankier, with a full head of messy curls that he runs a hand through as he yawns, taking in the sight of Robin, frozen in the bathroom doorway across the hall.
He blinks, languid and drowsy and unconcerned at being woken up by her screaming.
He doesn’t look like a demon at all.
“Oh, hey,” he says. “You must be Robin, I’m Eddie.”
“You don’t look like a demon at all,” Robin says, like a dumbass.
There’s a moment of pause, Steve’s head cocking to the side in her peripheral vision as Eddie seems to process that statement. “Sorry to disappoint,” he seems to settle on. “Hard to be intimidating in LOTR jammies,” he says, completely unbothered by the accusation or insinuation. He stifles a yawn and turns to Steve.
“Did you pick up eggs?”
Later, after sharing a bottle of the good stuff while they pass around one of Eddie’s impeccably rolled blunts, Robin holds Kiki on her lap and lays out exactly how she had come to such a hilarious – in hindsight – conclusion.
Steve seems mortified by the misunderstandings, but Eddie can’t stop laughing.
“I can’t believe you think weed smells like eggs, dude,” he says, “that one’s totally on you but I guess I get it.” He gestures to Steve’s head, “You probably have something crossed somewhere in there from all those sports concussions, but no worries. I’m totally telling Argyle you called him Azazel though, he’ll think it’s fucking hilarious.”
Steve groans. “I’m sorry!” He says, “but I totally blame you for most of that mixed message shit. I was literally just repeating things you said verbatim.”
Eddie shrugs, unbothered as he melts off the couch and onto a sprawl across the plush rug. “What can I say,” he muses to the ceiling, “I’m committed to the bit.”
“And the writing in the bathroom?” Robin can’t help but ask because that had been downright terrifying.
“Yeah, sorry about that Robbie,” Eddie says, looking truly contrite for having spoked her. “They’re just bath crayons. Like for kids to use when you’re taking a bath? You can like, write on the walls and then wash them off. I use them to write down lyric ideas or whatever comes to me while I’m showering so I don’t forget. Red is the freakiest so I usually use it less but I hate buying a new pack until I’ve used all of them up so….”
Robin nods. “Yeah, no, that makes sense.”
“They’re also good for leaving messages for each other,” Steve adds, “since our schedules are so different.”
That makes sense, too.
“So,” Robin drawls, “the unborn?”
Steve snorts as Eddie bursts into laughter once more. Through his giggles, Robin barely makes out…
“We were out of eggs!”