Eddie Munson

Eventually, he tells Lestat he's ready to go home. Truthfully, he's still completely petrified, worried he'll do something stupid, hurt Chrissy without meaning to, but he's being sent home with a full belly, without the slightest bit of hunger pangs, and he's still himself.

It comes down to that every time he worries. He's still himself, he's just more.

But the more scares him. He can hear things now, peoples' thoughts, and it feels invasive and uncomfortable. He doesn't want to hear Chrissy's thoughts, he doesn't want her to ever be in a position where she has to worry he's listening in. There's also the matter of her being human, needing to exist in the sun, her life being normal and regular, not like his will be anymore. Yeah, he's still himself, but he can't go into the sun and he has to drink blood and he needs to sleep in a coffin.

Maybe not a coffin specifically, but all the light needs to be blocked. That's what Lestat has told him. The easiest way to get that level of safety is a coffin. That's going to be weird, having a coffin in their home, and he doesn't want to make anyone uncomfortable, so he's already thinking about putting it in an unused bedroom. God, he hopes Robin doesn't want to kick him out because of it, though he'd understand if she did.

It's dark, it's safe, and Eddie slinks home, gold eyes almost glowing in the dark. He realizes, once he's home, that he can't enter. He unlocks the door and swings it open and has to stand outside on the front step before he sends Chrissy a text.

u have to invite me in, babe

On the morning of December twenty-fourth, Eddie panics.

He'd asked Chrissy if she'd want to hang out, do something for Christmas, and he'd tried to make it sound as casual as possible, because he knows there's no way she could ever like him. Not the way he likes her, which he knows for certain now after their kiss, even though it had been framed as friends rescuing each other. That should be enough, he knows, to just be her friend, and it is. It's enough.

It still makes hanging out with her difficult at times. He'll get over it, but for right now, every time he sees her, he thinks of the kiss up at Kagura and how warm her mouth had felt against his. The scent of her shampoo or perfume or maybe even just soap, he doesn't know what it had been, only that he'd felt like he could drown in it. He thinks of the light touch of her hand on his arm and he knows he can't think all this stuff if they're going to keep being friends.

So they're friends. They're just friends, but Eddie is still panicked, realizing he's invited her to come over to his place on Christmas Eve, only it looks like a twenty-year-old single guy lives here and he can't let her see his place like this. She hadn't judged the trailer, but honestly, she'd had a lot going on at the time and he could blame that on Wayne. This mess is his fault, though, and so Eddie throws himself into cleaning for perhaps the first time in his life.

When that's done, he goes to get groceries. Maybe it's a mistake on Christmas Eve, the stores are crazy busy, but he needs to have something at his place. He doesn't really know how to cook, so he gets the most expensive frozen pizzas, figuring they're probably the best quality, and he gets snacks, and he gets soft drinks and iced tea and on a whim, he grabs a string of white Christmas lights that are marked down to forty percent off, due to it being so late in the season.

Back home, the groceries get put away and Eddie doesn't have a tree, so he strings the lights up over the window behind the couch, then plugs them in to make sure they work. When he turns off the rest of the lights, they make the apartment glow and, for the first time, it actually feels like Christmas.

On the coffee table sits the one thing he's had ready all this time. A neatly wrapped box with a bow on top, Chrissy's name scrawled in his writing on the tag. Inside is her gold chain, the one she had given him, but the pendant has changed. Around his neck, he still wears the gold 86 alongside his pick. In the box is a similar pendant now, but this one is a 23.

This next year is her year. He can feel it.