Archive of Our Own ^beta

let this be the folklore, not in a field
not in a river, not mouth half-open,

knock-kneed under the tall grass
behind the baseball field.

not in a park or at the bottom of a drained pond,
not in their boyfriends’ trunks, their boyfriends’ closets,

or between the floorboards
in his house, they are alive 

Okay, so, like, here’s the thing:

Eddie was dead. Eddie had died. Eddie had rode into a cyclone of murderous fuckin’ bats with faces that looked like dicks , hand to God, they had penis faces and why was no one talking about that, he wants to talk about that, and he’d gotten full-on Prometheus’d. Sure, he was protecting Dustin and buying Nancy, Steve, and the gang time; sure, he’d gotten the Boromir treatment and, like, yeah, sure, he does love that for him, if he had to pick a way to go and all that. But Eddie was dead.

Except: he’s not.

He’s lying on his back, surrounded by the aforementioned demo-dick-bats, and he’s got chunks of himself missing and he remembers dying — he remembers the whole bloody, painful, awful mess of it. He remembers lying in Dustin’s arms and telling him he loves him. He remembers thinking he wished Steve was there, because if he was gonna go out and bite it doing something stupidly heroic and heroically stupid, he wanted one last pretty thing to look at and Steve was nothing if not easy on the eyes. And if Dustin was a hobbit and if Eddie was Boromir, then where was Aragorn to tell him he had conquered where few had gained such a victory and bid him be at peace?

But: he’s not.

Eddie was dead and now he’s alive, even if he’s still sort of, kind of, almost definitely bleeding the fuck out.

So, like, what a kick in the ‘nads, right?

Eddie gets up. It takes him a while, but he gets up. He’s pleasantly surprised to learn that he is not, in actual fact, bleeding out; he’s covered in blood, yeah, but his wounds? Miraculously unhorrific. In fact. They look like something that happened a very long time ago, a dip and valley or two in the planes of his stomach, but the scarring is pale white with time, faint, forgotten.

Still, he feels like he got fuckin’ pancaked by a semi. He thinks, duh, he was dead, he was ripped apart, and even if he’s been healed by some sort of magical higher power or lower Upside Down demon or whatever he’s still suffering the after effects of a truly wild amount of blood loss. He thinks he was maybe missing a kidney there, for a second.

But he gets up and he pats himself down and he puts one foot in front of the other, which is a dangerous business of course, Frodo Baggins, but what other choice does he have? He picks a direction and he walks, arms around his bloody but unmarred torso, occasionally scratching at the itchy bits of flaking blood on his neck.

He wanders. He’s disoriented and confused and there’s something so unsettling about remembering your own death. He thinks, at first, maybe this is just another fun little trick from Vecna, but it’s too clear, too sharp, too real . This isn’t just some bullshit — well, technically, he means, it is, it’s all a bunch of bullshit, but this is different bullshit, he thinks. An entirely new side to the bullshit, a twenty-side die of bullshit, if you will, wandering alone and terrified and calling out for Dustin, Steve, Nancy, Robin, anyone, everyone, please — 

No one answers. He’s unsurprised. Of course there’s no response to his call: because Eddie was dead , he fucking died, cradled in poor Dustin Henderson’s arms — shit, fuck, and he hates himself for that — and yeah he got left behind.

He doesn’t blame them; he would’ve left him behind too. He’s a runner, after all. And he’s covered in blood, soaked with it, doused like an extra in a bad horror film, yet who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him? There’s no reason to think he would’ve been worth dragging back right side up. It’s just that he’d been sort of hoping, maybe — 

In the end he’s wrong: it’s really just not his year after all, is it?

So Eddie walks and walks and walks, all alone through the awful, life-threatening forest.

He notices things, on his aimless trudge through the plane of shadows. There are cracks, for one, huge rifts and seams through the earth, bloody gashes that pulse and move like a live thing. One stretches from the remains of the trailer that he didn’t dare look at too closely, stretching in two different directions, and he thinks of the gates that had been opened by each of the deaths, by Chrissy’s body, mangled and terrible, above helpless little ol’ him. He clenches his teeth because otherwise he’ll scream.

He deliberately moves away from them, those big ones, but there are smaller ones, forming and closing quickly, a push and pull. He presses his hands against one, once, despite being aware in a sort of dream logic kind of way that he won’t be able to push through. He’s not sure why. They’d gone through the ceiling of the trailer multiple times just fine; and Nancy had related a story of a small gate in the woods to them as they were planning that day — just yesterday, Christ, just yesterday —  and she had pushed her way through that.

But his hands just press and don’t break through. There’s a little give but it burns to the touch and he sits back on his heels, bloody fingers scrabbling fruitlessly against this bloody seam. 

Eddie wonders, not for the first time and definitely not for the last: what the fuck is happening? Like, what is he missing here? Why can’t he just —  what does he have to do? This had all seemed so simple, for a given value of simple, back there in the RV with Nancy’s steely eyes and Dustin’s whip-smart brain and Erica’s sarcasm, Robin’s faith, Max’s bravery, Steve’s dumb confidence, Lucas’s surety. So what is Eddie missing here and now? Is there some fucking passcode he needs? 

He thinks, speak friend and enter, and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes so hard he sees stars burst across them. He holds in a sob.

Again, he gets up and walks. There’s fuck all else for him to do. He hasn’t run into anything yet, none of the horrors they’d all been so assured would be waiting for them. He sees demobats — absolutely fuck that shit in particular — upwards over his head, circling like birds in flight, and the vines shiver slightly and there is groaning and growling just at the edge of his hearing but nothing comes for him.

There’s a dark shadow, spreading over everything, and he swears he can hear his own name, hushed like a secret.

Eddie hugs himself close again, stepping carefully. They weren’t in time, he thinks, and Max — Max —

“Shit,” he whispers.

His feet take him forward without thought, the shadow at his back, and he finds himself on the steps of his last prison: the high school. It’s fitting, he thinks, for it to be his prison here too.

He wanders the halls, as terrible below as above, and it’s even worse than being alone within the woods of Upside Down Hawkins. That’s almost a known quantity at this point, the horrible things lurking out there, wild and inhuman and twisted, because he knows how to fight that — sure, not particularly successfully, he does have a one hundred percent death rate, after all, yay him, fuck fuck fuck — but here —

Here, there are echoes. Here, there are shadows of people above him, and he screams, now, he screams up to them; but no matter his screaming, no matter his begging, no matter how he presses his fingers into the shifting light, three short, three long, three short, three short, three long, three short, SOS SOS SOS SOS —

Here, no one seems to hear him.

Growing up, Eddie loved mysteries and riddles almost as much as fantasy. It’s probably what makes him a great DM these days: he loves a well crafted story with something to solve, and the journey along the way. He likes to leave breadcrumbs and clues and false leads and red herrings; it makes putting the puzzle together correctly even sweeter.

Mom had loved them too. It’s one of the few things he remembers about her with clarity. Most of his memories of her have become scuffed and faded over time, like a favorite VHS you play too much; or they’re too sad for him to pull out and examine closely — skin and bones in that shitty one bedroom as the sickness ate away at everything she had, his old man screaming at him that it was all his fault, shaking his shoulders so hard there’d be fingerprints practically in the bones of them, Mom crying silently, begging him to stop, the bruises on both their faces and their bodies and Uncle Wayne’s fury as he bundled them both up and out way too late.

But he remembers Mom reading him The Hobbit perfectly, even if he thinks maybe he’s getting the sound of her voice wrong these days, too far removed from happier times. She’d read him The Hobbit, and then the first two Lord of the Rings, and Eddie was ten when he took over for Return of the King, Mom too sick to get through it on her own. She read him her favorites in between too, starting him out on a collection of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew before the more grown up mysteries began to make their way into the rotation. She read to him about the adventures of Spenser and Warshawski in between the ones of Frodo and Sam, Uncle Wayne lurking in the doorway to listen to his sister’s fading voice.

And every night before bed, as she marked their place in what they were reading, she’d whisper to him in the thin, reedy voice he’s almost positive she had, “What is mine but only you can have?” 

“Your heart, Ma,” he’d giggle, and she’d kiss him on the forehead.

“Exactly right, baby.”

Her books had been one of the only things he’d kept, after, and while he returned to Tolkien like it was his baby blanket, he’d found comfort too in her dog-eared Clive Cusslers and Simon Cruzs and Le Carrés, her copy of The Name of the Rose which was more ballpoint pen than printed ink than anything it seemed, filled with her thoughts and notes and theories and analysis, the shadow of her love stretching long over him.

They’re so clean, the mysteries of George Smiley and Dirk Pitt and Jack Ryan too, everything tied up in a neat little bow after two hundred odd pages. Sure, there are the things that linger, but they’ll just crop up in the next story, something to investigate later, branching paths. He takes inspiration and comfort from them, feels the ghost of Mom’s hand on his shoulder as he builds his next campaign and plans for every outcome. He pours his heart and soul and mind and body into his own stories and mysteries and riddles, like he can bring back her memory that way.

Uncle Wayne despairs of him, wonders constantly how he can read so much and do so much math with DnD but still struggle so much in school, and Eddie used to wonder at that too. It’s the structure, maybe, and the expectations: reading with Mom had been about closeness and care and love. No one had great expectations — hah — for Eddie except Mom and Uncle Wayne, and Mom is gone and Wayne now just wants him to give up the drug business, turn away from the path that his no good piece of shit brother in law’s genetics wants to send Eddie down. Eddie had thought this year would be it, he’d do right by Uncle Wayne’s dreams for him, Mom’s memory, and get the hell out of Hawkins and make a new life somewhere in a place beyond the quarry.

It doesn’t matter, in the end, because as much as Mom would walk him through this mystery or that, give him some faded riddle to solve, she was gone and Eddie — Eddie found a place beyond the quarry, alright, and Eddie is there now, in a riddle of his own making, and the riddle is this: 

What is alive and dead at the same time?

Answer: Eddie Munson, alone in the plane of shadows.

Slowly, he becomes aware of a — of a presence of some kind, something moving at the edges of his vision, inching slowly ever closer. He hugs himself a little tighter as he walks through the wine-dark and vine covered halls of Hawkins High. The echoes of the voices above tease him, lull him, and he worries that there’s a monster in here with him.

The Balrog, he thinks, for surely he is in the mines of Moria now as the Shire continues to burn above him.

The shadow trails closer, and in the echoes he swears, he swears, he can hear someone calling his name.

He barricades himself within the twisted version of the junior English classroom, pushes desk after desk, chair after chair, in front of the door until he’s got a veritable mountain in front of it. He puts himself in the far corner next, an eye on his wall and another on the window, and presses his hands to his face once again, trying not to cry, his lungs struggling in the thick, terrible air. He wonders if this is the way he dies, not gutted, not semi-heroically, but choking on the poisoned air. Figures.

“Get it together, Munson,” he says. “C’mon, man, get it the fuck together.”

Eddie wraps his arms around his legs, presses his left cheek into the tops of his knees hard enough that he thinks his teeth might split open his gums, and catches sight of a pair of sneakers just inches away from his own. He drags his eyes up from the pristine white Reeboks and the pulled-up socks, along the bare legs, to the edge of a knife-pleated white, green, and gold skirt.

“I’m really fucking losing it, huh?” he asks Chrissy. His voice sounds foreign to himself, so desperate, so tired. He wants to cry but knows he can’t. He won’t stop, once he does.

She stares at him with her big eyes. She says, “I don’t know. But you need to run.”

The shadow is creeping its fingers beneath his desk and chair barricade, tripping its way towards him, and Eddie doesn’t know if he should trust the thing beside him — it’s a trap, part of him screams, and another part says, well, I mean, this might as well happen, right? — but either way he’s gotta get the fuck out of dodge.

So he does what his nice hallucination asks of him, and he darts forwards, grabs a chair from his pile up, and whips it as hard as he can through the window. He’s up on the second floor, of course, but he’s had worse exits out of buildings — out of realities, he thinks with a hysterical giggle — so he just sort of tosses himself out of the shattered window pane and hopes for the best.

He hits the ground and rolls with his impact, but nothing feels broken, so he pops back up and starts running in a random direction. This — this is what he’s good at, running away from his fucking problems.

His hallucination runs beside him, keeping pace easily in her pretty little low-top Reeboks. He chances a look and sees them getting muddied now, and she’s otherwise how he remembers her last. Not — not that, but just before that, laughing at him out in the woods in her cheerleader uniform as he tries to get her to relax around him, this girl in white and gold and green on the last day of her life. Neither of them knew it at the time; Eddie wonders absently if there’s anything he would’ve done differently. A million things, he thinks, and nothing at all all the same.

As they run, he thinks she looks perhaps a shade younger than he remembers but that could just be a trick of the patina of the Upside Down, which is coloring her in the same as him. No blood, though, and Eddie’s grateful for that. After all, he’s the one with all the blood on his hands, in all meanings and turns of phrases.

Eventually, he realizes where his terrified feet are taking him. Second verse, same as the first, pulling up outside the Upside Down mirror of Reefer Rick’s boat house. For reasons he doesn’t want to examine too closely, he opens the door for his hallucination to walk in first and, as she stares curiously around with her big, frightened eyes, he takes himself over to the boat itself and curls himself inside its curves once again.

He thinks, suddenly, of Steve. He wishes he was here. He wishes they were all here, but there’s something about Steve in particular that he wants right now. Not just the eye candy, though that’s a plus, but his steadfast surety and bravery and reluctant heart. Aragorn, he thinks, my brother, my king. God, he’s such a cliche; he’s not sure why he’s surprised.

“This is totally crazy,” he says to the ceiling.

“Probably,” says Chrissy.

He laughs until he cries, and then, like he predicted, he just cries.

Eddie gives himself a few hours in the safety of Reefer Rick’s boat house, circa 1983, apparently, to have a nice fucking breakdown. But, eventually, he digs his heels into his eyes once again, scrubs the salt trails from his face, and ignores the look he’s getting from the corner of the room where his psychotic break is sitting. He’s absolutely got to get his shit together and work the problem.

You see, he’s a planner, by nature; most people don’t think this, because of the whole, like, everything about Eddie. He’s carefully crafted himself this way: some people have their nice church manners to trot out when people look their way, Eddie’s got the Son of Satan paint job. He likes it that way, most of the time, though it has backfired fucking spectacularly this past week.

But Eddie’s a Dungeon Master. He’s got plans within plans and, yeah, sure, maybe this all hadn’t been in the road map and maybe he’s been panicking real terrible-like, but now is the time to buckle down and figure his way out of this mess.

He thinks of the trailer park and the lines running from it that he can’t exactly touch. He thinks of the darkness on the edge of town, as it were, and the way he’s being largely ignored by the denizens of the Upside Down — besides, of course, just whatever the fuck the shadow at his heels is — and frankly all of this is stuff that he resolutely does not want to explore at this juncture, okay, like, this feels like a trap he’d set for a campaign, waiting to let the players spring it for themselves.

But this isn’t DnD, this is his whole fucked ass reality and Eddie has to investigate. He’s gotta put on his daddy pants and once more into the fucking breach of it all.

So: one of the gates, it is.

And how convenient he’s got one right outside his door, right?

Right.

Fuck.

With his Chrissy-shaped breakdown in tow, he heads outside after taking a few fortifying breaths and also casing the place for a little herbal courage, calm his frayed — nay, shattered — nerves. Should he smoke a mystery blunt from the distorted reflection Reefer Rick’s ‘83 stash? No. Is he going to do it anyway? Listen, Eddie’s been accused of crimes by the dozen, not of making smart decisions, okay?

Chrissy side-eyes him as he lights up and he just shrugs, one eyebrow raised. They step carefully down the path, Eddie crouching low with the blunt hanging out of the corner of his mouth, his hallucination following his lead, and they stop at a copse of deaden trees to look out over the salt-flat dried earth of Lover’s Lake.

He takes stock, takes another hit, and edges forward, careful step by careful step.

There’s a lot of activity, he notes, as he creeps ever closer. Bats circling above, diving bombing at the gash in the ground that Eddie had lately been spewed out from as he followed the girls after Steve. But they’re not breaking through, not all of them; maybe one in ten that dive in get through, or one in twenty. The rest bounce off like they’ve encountered a force field, shrieking in rage.

He thinks, briefly, about getting closer, because, yeah, he’s got his own odds and they’re better than that, with those things nine times out of ten pretending like he’s not even there — again, not looking directly at that shit — but patrolling at the rim of the gate is a big, mean-looking mother fucker who fits the Party’s description of their first monster, the goddamn demogorgon, shit, these kids are ruining DnD for him by the minute, he swears, and he is not about that mess, thanks.

Eddie inches backwards, returns to his copse of trees where Chrissy had stayed behind, still wide-eyed and terrified. It’s nice that his subconscious is manifesting his fear in her as well as his guilt, he thinks. He takes another hit of the blunt.

“What next?” his hallucination asks.

He pinches out the blunt, tucks it in the pocket of his jeans, and says, “Onwards and upwards, my dear breakdown. We’ve got three more gates to choose from.”

“Gates?”

“Gates,” he repeats. He gestures with his hands. “Liminal spaces, if you will, where the veil between two worlds has become thin and we can shadow walk.”

She blinks.

“Just trust me,” he said. “We’re going to follow the yellow brick road, and it’s off to the trailer park we go.”

As Eddie walks, the Chrissy delusion at his side, he takes stock of his surroundings once more.

The rifts around him, those shadow paths back home, look as if they are hardening, at least, of course, to him and the things in the Upside Down. He stops at one point, crouched behind some bushes, to watch a pack of what Lucas and Dustin had described to him as demodogs attempt to go through the seams. A few slip through, as he’d observed with the bats, but most bounce right the fuck off with increasing frequency.

He files this information away, same with how they by and large ignore his presence, to interrogate at a later time. It has to mean something, he thinks, but he’s not quite sure what on earth it does.

Beside him, his vision of Chrissy continues to stare wide-eyed around them, flinching at every noise, and Eddie finds a sort of perverse pleasure in not being the new kid anymore. Sure, she’s a figment of his goddamn imagination or whatever but at least he’s got some base knowledge going for him, no longer just along for the ride and hoping for the best.

Well. He’s still hoping for the best — the best being getting the fuck out — but he’s not exactly holding his breath. He’s trying real hard not to give into despair but there’s only so much relentless, white-knuckled optimism and faith in the friends you’ve had for, like, a week can get you in the face of absolute horror and disaster, you know? Eddie’s a planner and he’s a realist too, which sucks pretty big time right now.

“Where are we?” Chrissy asks as they walk.

“It’s the dark reflection of our world,” he tells her. “I’m not entirely, like, sure how it came into being, like, in our reality, beyond probably some sort of fucked up government shit, but it exists alongside our own material plane. There’s some sort of terrible shadow monster or something that, like, rules it? I suppose you’d say? And it wants to consume our own plane.”

She wraps her arms around herself, a mirror of how Eddie has mostly been walking. “How did we get here?”

“You? I don’t know,” he says. He knows: he hallucinated her.   “Not, uh, not exactly. How much do you — do you remember anything?”

Chrissy touches her eyes, lingering. She says, “A clock was ticking. And a voice — there was a voice.”

“What kind of voice?” he asks.

“I don’t know.” She shakes her head, tucks her fingers back in her armpits. “I think it was a man’s voice.”

There’s no clock for Eddie, but there is a voice and he's not entirely certain of the gender of the voice he’s been hearing say his name, faintly, over and over. It could be a man, he thinks, but also it could be anything else. It’s been giving him a headache, that’s for goddamn sure. He asks, “Was he saying your name?”

“Sometimes,” she tells him. “But mostly he says — he asks where I’m trying to go? And then he says he can — don’t cry? He says it’s time for my suffering to end.”

Vecna, he thinks. He wants to cry again.

“But after that,” she’s telling him, “I don’t remember anything after that. And — and before. It’s like a dream, more than anything. Was that real? Eddie, was that real?”

“I don’t know,” he whispers. He’s lying: that was definitely real. But if his rampantly overactive imagination is conjuring something that doesn’t remember anything beyond that, he’s not going to force the matter. She’s not real, not really, but he’s not — he’s not a monster . He says again, “I don’t know. But you’re here now” — for a given value of here now — “so don’t, uh, don’t worry about it okay?”

He’s going to try not to too: she’s at his side, real or not real, and she doesn’t have the worst parts — the worst part, elbow snapping like a twig, her eyes, which she’s touching again, fuck — and she looks younger than he remembers, he’s sure of that now. But she’s here, impossibly, some figment of his guilt manifesting, and he grinds his teeth together again and puts one foot in front of the other.

There’s a second gate, on their path, the one where that Fred kid ate it. He was a dweeb, for sure, and Eddie wonders, somewhat unkindly, what the dweeb was dwelling on that got him got. He wonders about Chrissy too, but he’ll never know. If he thinks a little harder at it, he’s pretty sure she only knows what he knows; that story she just gave him must’ve been gleaned, he thinks, from what Max had said of her own experience, he’s sure of it.

But this gate’s a bust too, in the end. There’s nothing crowding ‘round it, trying to get through, so Eddie doesn’t approach it as cautiously as he’d tried to get close to the one at the lake. Unlike with the other cracks that he’s been coming across, he manages to get somewhere. He gets a whole fist through and hope swells in his chest like a tidal wave, threatening to drown him with the undertow, before he’s brutally ripped backwards.

Chrissy screams, EDDIE

It’s like something had grabbed hold of the back of his jacket, one big fist, and fucking yanked. The invisible hand sends him sailing through the air like someone’s tossed aside doll, and he skids and bounces to a halt something like twenty feet backwards from the rip. 

He lies on his side, dazed and winded but unbroken, for a moment. Then he shoves himself into a sitting position and looks at the gate.

“Oh, fuck you very much,” he shouts at it, gasping. It looks hard now, same as the others he’s tried to touch. What a fucking crock of shit this is right now, fuck .

Chrissy runs to his side and makes to reach out but he shies away from her concerned hands. He’s careful not to touch, just waving her away, because he thinks if he went to touch her and his fingers just slipped through her like mist, he might start screaming and never stop.

“Eddie,” she says, breathless, and with a start he thinks, That wasn’t her calling my name just now.

The ghost of small fingertips trips down his spine and he scrambles up, looking around like a madman.

“Eddie,” Chrissy says again.

“Did you hear that?” he demands.

“What? What?”

“Just now,” he says. “Someone said my name.”

She blinks, confused. “Yeah? I did?”

Eddie shakes his head. “No. No, no no. No, that wasn’t you.”

He runs his hands through his hair, dislodges the bandana he forgot was on his head, digs his nails into his scalp. What the fuck, what the fuck —

“C’mon,” he says, ignoring his hallucination’s concerned look. What’s one more fucking breakdown, huh? “We’re almost there.”

Eddie marches on towards the trailer park, picking up his speed so much that Chrissy is nearly jogging beside him. He stops just inside the bounds of it, fist clenching, chest heaving, and he stares. His jaw works. On his initial flight, after all that business of living and dying and living again, he hadn’t taken much stock of his old stomping grounds beyond the fact that it all looked irrevocably fucked . And now —

It’s torn asunder, nearly all of it. This is the first epicenter he’s seen that has homes around it, and it’s as if someone put the whole of it in a snow-globe unsecured before shaking it around. Structures are tossed haphazardly, like scattered toys, and the rift itself is thick and angry, swollen. Nightmare creatures are scrabbling against it, trying to burrow their way through something that is refusing passage, and Eddie inches around it, Chrissy tucked so close behind his shoulder that he imagines he can feel her chest rise and fall with every breath.

He takes them to the trailer, cracked clean in two, and he enters the broken cage he and Dustin had constructed, ascending into a place that is home but not home. Inside, he looks up and feels sick: on one side, there is the terrible sky of the Upside Down and, on the other, a gate that is hardened and glazed over. There’s no bedsheet dangling, and he cannot see anything through it, like whatever was on the other size had been wiped clean off the face of the earth. Nothing is going through it, for love or money.

For the first time, he feels a trickle of fear in his chest, but not for him: for the others. Had they made it out in time? He’d been so sure, every moment up until now, convinced that he’s the only one that’s been left behind and —

What if he’s wrong? What if the reason he can’t get out is because there’s nothing to get out to?

He spins away from the gate and leans up against the one standing wall, one arm over his head and the other hand braced in front of him. He dry-heaves; he can’t remember when he last ate, drank water.

He wants to go home, he wants to go home, he wants to go home.

“Eddie?” asks Chrissy. Her voice is thick with unshed tears.

He squeezes his eyes shut. He gathers himself.

“One more,” he tells her. “One more.”

He doesn’t want to do this. He doesn’t want to go there. He knows what the rifts mean and he knows exactly where the fourth and final gate is; he knows exactly whose body is judgment day. But what else? What else is he going to find there? Who else is he going to find there?

But what if it’s the only chance he has?

Eddie dashes the tears that have built up in his lash-line and sucks in a deep breath. He turns to the door.

“One more,” he repeats.

He heads outside first, glances this way and that, trying to gauge the best direction to go. Obviously, they can follow alongside the rift, as they’d basically done to get from Fred’s gate to Chrissy’s, but he’s concerned that’s not the smartest plan he could have. He chews on his bottom lip, thinking, which is when he notices a bit of movement across the way and the flash of something copper bright. His entire body goes rigid.

Up until, oh, ten seconds ago, he’s been happily passing Chrissy off as a hallucination, or maybe a delusion — and, like, nice delusion, sure, but a delusion nonetheless. That’s a little harder to believe now when the flash of movement and color he spots resolves itself into the figure of Max, sitting on the steps of the trailer across the way.

She’s tiny, this Max, is the thing, and yeah Eddie’s seen her like that probably. But he didn’t know her back then, and he doesn’t really know her now, so why would he be hallucinating a twelve year old version of a girl he’s only tangentially familiar with because she’s wrapped up in the same fucked up life or death, upside down bullshit as him?

Two coins add up to thirty cents, he thinks abruptly, but one of them is not a nickel.

Max waves a hand at him and he stumbles forwards like that big, invisible hand is drawing him again, Chrissy — Chrissy, oh God — right behind him.

“Looks like the bullshit is worse than I thought,” he says aloud, only a little hysterical, and sits down hard on the steps next to Tiny Max. He asks, “How’s your day been going?”

“Fucked,” says Tiny Max.

“Sing it, sister,” he tells her and, again and again and again, drops his head into his hands, fighting the urge to scream.

So the facts are these:

1. Eddie was alive and then he was dead and now he is alive again;
2. He’s trapped in the Upside Down;
3. He is either having an Upside Down slash reanimation related psychotic break; or
4. Something is bringing the victims of Vecna back to life; and
5. He’s like eighty, ninety percent positive that #3 is wrong.

Victims of Vecna, he thinks. Sick band name.

“Okay,” he says. He drags his hands down his face, pulling at his eyes, inhales deeply — coughs a little, then, because seriously the air quality is absolutely shit , he does not recommend this as a vacation spot, he’s gonna get fucking shadow black lung or something — and then claps them together. “Okay.”

Tiny Max and Chrissy, decidedly both not hallucinations, have been staring at him, Chrissy in concern and Max with all the pre-teen disdain she can muster. It is quite a bit of pre-teen disdain, he’s almost impressed.

“Do you remember me?” he asks.

“Sure,” she says. “You’re Eddie. You live across the way. You’re on the run for a triple homicide.”

Chrissy blinks rapidly. “You’re what?” 

“Don’t worry about it.” He waves a hand at her. He stares intently at Tiny Max. “What else?”

She shrugs, chews on the inside of her mouth. She looks out at the destroyed trailer park. She tells him, “It’s the Upside Down. It’s back. We thought, after Starcourt, after the, the flayed, after — we thought we’d finished it. But it’s back. And I — something happened to me,” she says slowly, eyes narrowed. “Something — there was a clock.”

“And a voice,” says Chrissy, almost excitedly. She drops down on her knees in the dirt in front of them. “Did you hear it too?”

“We don’t have to hurt anymore,” says Tiny Max. She looks between Chrissy and Eddie. “How did we get here?”

“Do you,” he starts, and then stops. They stare at him again.

Eddie pulls the blunt out of his pocket and lights it up again, buying himself a moment to think.

Chrissy doesn’t remember dying. She’s been touching her eyes, sometimes, as they’ve been on their long walk across Middle Earth together, like an unconscious tic, and sure he’d been thinking she was, you know, not real for a while now but survey says she is , because Tiny Max is here too. Chrissy doesn’t remember dying but she remembers small things about what happened to her, so Eddie’s pretty confident Tiny Max will be in the same boat. She’ll retain a few memories leading up to what happened, despite the fact that she looks something like three years younger than he should know her, give or take, but she won’t remember the whole, awful, bloody mess of it.

Apparently, he guesses, that’s just a fun little treat for him. Granted, he’s pretty sure their deaths were, like, way more horrific and tragic and traumatizing than getting a kidney pecked out and dying of blood loss so maybe he’ll give them a pass for it. Doesn’t mean he can’t be a little bent out of shape about it in the privacy of his own head and all.

At length, as they stare at him with varying degrees of patience, he tells them about his theory, about number four on the list. 

“I think something is out there reviving the victims of this place,” he says, more to the blunt in his hand than to anyone. “I’m, like, zero precent certain on why, because so far my collection of data is the three of us, and the two of you guys are, well, direct victims of Vecna. That’s — that’s what we’ve been calling the voice, the person, you guys have been hearing. Do you remember that, Max? It’s — he’s the one that’s making all this happen and he, uh, he hurt you guys and, like, killed me, but indirectly, I’m just a casualty of war, you know?”

“You died?” asks Tiny Max, eyes huge. Chrissy reaches out and, this time, Eddie doesn’t stop her from grabbing his knee. Her fingers are small and cold and he chokes back a sob. They’re real, they’re real, fuck, they’re both really real.

“Yeah,” he says. “Winner, winner, chicken dinner. Or demobat dinner, I guess. Anyway. It’s kind of — I mean, what’s the point, I mean. Because even if that theory is right, there’s, like, no way for me to prove it, is the thing, and also what’s the deal with all the gaping wounds bleeding over our little slice of Shadow Hawkins, some of which are closing but also sort of not? Like, seriously, what’s up with that?”

From the corner of his eye, he sees Tiny Max bite her lip. She says, “There — I think there was another voice?”

Eddie jerks his head sharply to look at her. Chrissy’s brow furrows, asks “Another one? I didn’t —”

“Yeah,” she says. “I don’t — I don’t remember when. It’s all fuzzy. But I think I heard someone talking to me, calling my name” — here, Eddie drops the blunt to the ground, fingers gone numb — “and she said no, not this time, or something like that, maybe? I think it — I think it was El.”

“El,” says Eddie slowly. “As in, the Party’s mage? The girl with the government funded superpowers you all kept telling me about?”

The one, he thinks, who he’s never met and whose voice he’s never heard and would therefore not recognize, and something that feels like hope rises precipitously, dangerously, within the cage of his chest, like birds beating their wings.

“Superpowers?” asks Chrissy, huge eyes even bigger. Eddie would laugh if he wasn’t fucking positive it would send him into another round of hysterics.

“I’m finding it’s best not to get hung up on the details too much,” he tells her. “Just let it wash over you and file it away to unpack, um, never?”

“Okay,” she agrees faintly.

“I think maybe she woke me up, and then everyone else,” Tiny Max says, slightly more animated as she warms to this particular theory and no one begins aggressively shutting her down. “But I don't think she did it right — or she doesn’t know she did it, maybe? Because why would she be trying to close the gates if she knew we were in here?”

“You think she’s closing the gates?” he asks.

“Yeah, that’s kind of her whole thing,” Tiny Max tells him.

“Right,” he says. “And, like, another point in the column of not aware she did it is the fact that you look about fuckin’ twelve right now.”

“Yeah, that too, I guess.”

Chrissy looks back and forth between them now. She glances at her own hands and then back up. “Could I — am I younger too?”

Tiny Max sort of shrugs, because she probably never paid much attention to high schoolers outside of Nancy, Jonathan Byers, and Steve when she was in middle school and has no frame of reference. But Eddie, three years older than Chrissy, does and he bites his lip and nods.

“I think so,” he says. “I think — I think I’m probably the only one that didn’t get shrunk a little, on account of me biting it whilst already occupying this particular plane, you know? We realized, back before we went back again, Max, you know when we all jumped into the lake? We realized that this place is, like, stuck when it first opened in ‘83 when your buddy Will went missing — ”

“Will Byers?” asks Chrissy.

“I’ll give you the complete abridged history of the plane of shadows and its dramatis personae later,” says Eddie, “but yeah. But, like, so he went missing first, and this place popped up and so they think it’s stuck in ‘83, with Will. Or not with Will, at least anymore, because he got out.”

“But you think,” says Tiny Max, “that, because of that, we’re all our younger versions of ourselves, from when the first gate was opened? Like, some trippy time travel shit? Or something?”

“Or something,” he says.

She shrugs. “I mean. I guess that makes sense?”

“Thanks for the full-throated support, kid,” he says. “It’s just another theory, and, fortunately or unfortunately or whatever, we have no way of actually testing it, because, like, also why would we want to? And we also have no way of getting out,” he adds to himself in an undertone, “because Supergirl is up top trying to undo the Crisis of Infinite Earths, and we’re about to get sealed down here in Bizarro World.”

He reaches down for the blunt he dropped earlier and is about to give himself a cool five minutes for another power breakdown when Tiny Max clears her throat somewhat pointedly. He turns back to her.

“Actually,” she says, “I might have an idea.”

Tiny Max’s idea involves hauling ass to the community pool, apparently, because that’s where the Mind Flayer — like, what? What? Prince of Darkness, Our Terrible Father Who Art In Hell, what the fuck, what the actual fuck, because Eddie is desperate to know — took a victim. And if Eddie’s little theory about the victims of the Upside Down somehow being connected is correct, they might find this other girl there. She didn’t die in the Upside Down, not like Eddie, of course, but, given Chrissy and Tiny Max’s presences, it doesn’t hurt to try it, he thinks.

“I’d try for Billy,” she said, as she was outlining her plan before they left the trailer park, and she wouldn’t look any of them in the eye, “but he died at Starcourt, and it wasn’t even under construction yet back then.”

Eddie pressed his shoulder into hers, wordless, and left it at that. He gets it, the complicated nature of loving people who don’t love you back in the right way, who maybe don’t deserve it until it’s too late, if they even ever did at all, and the pain that weighs you down after. Like, shit, does he get it.

So yeah they haul ass to the pool, Tiny Max in the lead like she has something to prove, Chrissy behind her, and Eddie watching their backs. He picks up his old spear before they leave the trailer park, just in case, and he grips it tight in his left hand, head on a swivel. He thinks, just because nothing has actively gone after them yet doesn’t mean it won’t . Once again, he’s planned enough campaigns with enough twists to know the end isn’t the end, even when you think it is.

They duck through the women’s showers and, when they exit out into the pool, there on the edge, sure fucking enough, there’s Heather Holloway, missing for the past year because she was sacrificed to the Upside Down like the rest of them. She looks terrified, more panicked than either Chrissy or Max had been, and Max had been pretty spare on the details but he can’t imagine the way she went out was any more pleasant than how the girls had gone, either; Eddie kind of wants to wrap this girl he’s never known up in his arms and tell her it’ll all be okay.

“What the fuck is fucking happening,” she spits out, shooting to her feet and near to hyperventilating, angry as all fuck, wow, and he almost laughs. He would not have put money on that being the first thing she says to them.

She’s looking at Tiny Max with the most recognition so she jogs ahead, around the pool, and starts to try to calm her down, Chrissy following shyly behind. 

Eddie hangs back and watches. There’s something about the way that she’s looking that reminds him of someone who’s just been woken from a deep sleep, and he narrows his eyes, working the problem in his head best he can. Max had a bit of that look in her eyes too, though Chrissy didn’t — but then again he had been ignoring Chrissy pretty hard at first, so maybe that’s not a valid data point, he thinks, she very well could’ve looked disoriented and confused and he just wholesale missed it.

Is it him? Is his arrival in these areas what’s causing this, what? Wake-up effect?

He dismisses that theory almost immediately. That doesn’t make sense; Fred was a victim as much as the girls had been and Eddie had definitely walked across his path like a particularly mangy black cat and no Fred apparition had appeared to haunt him too. 

Then again, both of the girls seemed to have appeared where maybe their trauma first kind of, sort of, could’ve started. So maybe, for Fred, he just hadn’t found the right starting point yet? Maybe this is all some fucked up game of hide and seek and blind dumb luck.

Which would fucking blow, him able to save people somehow from the depths of the darkness, only he has to stumble on the right spot first. That would, in fact, actually suck complete dick and not in the way he personally prefers.

This shit is making his fucking head hurt, man.

As soon as Tiny Max looks like she’s got Heather’s panic under control, Eddie ambles over. They make a wild group, all together at this empty nightmare pool: Eddie in his bloody battle gear, Chrissy wearing her cheer outfit, and now Heather in her red lifeguard swimsuit. Tiny Max looks the most normal of them all, jeans and Vans and a red track jacket.

“So I’m dead,” Heather is saying flatly, her arms crossed under her chest in a way that would be extremely distracting if Eddie was into that sort of thing. Beside him, Chrissy’s eyes flicker up and down and, damn, that is one fun bright spot of this whole shitshow, he thinks. He presses his foot lightly on her instep and she tosses him a split-second, wild-eyed glare, caught out. He smirks to himself.

“Not dead dead,” Tiny Max says. “Well, I mean, yeah, but, like, not totally dead.”

“That is not helpful,” she tells her.

“Eddie, you explain. It’s your theory!”

He chews on the ragged edge of his thumb. “How much does she know?”

Heather lifts a hand and starts ticking off fingers. “One, we’re in some nightmare underworld. Two, I got mind controlled by this kid’s douche brother, somehow. Three, I got murdered by him, or something that was controlling him, and now, four, I’m here.”

“Well, that’s the long and short of it,” he says. She rolls her eyes so hard at him that he thinks she probably sprained something. He continues, “Yes, we’re trapped in a distorted reflection of Hawkins, Indiana, circa 1983, because of, like, some dubious government MK Ultra adjacent experiments, probably. A year ago, something called a Mind Flayer made its way to Hawkins Above and that’s how you, you know. Then, like a week ago, another big bad we’re calling Vecna started trying to take over too. He was trying to create these gates between worlds, by sacrificing people, so that he could keep the door open, and he got Chrissy and Max, and then I bit it down here too. But there’s this girl, above, with superpowers — and just stay with us on this — who is trying to close the rifts, the gates, I mean, between our worlds. Trying to stop Vecna and his army from breaking through them.”

“My best friend,” says Tiny Max. “El. We think she tried to save me, but didn’t do it all the way, or didn’t know she was also doing it. So now people who’ve been killed because of the Upside Down are not staying dead.”

After a beat, Heather shakes her head and says, “This is insane.”

“I know,” says Chrissy, putting a hand on the other girl’s wrist. “Trust me, I know. But you just have to trust us , okay?”

“I mean,” offers Tiny Max. “You remember what — what Billy did, right?”

Heather stares between them all, her eyes lingering on Chrissy’s hand — seriously, if Eddie had the space in his head right now for anything other than anxiety and sheer terror, he’d be on the ground rolling around giggling, this is the best thing that’s ever happened to him, how do people like them always manage to find each other — before sighing, aggrieved.

“I do,” she says. “So maybe this isn’t the craziest explanation that I could think of.”

“So this is all well and good,” Eddie cuts in. “The theory has been proven conclusively and we can continue our magical mystery tour around the plane of shadows — ”

“Upside Down — ”

“ — whatever, and keep trying to wake up the myriad victims of this hellscape — which we don’t actually know how we’re even doing that, but we can dig into that later, because I have been trying to work that one out myself and am getting nowhere — but that doesn’t solve how we get the hell out of here after. Because,” he tacks on, emphatically gesturing with his hands, “trust me, I have been trying.”

Chrissy nods, finally pulling away from Heather and dropping back to his side. “He has.”

Tiny Max narrows her eyes again and, Jesus, what is the deal with this kid, she’s so little and mean and suspicious, he’s obsessed with her. She asks, “Well, what have you tried?”

It’s Eddie’s turn to tick off some fingers. “I’ve hit up most of the gates that formed from Vecna’s victims — only one I haven’t gone to is the last one, because it’s Vecna’s lair, and like I’d prefer to stay as far away from that shit as possible, but if we have to go, we have to go. The only one I even got close to getting through was Fred’s, and I only got one hand through before I got tossed like a bag of potato chips.”

“We’ve seen things try to go through other cracks too,” adds Chrissy, glancing at him. He nods and she continues, “The four lines that are running throughout town. Things are trying to get through those and only a few of them make it through.”

“That’s what prompted the theory that Supergirl is trying to close up shop down here,” he says.

“What about the center?” asks Heather.

They all look at her.

She frowns. “I mean. There’s gonna be a center, right? Between the lines that are coming from the gates, if everything is intersecting? I’d think that would be, like, the point. So maybe, like, they, I don’t know — maybe where they meet is like a mega — what did you call it? Maybe that’s the megagate? So if that’s the biggest and best one, maybe that’s how we get through?”

They mull that in silence briefly. It makes a certain amount of sense, he thinks. In fact, he thinks maybe that was Nancy’s theory to begin with, back in Max’s trailer, so why shouldn’t they try to use Vecna’s own plan against him to escape if it’s still open and viable?

“Worth a shot,” he says aloud. “We should maybe rustle you up some shoes and pants before we hit the road though. Not that those pins aren’t killer.”

Heather shoots him a look that manages to both be prideful, disdainful, and accuse him of being high, which, like, to be fair, he’s got a buzz from that blunt, so she’s not wrong. She says, “Yeah, I know. Surprised you noticed.”

“Ouch,” he says. “No need to call a boy out like that.”

She smirks.

Tiny Max is giving them the hairy eyeball. “What’s happening?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he tells her.

They leave through the women’s locker room, same as they entered, pausing briefly to rummage through all the lockers they can to unearth something for Heather. They find some slightly too big Nikes that Heather dons with the aid of two pairs of thick athletic socks from the same bag, her face twisted in disgust, and a pair of neon track pants that need a belt to keep up. 

Because they have no map to follow, they start making their way back towards the trailer park to find one of the lines from the gate. They’ll follow that, they decide, and keep going until they reach the epicenter and their megagate. Eddie leads the way this time, Chrissy at his side, and Max and Heather hang back. Heather had taken one look at Eddie’s spear and grabbed one of the pool skimmers before they left; while she may have been the newest and least informed member of his band of merry women, she’s quickly proving to be the most genre savvy of them all, he thinks.

He walks in silence with Chrissy, who looks lost in thought, her fingers worrying the cuffs of her sweatshirt, for a moment before shifting a little closer and elbowing the girl gently.

“Heather’s cute, right?” he says. 

She looks at him. “What?”

“Heather,” he repeats. “She’s cute, right? Total badass in the making too. If, uh, if women did it for me, you know, personally. That is.”

Chrissy stares at him. He bites his lip.

“Oh,” she says. “Oh!”

“Yeah,” he says. “Is that, uh. Is that okay?”

“Of course!” She grabs at his free arm. “Of course! I just — thanks for telling me? I don’t. That’s cool!”

He laughs, jostles her again. “Thanks.”

“I, um,” she starts. “I, like, agree. By the way. About, um. Uh. About Heather.”

“Which part?” he asks, teasing. He’s pretty sure he already knows the answer after all. “Badass, cute, or if women did it for you?”

“Badass,” Chrissy tells him. “And cute. Those ones.”

“That’s cool,” he echoes.

They walk, shoulder to shoulder now. Eddie stares out ahead of them. His hand flexes rhythmically on his spear. Behind him, he can hear Heather and Max softly talking to each other, probably about the Upside Down. From all around them, there are the whispers of this nightmare forest, the distant growls of terrible predators, and, above, the occasional screech of a demobat in flight.

“I’m sorry,” he says to her, quietly. He can barely get the words out, it’s like trying to gargle fucking glass. “About — that I couldn’t — that I didn’t know how to help you.”

Chrissy’s small hand finds his. She squeezes it once. She says, equally quiet, “It’s okay. You tried. I remember that, now. It’s all so blurry, like a dream or — or something that happened to me when I was really, really small. But I remember you tried. And that’s more than anyone else did. You noticed something was wrong.”

“It doesn’t feel like enough,” says Eddie.

“You’re wrong,” she says. “It was a lot. No one else noticed, Eddie. Not — not Jason, or my friends, or — not anyone. Just you. And my mom. But she didn’t see what you saw. She saw.” Her grip on his hand tightens. “I was — I was pregnant. I was already so confused about — about, you know, that and Jason and how I didn’t feel — I didn’t feel right, and I thought that would make me feel right but then it was all a mess and I couldn’t. And my mom just took me to Chicago and that was, that was that. I wanted — I don’t know what I wanted. I don’t know if I wanted to keep it, if I wanted — but I would’ve liked it to be my own choice, you know? She just decided for me, and then she treated me so different, after, and my dad — ”

She shudders.

“My dad was a shitbag too,” he says, because what else can he say? “Don’t worry.”

It makes her laugh and she tips her head against his shoulder. “I don’t think she told him or anything, but I think he knew. I think he knew about that, and the other thing, and I think he hated me for it.”

“Did Carver know?”

“No,” she says. “I was so confused about everything but — I don’t think it would’ve made him very happy either.”

“Then he shouldn’t be doing shit if he can’t live with the consequences,” he tells her. 

“You don’t think it’s my fault?”

“I think you’re the only person who isn’t at fault,” Eddie says. “It’s your body. You call the shots.”

Chrissy smiles at him, watery. “Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me,” he says. “That’s, like — that’s what a normal human reaction should be! And like between you and me, I think Heather’s the better bet, if you gotta pick a popular kid to get hung up on. I mean, not like I got room to talk — ”

“Are you hung up on a popular kid?” she asks.

Because he knows it’ll make her smile, he staggers dramatically, clutching his chest. “Am I, Cunningham, I only have it bad for the worst of them all: my kids’ co-parent, Steve Harrington.”

Chrissy giggles. From behind, Tiny Max says, “Oh I get it now,” as Heather opines, “Yeah, that is fucking embarrassing for you.”

“I know.” He flings his hands up. “But the heart wants what the heart wants. And in this case the heart wants a preppy little big-haired reformed asshole with staggering MILF energy.”

“I think I’ll break up with Jason when we get back,” says Chrissy, still giggling, eyes brighter than they’ve been, and yes, perfect, this is why Eddie’s been debasing himself like an idiot, that giggle, that smile. He thinks: yeah if women did it for me. She reaches out to reel Eddie back to her side. Her eyes flick to Heather; he resists the urge to clap his hands together in glee. “You’re right, I can do better.”

“That guy is a huge douche,” agrees Tiny Max. Behind them, she breaks into a run and launches herself at Eddie’s back, clambering onto his shoulders and digging her pointed chin into the top of his head. It hurts like a mother fucker but he doesn’t say anything; it seems like all of his new found shield sisters are starting to remember things the longer they walk — he’d heard a few whispers behind him that gave him pause, and Chrissy had of course outright told him. Maybe it’s their proximity to each other? Whatever. He’s just hoping he remains the only one with the death memories, shitty as they are. He wouldn’t wish that on his worst enemy, let alone on three women who had quite literally been through hell. Tiny Max is saying, “Pretty sure he totally jumped us at Creel House and broke my walk-man!”

Eddie hisses. “He did fucking what? Wow, seriously, fuck that guy. You better tell Steve that shit when we get back right-side up, Little Red, because now I am itching for some jock on jock violence.”

“Wait,” says Heather, appearing now at Chrissy’s left. “Are we still talking about the same Harrington you’ve got an unfortunate crush on? Sorry to break it to you, but that boy’s never won a fight in his life.”

Tiny Max snorts. “That’s true. But he’s got the spirit.”

“And a baseball bat filled with nails, I’m told,” says Eddie. “If he was ever gonna use it on a human, I bet it’d be on the guy who almost killed his sort of kid sister.”

“I guess,” says Heather. She looks between Chrissy and Tiny Max and shrugs. “Well, Carver always was a kind of self-righteous religious nut, I mean, like, no offense, Chrissy, with a pretty punchable face, so I’ll help, if he needs it.”

“Heather,” Eddie says admiringly, “you ever play DnD? Because I think you’d make an amazing barbarian.”

“Never heard of it,” she says. “Do I get to punch people? I feel like, when I get out of here, I’m gonna wanna do a lot of punching.”

“Oh yeah,” he says. “Heather Holloway, I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship.”

It’s an absolute warzone at the megagate.

He starts to get an inkling things are about to be absolutely batshit — pun fully intended — as they get closer.  Noises grow louder, the shrieks of the damned, practically, from all sides, and the sky, already inkpot dark and streaked with reds and purples like a vicious bruise, almost seems to churn with upset. His watch stopped working back on their first descent, and it never started back up, so he has no clue what time it is, if time even has fucking meaning here, but he still thinks, Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.

They keep walking, crouching low now, moving between whatever cover they can, Eddie with his spear in front and Heather with her skimmer covering the rear. Tiny Max and Chrissy move between the two of them, holding hands, Tiny Max with her fist in the back of Eddie’s jacket, like they’re some sort of six legged shuffling beast.

It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing seen in the freakish wilds of the Upside Down. That title, of course, gets reserved for literally everything else around them, and then, on the final approach:

The demodogs in roving packs, petal mouths gaping as they snap and snarl at the cracked earth of Hawkins Below — the bats, diving at the ground near them but not at them, a small mercy — demogorgons by the handful, screaming at flames bursting from the maw of the megagate — a shadow stretching above them and around them, a vast threatening hand, he thinks, terrible and not quite so impotent as the man himself had written in his stories —

A battle is raging but Eddie isn’t sure how to put words to it. He can barely track what is happening, things tossed this way and that. He thinks of the invisible hand that had pulled him back from Fred’s gate, and wonders if there’s some force like that at play here. It feels like there is; something is beating the shadow back, something he can’t see or can’t focus on, and the flames from the megagate, rising against the nightmarish sky.

Someone is on the other side, fighting. He wonders if it’s the others. He wonders where Vecna is.

His shield sisters have arrayed themselves at his side now, ducked down behind a half demolished wall. Chrissy has a hand over her mouth while Heather, white as a sheet, holds her skimmer like it’s a broadsword instead. Eddie has to fist a hand in Tiny Max’s jacket to stop her from vaulting over the wall and into the thick of it all.

“We have to try,” she hisses at him.

“It’s a suicide mission,” he hisses back, watching as something pushes at the shadow above them, like a full bodied shove. 

“Eddie,” says Heather.

EDDIE

He shakes his head, presses the heel of his right hand into his eye. This isn’t right, he thinks; he doesn’t know why he thinks that but he does all the same and it’s with this sort of foreign but bone deep certainty. This isn’t the way home. He has to find them the right way home, and this isn’t it. Is someone calling his name, he can’t —

At the mega gate, there’s an explosion, more flames bursting forth, the sky growing impossibly darker, and something shrieks from their backs.

A demodog lunges at Chrissy as they turn. Heather bodily checks the other girl out of the way, turns her skimmer like a bo staff and clotheslines the thing with it. Eddie stabs it in the head once, twice, three times, four, and Heather hammers at it with the skimmer and they keep at it until the damn thing stops moving.

He shares a wide and wild-eyed look with her and she says, “We gotta bail.”

Tiny Max says, “Are you kidding me? This is our only chance.”

“We can think of something else,” says Heather. “There is no way we are getting through there. C’mon.”

She hauls a shaken Chrissy to her feet, skirts around the body of the demodog, and starts the retreat back the way they came. Eddie grabs Tiny Max’s wrist and there’s a brief moment of tug of war between the two of them before she glares at him, sets her jaw, and allows herself to be dragged along.

They run almost the entire way back to the pool. Chrissy collapses as soon as they crash back into the women’s locker room, curling up with her back against the lockers, and Heather twirls her skimmer in her hands. She looks terrified but resolute, nearly shaking with nervous, angry energy. Tiny Max had allowed his grip on her arm during their flight from the megagate but now she shakes him off furiously as she rounds on them.

“We could’ve made it,” she whisper-screams at them. “We could’ve made it through, we could’ve! They don’t see us, not really, they don’t bother us. We could’ve slipped through!”

“Did you not see the part where Eddie and I had to beat that fucked up dog thing to death because it was about to eat Chrissy?” asks Heather. “Because this thing’s got the goo to prove it.”

“Yeah, and?” demands Tiny Max. “That’s, like, one in fifty that notice us!”

“And how many were out there? Huh, kid?”

“But why?” asked Chrissy, voice small. “Why don’t they notice us? Are we not — Eddie didn’t, didn’t think I was real, at first. What if — what if we’re not really real, what if we’re not here — ”

“We’re real,” says Heather with fierce conviction. She drops down to grab her hands. “See? This is real. You and me, and Eddie and the kid, we’re real.”

“It’s El,” says Tiny Max. “It has to be El! She’s — she’s protecting us somehow, I know it. She’s making sure we don’t get seen and if we’d only made a run for it for her — ”

Heather snaps something back that Eddie doesn’t catch. There’s a pressure building behind his eyes, like the migraines Mom used to get when she first got sick, and he’s aware, absently, that the girls are arguing now, Chrissy trying to keep the peace even while shaken, and it’s like — the pressure, in his head, something digging its way in or out and —

He pulls at his hair futilely.

Fuck.

Fuck!

EDDIE

Suddenly, for a moment, brief enough that Eddie thinks he maybe hallucinated it because seriously why the fuck not at this point, man, he’s alone in a blackness so complete that it makes him dizzy, sick to his stomach. There’s water underneath his feet and someone is calling his name, and, and, and —

“Please, stop arguing,” begs Chrissy. “Please.”

Tiny Max and Heather glare at each other but subside.

“The megagate wasn’t the right choice,” says Eddie into the silence. Everyone looks at him. He chews on the side of his thumb again, worrying the meat of it between his teeth. It’s right, it feels right, so he says, “I don’t know how to explain it. But I know the megagate wasn’t the right way out.”

“So what is?” asks Tiny Max.

Eddie sits down on one of the benches, tucks his hands under his arms, folds over at his hips, and drops his head between his knees. He’s thinking:

He’s thinking about a lot of things: about how long it’s been — two days, now, maybe three, traveling from point a to point b to gate one, two, three, there and back again — but then is that right? Has it been three days, because he’s hungry but not too hungry and does time move differently in the plane of shadows? He can’t remember from the manuals. And yeah, yeah, he’s hungry, so where is he going to get something to eat, to drink? A person can last weeks without food, he knows, but only days without water and, frankly, if he got mauled to death only to live again only to then die of dehydration? Well, a bitch is going to be pissed.

But then he’s thinking: I’m not the first person to get trapped in the Upside Down.

Eddie sits up.

“Will,” he says, abruptly loud in the quiet of the women’s locker room. “What did Will do when he was down here?”

Tiny Max cocks her head and slinks over to his side. “What do you mean?”

“How did he survive? He was missing for a week. How did he survive? How did he get out?”

“Mrs Byers and the Chief came in after him,” she says. “Through a gate at the old Hawkins Lab. Lucas said he was dehydrated when he got pulled out, half-starved. I think he hid, mostly. He doesn’t like to talk about it, even with the boys, so I don’t know much.”

“But he lived,” says Heather. “He got out.”

She nods. “He did.”

“So,” Eddie begins slowly, making eye contact with each one of them in turn, “so, technically speaking, that would make the first victim of the Upside Down — ”

“Barb,” says Tiny Max, eyes narrowed. “That would make it Barb Holland. Why?”

Chrissy and Heather exchange looks.

“I’m — hold on,” he says, holding a finger up. His head is absolutely killing him. He stands, begins to pace. “I’m thinking, I’m — I’m thinking.”

The megagate is obviously the newest, biggest, bestest of the gates that Vecna — and whatever controls Vecna — has wrought between the above and below planes of existence. It’s clearly where the majority of the activity is located; probably, in fact, why they haven’t seen much on their various travels in and around Hawkins Below. All the monsters and nightmare fuel have been congregating there, trying to get out, and that’s, too, where it seems the final battle is being staged. All the other gates are sealing, or are being sealed, one by one, all of them —

All of the most recent ones, that is.

It would make a certain amount of sense — it would be logical, even — for Supergirl to be working off those gates first. Like the megagate, they’re the biggest and freshest gates, the ones at the forefront of everyone’s minds. She’s probably at megagate herself, on the front lines with the rest of the Scooby Gang, if Eddie’s reading the situation right.

And maybe that means something else: maybe that means that there are other, lesser known rifts and tears betwixt the planes of existence that are unprotected — forgotten —

So what if, he thinks.

What if they go all the way back to the beginning of the story as they know it? Not to Will, but to the first death in the Upside Down?

What if they go back to Barb?

Here is a riddle:

The answer is one.

They make their way to the Harrington house.

Eddie’s the only one who’s never been, which sparks a terrible little gremlin of dumbass jealousy in his chest that he immediately dropkicks into fucking orbit, because wow was this not the time to unpack that, Lord of Darkness, please. He knows it’s in Loch Nora, of course, has supplied the grass and other sundries for certain parties at the party, but he’d never had the pleasure. Heather, who’d been on the swim team with Steve, had been to plenty, and Chrissy had gone to a few before the king was dethroned. Tiny Max knows it as a place for free pizza and movies when they bully their so-called babysitter into letting them run wild over the place, which apparently is quite a lot.

Tiny Max says Steve hates the place except when they’re in it, or at least that’s the impression she gets. Heather shrugs and says she’s probably not wrong. There’s plenty of ways to be a shitty parent, she mutters, the back of her hand brushing Chrissy’s, and Danny and Lane Harrington had seemed to have chosen absenteeism and a complete and total disdain for their only son.

Eddie thinks, even without solving the puzzle of the mother and the father, he’d probably hate the place too. He hadn’t paid much attention to Steve when they’d been in school together, and Steve had steered clear of him — most bullies don’t fuck with Eddie, since he’s carefully curated a persona that seems to suggest he’d enjoy it, and while they might call him queer after he leaves, fucking trailer trash faggot, he’s got the social cache of being the sole drug dealer in town to buoy him along all the same. Still, he’d borne witness to the rise and the epic fall, and he has to say: the Steve putting his body between everyone else and danger seems much more comfortable in his skin than the Steve who laughed along with Tommy H and Carol, and he imagines the house was the first step, this place where Barb Holland was last seen alive. 

He wonders if Steve looks out at the pool in the mornings and sees her on the edge, the diving board, waiting. Tiny Max says he’ll watch them swim but never join them when they ask, and eventually, she says, they stopped asking.

So they head to the very first gate — protogate, Chrissy had dubbed it for them. Eddie carries Max on his shoulders again, Chrissy and Heather with their arms linked at the elbows at his left. Heather’s still got her skimmer and Chrissy picks up a piece of rebar she finds on the side of the road as they walk. They move at a good clip, looking over their shoulders constantly as they go. They don’t hear much anymore — it seems they were right, and all the wee beasties of the Upside Down are making their final stand at the megagate — but the sky behind them grows ever, ever darker. Eddie keeps the fingers of his left crossed where it holds Tiny Max’s ankle to his chest.

They keep quiet as they walk, despite the silence around them, chatting only briefly about Steve’s house when they first set out, and so it’s a silent group that approaches the gated community of Loch Nora. They send Tiny Max clambering over the top to open it up for them and then Heather leads the way to the Harrington house.

One by one they hop the fence there too. Eddie pulls up the rear and, like with Heather, like with Tiny Max, like with Chrissy from the corner of his eye at the school, just as he pictured Steve picturing — there is Barb Holland, sitting on the diving board, her feet dangling into viney nothingness.

Barb stares at them; they stare back. None of them know her, not really, not like they know each other. Eddie and Heather had been in the same grade, before Eddie got held back one year and then the next — ironically, Barb should be graduating with him this year now — and Heather retains vague memories of Max trying to help her, of Supergirl and a tub of ice. Chrissy and Eddie met again on the last day of her life, and Tiny Max is their resident expert and veteran of the bullshit.

But Max didn’t live in Hawkins in ‘83, and Heather is popular and older, Chrissy popular and younger, and Eddie’s the loud nerd growing out a buzz cut that everyone avoided when Barb had been kicking around. She’d been a quiet kid at school, famous only after the big government cover-up of her death, and she’d hung with the band kids and the brains. They’d barely run in tangential circles with her, let alone the same ones. He thinks Heather’s probably the only one who Barb might even know the name of.

“Hey,” says Eddie. “So, like, how much do you remember?”

She looks between all of them. She doesn’t get up from the board. After a moment, she lifts her hand up and shows them a palm wet with blood but not cut open, far as he can tell.

“There was a party here,” she tells them. “They dared me to shotgun a beer, and I cut my hand open and then — ”

“A monster called,” Eddie offers, when she pauses and doesn’t start back up.

She stares again.

“Welcome to a very exclusive club,” he says. He sweeps his arms wide, bows. “May I present, undead Eddie and the undead babes — I’m Eddie, they’re the babes — and, yes, we’re all very undead, in the sense that we all were dead but now we are alive.”

“What,” she says flatly.

“Exactly what it says on the tin,” he says, and then speed-runs the Abridged History of the Upside Down, Vecna and all his armies, and the theories they’ve been kicking around between the four of them that has led them to this moment.

As he speaks, Barb finally begins to rise from the board. She warily makes her way over to them but stops something like ten feet away from them, her hands on her hips and a frown on her face. Her eyes flick back and forth between them again, one after another and back again. She looks like she might laugh a few times and, then, when Eddie brings the story as they know it to a close, she does start laughing. It’s almost hysterical, and he doesn’t begrudge her for it. It’s been a tough few days, a tough few years.

“You’re telling me,” she says, when she finally calms down, “that we’re in some sort of mirror universe where there are monsters and mind control demons and that I was killed because I fucked up shotgunning a beer trying to impress the brain-dead idiot my best friend was trying to make it with?”

Eddie ignores the dig at Steve and nods. “More of a shadow realm than mirror universe — haven’t found evil Eddie with a goatee yet, you know? — but. Yup.”

“And now some freshman with superpowers is, what?” she asks. “Bringing all of us back to life?”

“Not all of us,” he says. He seesaws one hand through the air. “Only the ones of us we cross paths with, I think. I don’t know! It’s not a perfect science, okay, we’re winging it pretty hard.”

“Jesus,” she breathes. She pulls off her glasses — one lens is cracked — absently cleans them on her mucky shirt and then frowns at them. She doesn’t go to put them back on. She says, “This is fucking crazy.”

“Yeah, pretty much,” says Heather. It’s the first time anyone other than Eddie has spoken and Barb just shoots her a little look before shaking her head and looking up at the sky above them. It’s been getting steadily darker; Eddie’s trying not to think about it, or about how bad his head is still hurting. It’s been absolutely pounding since they left the megagate and he fights the urge to pinch his nose or rub his temples for some kind of relief.

“Just goes to figure,” Barb is saying. “I told Nancy it was a bad idea to go to Harrington’s with everything going on, but she just had to jump on the King Steve train, had to try to fit in with the popular kids, and for what? For me to — to — to die in that vapid asshole’s pool. Fuck that, and fuck that guy.”

“Hey,” says Eddie. “That’s like — you don’t know — I get it, it sucks, and like you’re allowed to feel however you feel or whatever but you gotta know Steve’s not like that, okay?”

Barb scoffs. “He’s not? Please. I know you, Munson, and I know him. You don’t think he ever thought about shoving you in a locker, or letting one of his idiot lackey’s give you a swirly? He’s a bully and an asshole and a jerk.”

“Maybe once,” he says. “But what happened to you — what happened to all of them that night, it changed him.”

“Good for him,” she snaps. She looks furious and like she might cry all the same; Eddie doesn’t necessarily blame her for anything she says. “I’m glad my death could be his character development. That’s fun for me.”

“That’s not what he meant,” cut in Chrissy.

“Oh?” Barb says. “Then what did he mean? Because that’s what it sounded like, telling me my horrific death turned Steve fucking Harrington into a saint. Please.”

There’s a small, vibrating sensation at his side. Between his aching head and the buzzing in his ears like there’s static that’s been steadily building, he thinks he should be forgiven for not noticing that Mount Vesuvius is next to him and about to goddamn blow.

“You shut the hell up about him!” shouts Tiny Max, jamming a finger in Barb’s direction. “You don’t know jack, dead girl!”

It’s like this: Eddie knows — he fucking knows why he’s defending Steve, okay. He’s not discounting the past that Barb is still living in but all evidence at Eddie’s own disposal points to him being a stand up dude and having clearly changed himself for the better since then. He’s weirdly selfless, brave, kind of insecure, and he believed enough in Dustin’s belief in Eddie to follow him, and then he believed in Eddie too. He’s good with kids and probably animals too, damn him, and yeah, again, Eddie’s got a set of fully functional eyeballs; plus, he’s self-aware when he wants to be, you know, and he’s a red-blooded American homo, of course he’s got the world’s worst boner for all that chest hair and those freckles and the teeth, okay, the teeth on that boy and then the thing with the bat? Mark Eddie down as scared and horny. 

Because, yeah, all that, a hero complex a mile wide, and an ass that won’t quit? Give him another fifteen minutes and half a chance, and Eddie’s gonna end up falling in love with the dude. So he knows why he’s defending Steve with his whole chest; he’s a parody of himself and he’s been dead and brought back to life, he’s gonna allow himself these little pleasures, sue him.

But Tiny Max looks kind of like she’s about to go apeshit on Barb. He kind of wants to let her. Heather’s dropped her skimmer and got both hands on the kid’s shoulders, holding her back. Tiny Max has got a complex with brother’s a mile wide, and Eddie’s heard the rumors about the beat down from Billy, has seen him first hand tucking a bigger Max under his arm like his body will shelter her from Vecna and death itself. The girl is ready to fight for him like he fights for her and she’s approximately ten pounds of whoopass in a five pound bag and Eddie thinks, When this is all over, I’m suing Steve for joint custody of this one too.

“Steve may have been a jumped up asshole when you knew him,” she hisses, struggling in Heather’s iron grip, “but newsflash, you’ve been dead three years. People change. I’m sorry you’re so small minded you can’t wrap you’re fucking brain around it. And it’s not all about you! He’s gotten the shit kicked out of him for this whole town, and got back up every time, and no one has ever thanked him for it. No one knows. No one cares. He’s a good person. He’d be the first person trying to get you back, if he knew you were here. He went to dinner at your parents’ every week, he paid for your funeral —”

Tiny Max shakes her had, spits in Barb’s general direction, and says, “So fuck you, dead girl,” and finally allows Heather to reel her back into her arms, her fury exhausted.

Barb stares, wide-eyed. She blinks rapidly. “I’m — he — I’m sorry, I — ”

“You didn’t know,” says Chrissy softly, taking a step forward. “It’s okay. You didn’t know. None of us did, really.”

She swallows. They all stare at each other in the charged silence, except Tiny Max, who glares at the ground.

Barb asks, hesitantly, an olive branch she doesn’t need to extend but does anyway, “So how do we get back?”

“The pool,” he says. “Every death in the Upside Down, every time something crosses over, something gets left behind.”

“So where I,” Barb begins.

From behind them, from the direction of the megagate, in the distance, there is a massive explosion. It reminds Eddie of his first jaunt down below, the tremors that rocked the Upside Down as they traversed it looking for a way out. They stumble together, Chrissy grabbing at Eddie’s arm and Eddie grabbing for hers, trying to keep each other steady. Heather tucks Tiny Max further against her, and Barb’s momentum takes her closer to them with shaky, uneven steps.

The buzzing in his head spikes —

EDDIE

— and behind them, the dark sky has gone a bright blood red and it no longer looks like it’s churning like the sea: it looks like it’s collapsing now, imploding like a burnt out star, a whole universe dying before their eyes, around them. He presses his free hand to his temple, digging the heel of his hand in, and god, what the fuck is happening? What the fuck, he’s having an aneurysm or something, shit —

“She did it,” breathes Tiny Max in elation, a complete emotional one-eighty. She reaches up to grip Heather’s hands, saying, “El did it. She beat him — she’s ending it, she’s ending it all!”

“But what about us?” asks Heather.

Tiny Max turns her face up to her, eyes huge, and —

EDDIE

— Heather stumbles suddenly, nothing pressed against her or beneath her hands. She looks wildly to Eddie, who in turn looks to his left to find nothing there too, rebar clattering to the empty tile.

EDDIE, says Heather.

Above them, in the distance, growing closer, the sky folds in on itself, and then he is in blackness, in the dark, water beneath his feet, and there’s a girl in front of him in slightly too big acid wash jeans and someone’s letterman jacket standing in front of him. There’s blood dripping from her nose and she’s got the buzzcut he never managed to pull off.

“Supergirl, I presume,” he says.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi.”

Her eyes search his face. She asks, “Are you here?”

“I’m,” he starts, stops. He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I’m somewhere.”

“I have been looking for you,” she tells him. “All of you.”

He swallows, “Oh,” and thinks he might cry.

“Eddie.” The girl with the buzzcut holds her hand out to him. They’re not close enough to touch. She says, “You have to come home now.”

It’s been her, he thinks. It’s been her the whole time. The way she says his name — she’s been calling to him since the moment he gasped back alive, bloody and whole. She’s been cutting the top of his head open and dropping image after image, idea after idea, into his head, hoping that what little she can give him, hoping that what he can glean from her once static heavy voice — that it would take him home.

She’s been giving him clues, breadcrumbs: the breath in his lungs; his shield sisters, one after another; the first gate at the bottom of Steve Harrington’s pool; this hand, the reaching out one. She’s been calling for him and he’s finally dialed into the right frequency.

Supergirl smiles at him, says again, “Time to come home now — we are waiting for you.”

He snaps back into awareness at the edge of the pool. He’s walked closer to it in whatever fugue state his conversation with Supergirl had sent him into, and Heather is at his right, gripping his wrist like she thinks he’s about to jump, Barb hovering closer at his left. Above them, the sky is collapsing faster and faster and the thing is:

The thing is:

Eddie’s never thought of himself as a reliable narrator in his own life. He likes stories too much, likes living in a world better and more exciting and fantastical than his own, likes setting a trap and seeing who falls through, tells half-truths with a whole smile. The truth is easy: it’s brutal and ugly and desperately unsexy, a drunk dad in county lock-up most nights who says he loves him in one breath and then hits him with the next, a split lip and a black eye on an eight year old, hunched, poor boy shoulders and your mother’s disease-thin body unmoving in her bed.

But maybe he was right, back then. Maybe he was right, and maybe —just fucking maybe — maybe it’s gonna be his year after all.

“Sauron’s tower has fallen, and now I think I am quite ready to go on another journey.” He claps his hands together, and heads to the steps to the pool. “C’mon, Barbarella, H, it’s time to crawl through Satan’s asscrack.”

“Do you have to say it like that?” Barb says, long suffering, which isn’t fair, he thinks, they’ve only known each other like five minutes. At least Heather gives a chuckle and, yeah, he’s a delight and this girl gets it.

One after another, Eddie leading the way, the three of them clamber down into the empty depths of the pool as the sky above them churns itself into nothingness. They crowd together in front of a pulsing mess of vines; there’s a mouth-like opening, red, a small mirror image of what Eddie had crawled through a million years ago at the bottom of Lover’s Lake.

“He didn’t seal this up or anything right,” says Barb.

“Max said the kids all use it in the summer,” Heather says. “Uses saltwater instead of chlorine.”

“So let’s all remember to hold our breath.” He looks between the women flanking him. “Who wants to go first?”

Heather nods, a resolute look smeared across her face. “I’ll go. I was on the swim team, I can hold my breath better than anyone” — Eddie manfully resists making a dirty joke about his own lung capacity, which is impressive if he may say so himself; he’d swallowed — heh — back a similar one as Steve announced he’d be the one diving at the lake too — “so I can wait in the water, to make sure everyone gets through fine.”

“Sounds good to me,” says Barb.

“Yeah,” says Eddie. “So, Heather first, then Barb, then me, and a big old fuck you very much to this shithole.”

Heather steps up to the gate. She kneels down but turns back to look at him.

“They’ll be there, right?” she asks. “Chrissy and Max, right? They’ll be there? They’ll be fine?”

“Yes,” says Eddie. He kneels down next to her, grabs her hand and squeezes it once, and his voice doesn’t shake as he tells her, “They will be.”

“Okay,” she says.

She turns back to the door between worlds, cracks her neck, whispers, “Fuck you,” and then she’s gone.

Eddie looks at Barb. She’s staring after Heather’s disappearing body with an unreadable expression on her face and then she glances down at Eddie. She kneels too and they sit, shoulder to shoulder, for one long moment.

“Thanks for coming to get me,” she says.

“I’d say anytime but I think we’d both rather run screaming into the night.”

Barb snorts and goes in.

Part of him thinks this moment should feel different, should feel bigger and more charged and like it’s changing him as a person. But Eddie thinks: maybe he’s already done all the changing he needs. He’s not running away from something anymore; he’s running to something, and so, with one last look at the hateful sky, he holds his middle finger up into the toxic air of the plane of shadows, of Hawkins Below, of Mordor and the Upside Down, and crawls back home.

The disorientation is immediate as water drenches his face. Thin hands grasp his wrists and haul him the last of the way through then upwards. He breaks the surface with his hair plastered to his face, the scent of salt and brimstone in his nostrils, the taste of his own blood in his mouth finally fading, and Heather’s hand in his. Barb is treading water just next to them and they all wordlessly look down to watch the gate pulse red one last time.

It disappears like it was never there, not even a single crack in the porcelain tiles to bear witness to their journey and Eddie leans back in the water, floating, staring up at the sky. It’s sunny; he didn’t think he’d ever see the sun again.

“Is this thing heated?” asks Eddie. “That rich fuck.”

Heather bursts into laughter that almost immediately turns to tears. He floats over to her, wraps his arms around her, and says to Barb, “C’mon.”

Soaking wet, they climb out of the pool and stand, dripping, on the edge. Heather rubs furiously at her eyes, swallowing down her tears ruthlessly, and Barb keeps looking up at the sky too, blinking.

“I thought there’d be, like, a whole meet and greet,” he says to no one in particular.

“Maybe they don’t know this is where we were going to come out,” suggests Heather, a little hitch in her breath betraying her.

Barb crosses her arms over her chest as Eddie says, “No, I got the impression they knew exactly — ”

A noise to Eddie’s right has them all jumping. Heather looks around frantically for a weapon and Eddie shoulders his way in front of the girls, ready to tackle whatever it is to give her time to finish looking, and Steve emerges from the woods on the other side of the pool, shoulders slumped and a bat — hold on, hold on , it’s the bat , and just because you are absolutely giddy with relief doesn’t mean you need to make this weird, Eddie, he thinks — covered with nails clutched in his hand.

He’s not looking up as he walks, just putting one foot in front of the other. It gives Eddie time to look at him and to, yeah, pop probably the weirdest boner he’s ever gotten — outside of the demobat, but even then, you know? Steve’s got yellowing bruises all down the side of his face, the eye there swollen shut and not even black and blue, just black , so terrible that it actually makes Eddie a little sick to his stomach to look at straight on, with a split lip and a thick swatch of bandages around his neck that look like they need changing. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days, a whole mile of bad country road, rode hard and put away wet, and sure Eddie probably doesn’t look much better — might even look worse, though all his wounds got the Supergirl miracle cure while Steve’s super didn’t — but he’s never seen anything, anything better.

Eddie smirks, pops a hip, and clears his throat as Steve rounds the corner of the pool, just a few feet away from them.

He looks up, snapping into a defensive stance with his nail-bat held in front of his body like he’s about to hit a dinger, and, yeah, there’s that battle-hardened awareness Eddie was looking for. What a fucking catch . The one eye capable of blinking does so rapidly, growing ever wider.

“Hey, there, big boy,” he says. It comes out softer than he meant it to. He bites his lip, takes a step towards him.

“Eddie?” he says. He looks at Barb. He pales. “Oh. Oh.”

Steve keeps staring — at him, again, then at Heather and at Barb, lingering, then back at Eddie. His face does — something, Eddie couldn’t tell you exactly what but it sort of crumples, maybe. Goes flat then broken and his eyes dart around and his breathing gets shallow. He says, “I left you. I left all of you.”

“Nobody left anyone — not, not the way you’re thinking,” he tells him. “You couldn’t have known.”

But this boy’s got a martyr complex the size of the state, he’s twenty percent Aqua Net and eighty percent heart, Christ Eddie’s so tragically gone for him, huh? He just looks at them with his big, mournful eyes, says, “I did, ” and his breathing is way too fast and light, so Eddie takes another step forward, then another, hands outstretched, and Steve’s eyes roll back in his head and he goes down like a ton of fucking bricks. He’s not fast enough, just gets under him enough that his head doesn’t crack off the pavement, only sort of bounces.

He winces and cards a hand through his soft, dark hair. The man just passed out at the sight of Eddie and his undead babes, he’s allowed to take a few liberties, okay? Also, he’s just had, like, the most trying fucking week and a half of anyone’s life, except, okay, maybe Will Byers, maybe he and that kid should start a fucking club too, or maybe a support group, survivors of the worst realm ever —

“Is he okay?” asks Heather, shuffling over.

“No idea,” he tells her.

There’s another noise from the woods, just a little to the left of where Steve had emerged. Heather, bless her perfect little barbarian-to-be heart, ducks down and grabs Steve’s nail-bat, and Barb scrambles in close too. The part of Eddie’s brain that runs on DnD non-stop has, this whole time, been thinking: Heather’s their barbarian and Max is clearly destined to be a rogue; he’s been putting Chrissy in as maybe their cleric, or a monk, and Barb could be a wizard, if she got that stick out of her butt and decided to get down with them —

God, he thinks. Where are they?

The noise in the woods resolves itself into none other than Supergirl herself, in those jeans and that letterman, looking exhausted with one eye bloody with burst capillaries all over the sclera, and at her side — holy fuck — Chief Jim Hopper, skinny and careworn but incredibly not dead. Eddie’s got a new member for Undead Eddie and the Undead Babes, he guesses.

Hopper clocks Steve in Eddie’s arms first and doesn’t even bat an eye, just sighs and makes his way over to them, saying, “He better not’ve hit his head again, boy’s head’s hard but not that hard.”

“Uh,” he says.

He notices Heather and Barb then too, and goes pale like Steve at the sight of her but maybe already being halfway to a crouch to check on Steve means all the blood doesn’t rush completely out of his body. He keeps his feet, if a little shakily, and looks to Supergirl.

She’d paused, just on the edge of the wood, but now she’s running up to Heather, who drops the bat and gets swept into a tiny, fierce embrace. 

“You made it,” Supergirl says. “You all made it.”

Turns out, time can sometimes get a little weird in the Upside Down; Eddie gets looped in on this particular fun fact about twelve hours after Steve passed out in his arms.

But first:

He and his two remaining shield sisters get bundled into the back of a suspiciously nondescript black Jeep Cherokee. Hopper helps Eddie haul the still unconscious Steve into the back seat, and Heather and Supergirl join them — El, he reminds himself, though he bets she’d dig the Supergirl moniker — because she’s got an iron grip on Heather’s hand and won’t release it. El sits next to Eddie in the middle, and they drape Steve across their laps. His head is in Eddie’s, and he keeps running a hand through his soft and, yeah, actually pretty dirty hair, runs a palm gentle-like along the vicious bruise on his orbital bone and cheek, feels the heat of severely bruised tissue, runs his fingers along the frayed edge of the once sterile bandage on his throat.

Heather watches him over El’s head but doesn’t say anything, nor does Hopper behind the wheel, who keeps glancing at them through the rearview like he thinks all of them, including powerful little El, are going to disappear when he’s not looking. Barb, riding shotgun, ignores them all in favor of watching the town roll past her window.

They drive through Hawkins, which looks not unlike pictures of post-war German towns that Eddie can vaguely recall from the few times he’s voluntarily cracked open his world history textbook. It doesn’t look as bad as Upside Down Hawkins had — which had been actively on fire and, you know, collapsing in on itself when they’d crawled through the gate — more like a few smallish bombs had gone off some time ago and now repairs were underway.

Hopper takes them to what has to be some sort of shady-ass government installation just on the outskirts of town. It looks almost like FEMA has come to town, white prefab buildings hastily erected around what on the outside reads as an empty office building and more unmarked black vehicles — sedans, vans, and trucks — swirling around.

A bunch of suits swarm the Jeep when they roll to a stop. Hopper starts barking at people and then a tiny dude in a white lab coat with a too-friendly face pops out of the crowd. He lets Hopper yell at him but takes control all the same, gesturing for a group of people in scrubs forward. Two people load Steve onto a gurney and Eddie fumbles forward, wanting to follow, but Lab Coat snags his arm and, instead, Hopper and El, draped in the letterman of the man himself, follow Steve into one entrance of the office building and Eddie, Heather, and Barb get brought to another.

Inside, they get corralled into what looks like a sterile hospital wing and are immediately separated by gender despite Eddie’s protests and Heather and Barb’s weak smiles and tense looks. Eddie assumes what happens to him, happens to them: stripped down to skin and sent through a decontamination process that is entirely too-thorough, thanks, he and that orderly are closer than Eddie’s ever been to another man, and he fucks men. Then he gets a set of powder blue scrubs tossed at his head — he asks if they come in black and gets an eye roll back — sits through a barrage of increasingly invasive medical tests, has more blood drawn than he thought the human body had in it, gets frowned at and poked and prodded and has pictures taken of the shiny, pale scars he can see now on his abdomen now that the blood has been cleaned away and is given an IV and pole with a truly alarming amount of bags of fluid attached. He hears someone say the phrase medical marvel at one point and really hopes the kids love him enough to convince Chief Hopper to save him from becoming someone’s post-doctoral thesis.

He gets put in a room with a hospital cot, gets told to lie down, get some rest, someone will come get him soon, and he sleeps in fits and snatches. He paces when he isn’t. Tries to remember the last time he slept, before, maybe the RV? Maybe the trailer? Maybe fucking never? He starts to get hungry; someone brings him a blue Jell-o cup and a cup of ice chips before he even asks. He wonders who they’re watching him; he doesn’t see any cameras.

In his head, on a loop, he thinks: Chrissy, Max, Heather, Barb, Steve — Chrissy, Max, Heather, Barb, Steve — Chrissy, Max —

Where are you?

Eventually, Lab Coat turns up at his doorway. He smiles that benign, too-friendly smile at him and Eddie, in his powder blue scrubs, pulls on the persona of Eddie the Freak like a well-worn suit of armor. He grins a rictus grin and snarls when Lab Coat just crooks a finger at him and says, “Come along now, Mister Munson.” He follows regardless, because what the fuck else is he supposed to do?

He’s taken to some conference room and the armor falls off almost immediately. Arrayed on one side of a table are Barb and Heather, and Chief Hopper and Joyce Byers, what , who leans over the Chief to talk warmly to Barb. Lab Coat drops into a seat on the empty side of the table and Eddie does the same into the empty seat between the Chief and Heather, who reaches for his hand under the table.

“I’m Doctor Sam Owens,” says Lab Coat. “Let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we?”

After Eddie got that kidney eaten in the Upside Down and then did a little light bleeding to death, the others emerged to a broken town. The clock chimed and Vecna opened the fourth gate, and Hawkins Above split like a cored apple. El appeared at the, ha, eleventh hour, so to speak, and with Will Byers — who’d been given his own curse of Vecna, tied psychically to the shadowy master of the plane of shadows — they amassed what forces they could and did battle. Owens and his team of scientists and soldiers fought side by side the brave child soldiers of Hawkins, before Vecna, with his strings allegedly pulled by the Mind Flayer, put in one final stand across from El and Will in the center of town. They stood across from each other, old west gunslingers, eyes locked, the world burning, and then —

Then, it was over, washed away like a terrible nightmare you can’t quite recall except for your racing heart. Owens is hazy on the details of the hows and whys; the duo are being tight-lipped about it, only saying that it’s done, sealed and destroyed, the world beneath this world salted and burned, and this one finally, finally set to rights. 

And when El emerged from the final fray, blood pouring from her nose and eyes, tucked under Will’s arms to help hold him upright on a broken leg, she locked eyes with her adopted father and said that there were people waiting for them.

That’s why they’d been in the woods. For El, her conversation with Eddie in the blackness had been seventy-six hours ago; for Eddie, it had been twelve: he and his shield sisters had been wandering Hawkins Below for three days, while two weeks had passed in a miasmic blur of terror and fighting and screaming for the crew above.

Several of them — including El and Steve, Hopper says with a glower; Dustin had tried to get in on the action but Steve had hypocritically and aggressively benched him for a sprained knee, while Joyce had run herd on the others and practically chained them to chairs in the waiting room — had refused medical attention and instead had taken to the woods. El, says Owens, had predicted they would go to the pool but she thought maybe they were spooked and had fled to the woods. 

“Nope,” says Eddie. “Just on a different time table. And what about — ”

Heather’s hand tightens on his.

He asks, “What about the others?”

“Your little friends?” asks Owens. “The rest of the children have all been treated for various bumps and bruises. Mr Harrington was, as always, the worst off, he’ll need a specialist for that eye — Jim, you should really put that boy in a bubble at this point — ”

“No. I mean, yes, but,” he says. He stares at the table, swallows hard. Do they not — God, do they not? “The other — the other victims. From Vecna. Max, and — ”

“There’s a long road ahead of her,” he tells him, “but Miss Mayfield is quite the fighter. She woke approximately at the same time you were found by the Chief and Eleven and Mr Harrington, give or take a few minutes.”

Eddie shuts his eyes tight. “And Chrissy?”

“Appeared in a hospital bed just outside Hawkins three days ago,” says Owens. Eddie’s eyes snap open and the man smiles crookedly if kindly at him. “Listed as a Jane Doe. We’ve had her transferred to our facility, and Miss Cunningham regained consciousness around the same time as Miss Mayfield. She will also have her work cut out for her for recovery, but I imagine both of them will have lots of friends at their sides to cheer them on.”

“Fuck,” gasps Heather. Eddie turns to her, sees her free hand over her mouth, her eyes looking back at his, and he thinks he might cry.

He is crying, he realizes then as a chair suddenly screeches away from the table; he’s crying ugly, snotty tears, hysterical and so unpretty, and then Mrs Byers envelops his shaking shoulders with one arm and tosses the other around Heather’s. 

“It’s okay,” she says, tucking them in close to her. “It’s all going to be okay.”

“We’ve got cover stories in place,” agrees Owens. “A terrible natural disaster, a previously undiscovered fault line stretching right through the sleepy town of Hawkins, Indiana, cracking wide open. We’ve got people willing to go on the record as having seen things but then realizing it was because of gas mains bursting and leaking. Should tie the whole thing up with a neat bow.”

“And,” says Hopper with a glare.

“A copycat serial killer,” Owens says, “who has been, sadly, on the loose in and around the town for years. One that all the missing people and suspicious deaths can be attributed too. One that young Will Byers, traumatized, escaped from; one that’s been holding Barb Holland for years, and Heather Holloway too, and had viciously attempted the murders of Chrissy Cunningham and Max Mayfield, who murdered Fred Benson and Patrick McKinney. Hawkins’ very own Police Chief had been on his trail last summer, had to fake his own death to solve the mystery — ”

“And,” the Chief says again, more slowly this time, glaring even harder.

He rolls his eyes. “I was getting there, Jim, Jesus. A copycat serial killer, Mr Munson, who you witnessed in the act and were kidnapped as well. But Chief Hopper came to save the day, and after a vicious shootout with the now dead killer, was able to see all three of you to safety. We’ll have to make sure all your stories are perfectly matching, of course, before you’re families are informed and you’re allowed to leave the facility — ”

“When can I see them?” he asks, finally calming down. “Chrissy and Max. Steve.”

“You can see everyone,” says Mrs Byers, steely. With Hopper still glaring at Eddie’s left, there’s really no room for argument.

She helps Eddie to his feet without waiting to be dismissed and puts a steady arm around his shoulders. From the corner of his tear-fogged eyes, he watches Owns shake his head and Hopper ignore him, standing too to help Heather and Barb to their feet. Mrs Byers walks him out of the conference room and down a few more hallways before stopping them before a door. She runs her small, cool fingers under his eyes, wiping away his tears, and asks, “Ready?”

He nods, not trusting his voice. Mrs Byers smiles at him and opens the door.

Inside is a waiting room, filled with idle chatter and petty arguments that fall silent as Mrs Byers enters first. Eddie slinks in after her, Heather and Barb behind him with Chief Hopper pulling up the rear, and there’s a moment of complete and total stillness as everyone sitting in the waiting room stares at everyone in the doorway.

The kids are in one corner, Mike and Dustin and Lucas and Erica and El crowded around a boy in a wheelchair that must be Will Byers, the source of the loudest talking — some sort of DnD argument, if Eddie’s hearing didn’t betray him before they shut up, Will and Erica on one side of it while the rest of the boys take up the other; El is tucked up behind Will’s wheelchair, not participating but looking thrilled to be there nonetheless. The older teens are in another corner, Robin half dozing on Nancy’s shoulder while she quietly talks to Jonathan Byers and holds his hand. Some rad looking dude with pin straight dark hair that Eddie has never met before is with them, clearly zoned out.

Nancy is the first to react. She shoots to her feet, eyes huge, and says, trembling, “Barb?”

“Hey, Nance,” she says. “Sorry I’m late.”

“That’s okay,” she says and promptly bursts into tears and throws herself across the room at Barb.

All hell breaks loose. The able-bodied kids launch themselves from their seats at Eddie, talking a mile a minute. Erica practically scales Eddie from behind, arms in a death grip around his neck, while Dustin and the rest of the boys paw at his stomach, lifting up his shirt and poking at his whole stomach. Dustin is crying and he wraps his arms around the boy’s shoulders. As if from a great distance he can hear himself saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m here,” over and over again while Dustin mumbles, “Fuck you, I’ll kill you myself next time you pull that shit.”

Robin slams into them next, crushing the boys into him further, and Erica shrieks, “Hey, watch it!”

“You have now been elevated to supreme dingushood alongside Steve,” Robin tells him caustically, “and I will help Henderson destroy you, okay, if you ever decided to play big damn hero again. This is not buddies, this is not friends, friends don’t make unilateral decisions in the face of unspeakable danger, that’s just house rules here, okay?”

Friends, he thinks, and he’s worried he might start crying again so he smacks a kiss to her cheek so wet she recoils from him in disgust. He tells her, “You got it, babe.”

El is beaming from behind Will and she pushes his wheelchair over to Heather, who’s looking particularly lost. If he’s got his facts straight, her parents were victims of the Mind Flayer too, and none of her other friends would be in the know. But it’s okay, he thinks, his own arms full of rowdy and hysterical freshmen and one middle schooler who’s cooler than all the rest of them combined, because she’s got him and he’s gonna drag her kicking and screaming into this group, so help him Satan.

Barb and Nancy are sobbing in each other’s arms, holding each other so tightly that he can’t tell where one girl starts and the other ends. Jonathan hovers near, looking close to tears too, and Nancy catches Eddie’s eye over Barb’s shoulder, mouths thank you through her own deeply unpretty tears, and, ugh, all the emotional volatility in this room right now is making Eddie want to run away and also break into hives but he wouldn’t have it any other way, he doesn’t think. This is — this is — 

Eddie never had many friends, himself. He has his uncle, of course, who would unquestionably die for him if he had too, and then he’s got his group of DnD freaks and losers, his bandmates, but he’s never had people like the people in this room, not really: loud and loving and ready to do battle for each other at the drop of the hat, who will literally walk through hell and come out the other side for you, who will pierce through the veil and hold out their hand and say, “It’s time to come home.”

Shit, he’s crying again.

He presses his face into the top of someone’s head — Mike, he thinks, based on hair texture — and curls his arms tighter around the kids in his embrace.

Hopper claps his hands together and says, “Hey, give the man some space, he’s not going anywhere.”

Eddie’s version of the story gets demanded then, as they’ve heard bits and pieces from El, Max, and Chrissy which, when he gets told this, he almost starts crying for a third time. Christ, Eddie’s never cried this much in his life, he’s gonna need that IV drip again. Everyone listens, rapt, to his story, because listen if Eddie can do anything, it’s tell a damn good story. He doesn’t spare details or leave out how scared he was, or confused and terrified, because the kids deserve the truth, and he lets Dustin and Robin hold his hands whenever he pauses or trembles. They look at Heather with wide-eyed respect when he tells them about the demodog they put down together, and how she was the first to crawl through the gate home despite not knowing what would happen on the other side.

Eventually, he winds down and Hopper appears at his side to ask if he’s ready to see everyone else. He sucks in a sharp breath, filled with unexpected trepidation.

Heather makes eye contact with him from across the room where she’s been tucked between El and Will. She nods and so Eddie nods too. He says, “Yes, please,” and they rise together and follow the Chief out of the room.

They travel down two new hallways in complete silence, Hopper leading the way. Like Dustin, he’s got a bit of a limp and his is the one story he hasn’t gotten yet, because he certainly wasn’t in hiding for a year catching a fake serial killer and there’s something about Russians, he thinks? Which, like, what the fuck, life is already so weird, this might as well happen.

Hopper leads them to yet another nondescript door and pauses outside of it, just as Mrs Byers had. He looks them both over and sort of nods to himself before opening the door and turning back to them.

“You guys did good, kid,” he says. He claps one big hand on Eddie’s shoulder, does the same to Heather with his other, and pushes the two of them through the open door, and —

And —

In hospital beds side by side, Max and Chrissy lie quietly talking. Max has both of her legs up in traction, her right arm in a cast, and her bright blue eyes are sunk into blackened sockets, but they’re tracking, bouncing up and down as she talks about how someone better buy her one of those sword canes once she’s on her feet again. Chrissy’s got both of her arms in casts, the right from wrist all the way up to elbow, the left one in two pieces so it can stay pressed against her chest with a figure-eight brace with the fingers on that hand all splinted; she’s got a brace on both ankles, and bandages wrapped around her eyes.

Between them sits Steve, one hand in Max’s undamaged one and the other outstretched to rest on Chrissy’s hip. Someone’s changed his neck bandages and he’s got a black patch on now over that busted eye; unfairly, or perhaps just because the gods like to laugh at Eddie, he makes it fucking work.

Max sees him first, and a wickedly gleeful smirk stretches over her face. Fuck, he loves this kid.

“Eddie! Heather! Quick,” she shouts. “Is it true Steve swooned like a regency heroine when he saw Eddie?”

“Shut the fuck up,” hisses Steve. He’s bright red and Eddie would be lying, like, so fucking much if he said this isn’t doing it for him.

From the other bed, Chrissy laughs brightly. “Oh my God!”

“I’ve been known to have that effect on pretty boys, yeah,” he says.

She laughs again and gently wiggles the unbraced fingers of her right hand. “Come sit with us.”

Heather doesn’t need telling twice. She goes to perch on the foot of Chrissy’s bed, one hand dropping easily to the other girl’s calf and staying there, probably come hell or high water. She stares at Eddie meaningfully until Eddie sits himself down on the uncomfortable armrest of Steve’s hospital chair, dropping a causal arm around his shoulders. His hand rests against Steve’s chest, just above his beating heart, and Steve reaches up to grasp his hand, squeezing it once.

“You okay?” he asks.

“I’m great,” says Eddie. “You okay?”

“Getting there.” The bright red of his blush has faded to a soft pink and Steve smiles up at him, something shy and sweet about it. He says, “So I didn’t get a chance to say before but, like, it’s good to see you, man. Really good.”

He squeezes his hand again. He doesn’t let go.

Eddie smiles helplessly down at him and thinks, Yep, looks like my fifteen minutes are up.

“You too,” he says aloud.

Max gags expansively and Chrissy whispers, “What’s happening?”

“Dustin's not a bastard anymore,” Max tells her as Heather says, “I got the girl, so Eddie’s getting the guy.”

Eddie snaps his eyes away from Steve to glare at Heather, who is smirking unrepentantly. So much for their beautiful friendship, he thinks, because now, tragically, she has to die, and also probably everybody in this room.

“Oh,” Chrissy is saying, coloring now too beneath her bandages. “Cool. I, um, I love a happy ending.”

“Me too.” The hand still over Eddie’s twines their fingers together and his heart skips a beat as he looks down. Steve adds, “Plus being a single parent’s been, like, really difficult or whatever.”

He blinks. Steve smiles again and sort of sinks back into Eddie’s arm.

“Oh,” he says.

“Ugh,” moans Max. “Chrissy, can we trade? I wanna be blind, it’s like watching my parents flirt.”

“Wow, Mayfield, you ungrateful little shithead,” he says flatly and she chortles to herself from her bed. “Here I was, about to propose perhaps the sickest Dungeons and Dragons campaign of all time for you ladies, and now you’re doing me dirty like this? See if I let you make a rogue way better than Wheeler Jr’s.”

“Wait,” she says. “Better than Mike’s? I’m in.”

“What’s the campaign?” asks Chrissy.

“Picture this,” he says. “Five fair maidens, because Barb and Supergirl both have to get in on this action — a rogue, a barbarian, a cleric, a wizard, and a monk, brought together by the whims of fate, banding together as shield sisters as they work to destroy an ancient evil through none other than their wits, their abilities, and the power of friendship. Harrington here can be the prince in a tower you need to rescue,” he adds, just to see him blush again.

“I want to punch a dragon,” says Heather.

“You can punch a dragon,” he agrees.

“Then I’m in,” she says.

“Sounds like fun,” Chrissy says, smiling.

“Yeah.” Max pokes his shoulder. “But get Will to be the DM thingy or whatever. This Party needs a bard.”