Chapter Text
November 1983
The clatter of shattering glass and the string of hushed curses that follow it rouses Eddie from an already restless sleep. He blinks away the drowsiness flooding his head and the rush of static to his ears as he sits upright and slowly pushes back the warm blankets that he so desperately wants to burrow himself into again instead of getting up, and he fumbles with the lamplight on the bedside table until the room is illuminated in a soft yellow glow.
He stares at his watch, and 6:49 stares back at him, unkind and cold like the blistering autumn wind buffeting the sides of the trailer and the whistle of it between the cracks in his window panes.
The bleary grey morning beginning to seep through his blinds is the bitter reminder that he needs to actually get up, but he only digs his fingers into his sheets and gazes dazedly at the carpet beneath his feet.
A monthly stay with his mom at a three-star motel over the long weekend always seems to drag on long enough to be painful, no matter how much Eddie hates it. His arguments are useless against custody rulings and lawyers who don’t give a shit and his mom and her boyfriend who’s barely older than Eddie, despite how she never seems to care about the visits and spends the only scheduled, court-ordered days they have together complaining about getting back to Indianapolis so she doesn’t have to spend a second longer in Hawkins than she has to— like it’s a disease, like Wayne Munson’s sobriety is infectious and as if the shitty, rundown trailer he’s been living in since before Eddie was born is going to somehow turn his nephew into another angrier version of his dad overnight for the sole purpose at getting back at her for leaving.
Eddie is no stranger to it all, to his uncle’s struggle to make ends meet, to the real reason why his mom fosters nothing but resentment for this place and Eddie; she could never be happy here, in this town, and still clings to the puritanical and elitist mansion-clustered hills where she was raised, and she never could understand his contentment— his riled, defensive rebukes every time she insults his home, his uncle, him. She despises him for it.
A quiet knock on his door signals Eddie to turn and stare at it, waiting as it cracks open and Wayne appears in the doorway in his overalls and steel-toed boots, gazing down at Eddie with a gentle smile that hides something sad behind it as his calloused fingers curl tighter around the doorknob in his hand.
“Just making sure you’re awake,” he speaks, his voice low and quiet, so quiet that, with the dull buzz in his ears, Eddie can hardly hear it. He’s gone a moment later, closing the door behind him and once again, Eddie is alone.
The morning after is the worst, because the night before always bleeds into the days following it and leaves him miserable and frustrated and he snaps and feels worse from the guilt after it— yet his uncle never reprimands him for it, never gets angry, never looks at Eddie with anything other than rueful silence and in place of meaningless, placating words, he just rests a heavy hand on Eddie’s wrist the entire drive back to the East Side and doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t push.
He gets dressed in the same pants he’s been wearing for a week, drinks the tea his uncle made for him, drives to school, lets himself get shoved against lockers by Tommy Hagan and thrown around by Steve Harrington and then goes home, goes to work, goes to bed, gets up, and repeats the endless monotony until the weekend where he does nothing but sleep and shove empty beer cans in the crack between his mattress and the wall and nicks half-smoked cigarettes from his uncle’s ashtray and tries not to feel too upset about poor attendance and failing grades.
Eddie is seventeen, and he does his best to ignore Jonathan Byers, even though he wants to say something, anything, even when he knows that awkward apologies and I’m sorry’s won’t bring his brother back home.
October 1984
Eddie is eighteen, two months into his second run at twelfth grade and burnt out before he even sits down at his desk.
He blinks, it’s been an hour, the bell is ringing, he’s trudging in a trance to his next class and half-aware of the askance looks he receives from passing students and absentmindedly crams a shitty flyer invite to another shitty party in his backpack and keeps walking.
He thinks about his campaign, about Kas, about what he’s going to eat for dinner tonight and which record he’ll buy for himself as a gift for miraculously passing his calculus test, and he keeps staring out at the window even with the vague sense that someone is calling his name, and that someone is his teacher, and the next thing he knows he’s being sent to the office and he tunes out the mocking snickers from the back of the classroom as he packs up his things and leaves.
Eddie is eighteen, and he’s drinking cheap alcohol out of a water bottle and hiding joints up his sleeves and pretending to not care as people start calling him “the freak” often enough as if it’s his middle name. He sits under the bleachers in his spares and scribbles incoherent chicken-scratch into a tattered coil-bound notebook held together by duct tape and brooding anger.
Kas is everything Eddie is not; he’s strong, he’s charming, he’s heroic and conniving and brave and certainly not a coward who balks at standing up for himself and is too scared to run away when he’s trapped. Kas doesn’t feign confidence, he exudes it, he doesn’t have to pretend that he’s full of bravado and selflessness. Unlike Eddie, Kas isn’t a coward, and he isn’t a freak.
Eddie is eighteen, he goes to Tina’s party, he sells weed too expensive to all-too-eager rich kids and pockets the money to bring back to his uncle. He lets Billy Hargrove back him into a wall because he’s too skinny to weasel his way out of a confrontation and there’s something intoxicating aside from the booze slurring his speech and better judgment, and he likes it a little too much as he breathes in Billy’scologne and the acrid stench of cigarette smoke on his leather jacket and suddenly he’s running for his life, high and drunk and stumbling to his van until he tears off toward Kerley Trailer Park with drunk jocks in his rear-view and the craze of adrenaline pumping through his veins.
Eddie is eighteen, and he fails twelfth grade again.
His mom doesn’t bother to call anymore, and this time he cares, this time it hurts, this time he promises that he’ll do better even though there isn’t a trace of disappointment on his uncle’s face, but to Eddie that only makes his failure sting with shame and he tricks himself into believing that he deserves something worse, hates that his uncle isn’t mad at him, hates that his mom left and his dad is dead and hates himself for not trying harder.
July 1985
Summer is better. Eddie has time to work longer, has weekends to go practice at Gareth’s and work on campaigns for Hellfire and stay up late into the night watching Rat Patrol reruns with his uncle when he isn’t on night shift.
He works long hours, he drinks too much, stays up too late, wakes up too early. He goes to Indianapolis by himself, comes back with cigarettes and a brand-new NJ Warlock that was stupidly expensive but god he spends too long staring at it like it’s his long-lost love, and it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen and he plays it and plays and plays and plays until the callouses on his fingers are red and numb and he listens to The Call of Ktulu with more resolve and focus than anything he’s ever studied before until he can play it with his eyes closed and his uncle is smiling and proud and Eddie’s happy and there’s no school and he has nothing to worry about.
Eddie is Nineteen. He goes to the mall, smiles at pretty girls that blush when they’re caught staring, spends too long in his bedroom mirror chopping his hair when he thinks too much and smokes too much weed.
His mom moves back to Hawkins but doesn’t tell him. He runs into her at the post office and stares too long at the dazzling new ring on her finger and that night he drinks and cries like a pathetic child and keeps his door locked even as his uncle asks to be let in with a thick voice, and pretends, pretends, pretends that he doesn’t care— it’s all a ruse, and Eddie’s been a terrible liar his whole life, but he makes up for it with flourishing theatrics and pours his heart and soul into his writing and overcompensates with apathy and sharp smiles and a wild, wicked gleam in his eye willfully accepting the title of “the freak” with fervour as if it’s a badge of hard-earned honour.
The Hawkins chief is dead and a martyred hero and Eddie’s cousin went missing and no one ever found him. Summer ends before it barely begins, and Eddie gets better at fake smiles and self-loathing until one day it clicks, one day it finally settles in that the only place he’ll go if he ever leaves Hawkins is jail or death, and he decides not to care.
March 1986
Eddie is shrieking, manic and clutching the edge of Dustin’s sweater with white knuckles like the kid is a lifeline tethering him to existence as if in letting go he’ll get sucked back into that place, into the cold and dark and the swarm of razor-sharp teeth and waxy wings and wispy corpuscles covering the lining of his throat— guttural screams wrack his spasming body as he thrashes under Steve and Lucas’ strong grip, and Nancy’s pulling out teeth and what’s left of his shirt from the amalgamated mass of mangled skin and blood that is his chest. Vecna is dead, is he? Eddie is alive, is he?
He’s got his bandana between his teeth to keep him from biting his tongue off and the pain is unbearable but consciousness clings to him inescapably like the infection steadily seeping into his bloodstream. He’s writhing, hyper-aware of everything touching him and around him and every word and breath and sets of stricken eyes unable to tear away from the boy in front of them.
Eddie doesn’t want to die, but this is worse than death— he’s losing blood too fast and crying and all-too cognizant of flashing red and blue lights and the paramedics standing frozen over him, transfixed and horrified until Robin wails at them to fucking help him please help him and he’s being lifted carefully onto a stretcher.
He wakes, drifting in and out of consciousness, bouncing between blinding pain and the blurred haze of analgesics. He’s strapped to his hospital bed, then handcuffed to the rail, and then he’s free from restraints save for gauze and plasma drips and the wrenching, painful feeling of a breathing tube shoved down his throat.
First, he sees doctors, then nurses, until Chief Powell comes in and the words come pouring out of him even though it hurts to speak, and he’s pleading with him, I didn’t kill her, I swear to God I didn’t kill her, and he can’t stop the raucous, hysterical repetitions until Powell grabs him by the shoulders gently but firm and tells him we know— that the investigation led to Henry Creel, and Eddie doesn’t ask how, but he’s cleared, and everyone knows Eddie Munson didn’t kill anyone, just that he ran, that he almost died, that Creel almost murdered him and he’s lucky to be alive.
Lucky.
They finally let his uncle come see him, and the floodgates open and Eddie can’t manage much else around shuddering sobs and cleaves to weathered flannel and the strong arms wrapped around him.
Eddie is nineteen, and alive.
Dustin and the others filter in and out, recounting everything he missed, the aftermath, Chief Powell’s public declaration of Eddie’s innocence— all of it.
They all hold back something they want to say, and he doesn’t miss the cautious glances at the layers of bandages swathing his arms and neck and chest. Their words catch in their throats, Eddie doesn’t pry, and he doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to see his skin and the scars mottling it, doesn’t want to know what he looked like when Eleven pulled him out of the Upside Down.
Eddie is nineteen, and he stops pretending that he’s got it all together, stops pretending to sleep at night and instead stares sullenly at the white hospital walls around him and blinks like a deer in headlights at the nurses who come to check on him every hour until he’s released.
Eddie is nineteen, and he’s losing his grasp on the carefully cultivated reality of nonchalance and suavity he’s created for himself over the last three years; it’s being rapidly replaced with a turbulent cascade of crumbling resolve until he’s left unable to hide away the hollow shell of the terrified kid he’s been running away from since he was fifteen.
April 1986
A month has passed since Vecna was killed and El closed the gates. To Eddie, it feels like yesterday, or like a year ago, or like now, like it was five minutes ago, when he woke up in a cold sweat with the jolt of his heart pounding so hard it might burst through his ribcage.
He’s shirtless and sprawled over his bed, gasping for air and wide-awake and he can’t stop himself from the fleeting glances at every shadow lurking in the corners of his room. Even with the light on, because he can’t bear the dark anymore, it feels too dim, too stuffy.
He throws his blankets away, winces when his door clatters against the wall and stumbles into the kitchen. Cigarette smoke fills his lungs as he glances warily up at the living room ceiling, half expecting Chrissy’s body to still be there, or the portal, and he suppresses a yelp when the lights flick on and his uncle’s leaning against the wall, watching Eddie with a pained look that starts a sinking feeling in Eddie’s gut.
“It’s not your fault, Ed,” he tries, but Eddie knew he was going to say that, and his expression has already twisted and he’s stomping back to his room with a bottle of beer in his shaking hand and he slams his door behind him.
Eddie is Twenty, and he spent his birthday in a coma and the days since wallowing in fear and a near-constant waking nightmare reminding him of the sickening crunch of snapping bones and Chrissy’s last raspy exhale as her disfigured body dropped in a crumpled heap on his living-room carpet.
He’s on autopilot, he shouldn’t be driving, and he shouldn’t ignore his uncle as he climbs into his van and goes, just goes.
Adrenaline is all that saves him from his newfound, crippling fear of the dark, of being cold, of the bad wiring in the trailer that causes the lights to flicker anytime the door gets shut too hard, and anything else that could possibly remind him of being stuck in that place. Of staring up at Dustin as he cut the rope to save them, as he regretted it as soon as he did and fell into the swarm, and the feeling of teeth and claws and ripping and tearing and biting.
Eddie is Twenty, it’s almost four in the morning, and he’s crying again.
He sits shivering in his van in an empty parking lot and thrums his fingers against his steering wheel with The River in his Walkman until dawn comes spilling over the treeline and he goes back home, but by then his uncle has already left for work.
Eddie goes to school, he ignores his friends, he tries to pay attention in class, and when the ringing that signals three-o’clock sounds, he’s the first to leave.
He’s climbing back into his van when someone comes up behind him and yanks on the back of his shirt with a surprising amount of strength and Eddie’s met face-to-face with Dustin and Mike staring up at him with expectant, startlingly imploring eyes that bore into Eddie’s soul long enough that he fidgets in the silence.
“What?” he blurts, and Dustin splutters, swings, swats at Eddie with a burst of pent-up frustration and frantic desperation before he reaches out and snatches Eddie’s keys out of his hands, forbidding an escape, and Eddie squawks. “Give me my fucking keys back, man!”
“You can’t just do this, Eddie,” Mike chastises, and for the first time Eddie realizes how tall he is, or maybe Eddie isn’t wearing his boots and he’s slouching more than normal and he only shrinks further against Dustin’s distressed gaze.
“Do what?” he retorts immaturely. He knows he’s withdrawing, it’s not like it’s accidental. He makes a swipe for his keys, and Dustin jerks his arm back just in time to pivot on his heel and throw them across the parking lot, into a bush, and Eddie gasps out a pathetic squeak.
“This is an intervention, Eddie,” Dustin announces, matter-of-factually with his hands on his hips like he’s Mike’s mom and the disapproval radiating off of him insinuates that he might as well be.
“An intervention? What, you’re my therapist now? Is that what this is?” Eddie balks incredulously, plowing through Dustin and Mike and he wades into the thicket. “Jesus,” he gripes, plunging elbow-deep into the bush and comes up with nothing but scratches over his forearm and no keys. He tunes out Dustin’s adamant protests and Mike’s righteous indignation until he wrenches the damned things out of the dirt with a scowl.
Steve’s there. Henderson’s leaning against the hood of his car on the passenger side, and since when did he get here?
“C’mon, dude,” Steve sighs, pulling open the back door, gesturing for him to get in with no further explanation.
“Get fucked, Harrington,” Eddie quips, spotting his flickering glance to the gnarled scar on Eddie’s cheek, scar tissue still red and taut against the unscathed skin surrounding it. Unscathed. Eddie is the furthest thing possible from unscathed, and he swerves out of Mike’s clawing range as he bolts past the trio and groans loud and long as his hands fumble to unlock the door and pounds his forehead against the window in defeat, squeezing his eyes shut, as if by focusing hard enough that the guys trying to kidnap him will up and disappear into thin air.
“Your uncle called my mom,” Mike says abruptly, and Eddie twists to look at him accusingly. “He said you took off in the middle of the night and he didn’t know where you’d gone, and he called all your friends, and I told Mom I’d look at school, but you didn’t show up to D&D or lunch or anything.” Mike’s hands are stuffed into his pockets, and he’s staring at Eddie’s feet.
“We’re worried about you, Eddie,” Dustin adds, and he’s giving Eddie those eyes, and he shoots Steve a look that says help me but the asshole just shrugs and rests his elbows on the roof of his BMW.
“I flipped out,” Eddie huffs, waving his hands noncommittally, and Dustin’s disapproval deepens. Strangely, Eddie finds himself subject to the waning patience of a fifteen-year-old almost a foot shorter than he is and squirms under the pressure of it. “Okay, I massively fucking flipped out and I know it was dumb but it won’t happen again. Can I go home now?” He asks, cynicism dripping in his tone as he finally unlocks the door and opens it, lugging his backpack in and out of sight.
“No,” all three chorus and Eddie feels a little less like twenty and severely out of place, wearing the dirty sweater covered in burn holes and dried mud he’d found in his backseat and the sweatpants he woke up in, hair more unkempt than usual and hands lacking rings and instead carefully out of sight to hide bruised knuckles and cracked skin.
He’s high, he’s still a little buzzed, and he zoned out halfway through answering a question in class and he walked out of third-period Algebra to go puke in the toilet. This definitely isn’t the first time it’s happened, but considering the circumstances and the sheltered reasons and the lies spewing through Eddie’s teeth, he has an excuse to be more of a shithead than usual. He’s trapped by fear and the government NDA threatening him with life in prison if he squawks about what he knows.
What he’s seen.
What happened.
He stares too long, leaves too much time in-between the sentence he meant to start and now he’s in the back of Steve’s car beside Mike, going someplace that he doesn’t care enough about to ask.
Eddie is twenty, and he’s falling apart.