Chapter Text
Eddie spends the next two days in a nightmarish state of purgatory.
It feels like someone’s found the fast forward button on his life and is holding it down, jerking him from one scene to the next without giving his brain time to catch up. He blinks once and he’s standing in front of the kitchen sink, a glass of water in his hand. Blinks again and he’s sprawled on the couch, listening to the droning babble of a sportscaster as Nancy paces holes in the Harringtons’ carpet. Blinks again and there’s whiskey in his mouth.
It’s fancy shit, probably. Premium barrel aged with the jizz of an oak sprite or whatever the fuck. He hopes it’s not too fancy— sorry Mr. H, not only did I blind your son, I drank you outta $500. Please don’t call the cops, I really don’t wanna get fucking electrocuted.
Nancy swirls hers around in her glass like she’s a wine critic that snapped one day and ordered something stronger, staring between the phone and the clock.
It’s a familiar routine at this point. Robin calls them every four hours on the hour for updates (none) and to deliver a report on Steve’s wellbeing (bad), and Nancy dutifully forwards that depressing bit of non-information on to their extremely grounded, extremely-not-allowed-to-leave-their-houses band of rugrats. And then Eddie has to listen to them sniffling and choking and trying to be brave over the phone.
He wishes he had control of the fast forward button in those moments. Wishes he could skip past hearing Dustin’s voice warbling over Steve’s name. Wishes he didn’t have to learn that Erica is actually an optimist, asking over and over again if Nancy’s sure the doctors have tried everything.
Wishes he could fast forward right to being drunk on the living room floor, Nancy splayed out next to him, staring at the ceiling as they listen to a tape full of Steve’s favorite songs.
“If I go to prison,” he says. “D’you think you can learn some of these on the guitar?”
Nancy rolls her head to the side to glare at him, her eyebrows knit together into a tiny little dent of fury.
“You’re not going to prison,” she says firmly.
Eddie snorts.
“We failed at the whole ‘clearing my name’ mission rather spectacularly,” he says. “I doubt anyone’s gonna believe that an evil wizard psychically murdered three people and blinded another. They’re probably gonna start saying I whacked Steve on the head, too.”
“No. No they’re not. I told you, the government—”
“Doesn’t tend to give a shit about people like me. If telling everyone I killed those people is their easiest way out…they’ll do it. You know they will.”
Nancy makes a noise like a growl in the back of her throat, sitting up so fast that it makes Eddie startle. She leans back on her hands, scowling down at him, her jaw set in a way that has him fearing for her teeth.
“We’ll make them give a shit,” she says. “I’ll make them give a shit.”
“Like they gave a shit about you?” he asks. “Like they gave a shit about Steve?”
His stomach feels sour with whiskey and guilt, and the words come out sour too, bile-filed, accusatory things. How could you hope to protect me? How could you hope to protect anyone, in this fucking town?
How could I? God, how could I?
Nancy’s staring at him with naked, startled hurt on her face, and he has to close his eyes to get away from her. What is he doing, casting away his lifelines? He can’t afford to do that now. Not when every person that still believes him is a barrier between him and the electric chair. A flimsy barrier, sure. But a barrier all the same.
“They don’t care about us,” she says, after a long moment. Her voice is cautious, like she’s approaching a wounded animal. “But they care about themselves. Their reputation. Keeping all the monsters and other worlds and human experiments away from the masses. And we can threaten that.”
“Sounds like an excellent reason for them to kill us.”
“Sure,” she snorts. “Just like it would’ve been an excellent reason for them to kill Jonathan and me when we started digging around for proof that they killed Barb. Just like it would’ve been an almost-impossible-to-ignore reason for them to kill Steve and his parents, when they escaped the lab.”
Mrs. Harrington had given them the whole sordid tale while Steve had slept off his mind battle with Vecna, those few brief hours when Eddie had felt okay. That shining morning when they had won at no cost.
They’d sat around the kitchen counter while she made them all tea, and she hadn’t looked at them when she’d explained that most of the lab employees were prisoners, just as much as the kids. Enslaved by their government with the threat of a treason charge hanging over their head should they attempt to run.
She’d explained, too, that one of her best friends from college was a journalist at the New York Times. After they crawled out of the woods, the first thing she did was scrabble up some change and call her. She’d spat out the whole story in quick bursts, and told the woman to spread it around. To publish the whole thing if she didn’t hear from Mrs. Harrington every week.
That was enough to bargain for their lives and freedom both, apparently, when the suits finally caught up to them.
She’d said this all in a calm, level tone, like she was reading out of an encyclopedia, and they’d all pretended that her hands weren’t shaking.
“So what,” he says. “You wanna dig through Mrs. H’s address book and call her reporter friends?”
“Why not?” Nancy says. “And I have contacts of my own. We can set up a whole web of failsafes for you. Force them to come up with a different story.”
“Okay but…I mean. Hawkins lab is a real place, with a real address, with a shitload of people who signed up to work there and dropped off the face of the Earth. That would be pretty easy to collaborate.”
“Corroborate,” Nancy corrects smoothly. He opens his eyes to glare at her.
“Whatever,” he says, waving his hand. “The alternate dimension, the son of a serial killer murdering people with his evil mind powers? That’s a stretch. You know it is. And it’s not like some reporter is gonna swan dive into another dimension to save my skin.”
She chews on her lip, and the tape plays through almost the entirety of “Born to Run” before she speaks again. Eddie pictures Steve flying down some dark, winding road with this song blasting from the radio, and his heart clenches into a hot bit of coal. He’s never gonna drive again. Add that to the fucking list.
When Nancy does speak up, it’s a relief.
“C’mon then,” she says, getting to her feet. She snatches the whiskey bottle off the floor and Eddie lets out a groan of protest. “Quit whining. We’ve gotta sober up.”
“Why, exactly?” he asks dubiously.
“Because we’re gonna go get them their evidence,” she says. “A bag full of those fried bats, or fuck, we’ll march on over to the Creel house and take the bastard’s corpse back with us.”
He can only stare at her, jaw falling open. Laughter bubbles up inside his chest at the absurdity of the suggestion, but he’s too shocked to let it out. She’s joking. She has to be joking, only her every muscle is rigid, and her face is set in a mask of grim determination.
“You want us to go back,” he says slowly. “Into the Upside Down.”
“Yes. Tonight. We’ll give it…” she squints at him, calculations whirring behind her eyes. “...five hours. Midnight. It’ll be quiet then, and we should be sober enough. We’ll head over to my place, I’ll grab my guns, and then we can go in through Fred’s gate. That one's the closest to the Creel house. I’ll start making a stretcher to carry Henry’s body.”
She nods decisively and wheels around, heading for the door.
“Wait,” Eddie says, scrambling to his feet. The world is woozy around him, dreamlike. Is it possible to get so drunk you start hallucinating? Is that why he’s hearing her suggest something this insane? “Wait, wait, wait.”
She half-turns to face him, feet still pointed to the door. Her whole body is tense with suppressed motion, energy held back.
“What?”
“You…I…we just…” Eddie stammers. She eyes him with extreme impatience. “It’s dangerous,” he settles on.
“It’s less dangerous than leaving them with a clear target,” she says. “You’re right. We can’t hold them off you with good will alone. We need a threat or…”
She shakes her head, blinking like she’s trying to clear the thought of Eddie’s fried body out of her skull.
“Less dangerous for me, maybe,” Eddie says, not bothering to expel the image himself. He’s been carrying it around since he came back to himself at Rick’s boathouse, shaking and sobbing with a girl lying dead in his trailer. “Way, way more dangerous for you.”
Nancy makes a pitched noise of frustration. She lunges forward, grabbing wildly for his shoulder, almost toppling over with the speed of it. The whiskey sloshes at her slide, and she grips him with all the force of a vise, and her eyes burn almost as much as Eddie’s throat.
“How long is it gonna take,” she snarls, “for you to realize that you’re part of us now?”
She sways a bit on her feet. There are tears gathering on her lashlines.
“You mean something to us. You mean something to me, and I’m not gonna just sit safely in this house and let them kill you. Just like I wouldn’t let them kill Mike, or Robin, or Steve. Get that through your thick skull.”
His breaths feel all stoppered up in his lungs, pressing at their insides. He wants desperately to close his eyes again, to escape the sight of Nancy Wheeler crying at the mere thought of his death. But he thinks she would start actually screaming at him if he did.
“Okay,” he says instead, weakly. He brings a hand up to settle over her wrist. She’s shaking a bit. Or he is. Probably they both are.
“Okay,” she says.
She takes a deep breath and lets go of his shoulder. Turns away, and some sort of spell breaks, and its only lingering effect on the world is the warmth curling in Eddie’s heart. The knowledge, sharp as broken glass, that she’s willing to risk her life to save his. Not just because he’s important to Steve, and not just because it’s the right thing to do. But because he’s him.
“Come on,” she says, setting the whiskey down on top of the fancy liquor cabinet. “There’s a workshop out in the garage. There should be enough long pieces of wood to make a stretcher.”
Eddie nods, not trusting his voice, and follows her out of the living room.
It feels both too easy and too fun, getting ready to go back into the Upside Down.
Maybe it’s just fun in contrast to the two days of endless, wallowing misery. The world’s finally stopped its little time-skipping routine between scenes of hazy grief, crystalizing into action and purpose and movement. Putting the stretcher together, methodically eating a simple but hearty meal of grilled cheese and canned soup, stretching out their cramped limbs and warding off a rapidly-encroaching hangover with coffee and ibuprofen.
He doesn’t really think about what they’re doing until Nancy’s scrabbling down the gutter from her bedroom window, backpack slung over her shoulders. There’s two guns nestled inside, he knows, and boxes of ammo. Weapons they’ll need to defend themselves from things worse than the bats.
Nancy passes him a pistol.
“Know how to use it?” she asks.
He nods.
“Wayne brought me to the shooting range a few times,” he says. “I was never that good at it, but…from what you’ve told me, most of the shit down there makes for a pretty big target.”
She nods grimly, checking over her own gun.
“Hopefully we don’t run into any of them,” she says, and Eddie bites his tongue and doesn’t say anything about jinxing themselves.
They steal two of the Wheeler’s bikes, strapping the stretcher to the back of Nancy’s. He deliberately doesn’t think about their mirrored counterparts scattered over the road in the Upside Down, where Steve had tossed up the first shield. Four days ago. God, how had that only been four days ago?
The pedal down the road in a silence hovering between tense and companionable. Because even though there are many, many things that he is deliberately not thinking about right now…it still feels better than drunkenly waiting for the next phone call. The next nail in the coffin, the next bit of knowledge that yeah, this is Steve’s forever and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
This is doing something at least. Something for Steve, even, if he believes Nancy’s insistence that having Eddie around will be a good thing. That he’ll be wanted, in the aftermath of what he’s done.
So even though he’s vibrating with adrenaline at the thought of the flower-petal monsters and their many, many teeth, there’s a surety to his legs. Each turn of the pedals is just the next thing he has to do. Each breath is just the next breath he has to take, and he doesn’t feel guilty holding it in his lungs.
“I think we need to keep doing stuff, after this,” he says to Nancy as they pull up next to the gate. It pulses red and wrong in the middle of the street behind half a dozen ROAD CLOSED signs. He wonders what the municipal workers thought they were protecting folks from. A volcanic eruption maybe?
“Stuff?” Nancy asks.
“Just,” Eddie sighs. “I feel…better, being here. Doing something. Don’t you?”
She nods, thoughtful. Unties the stretcher from the back of her bike.
“Well,” she says. “We’ll have to put Henry’s body somewhere. And then figure out who to contact, what to tell them. We’ll take photographic evidence…and maybe hide some of the bats around town, so that there’s still something even if they confiscate our evidence.”
He takes the other end of the stretcher, listening to her lay out a roadmap for the next few weeks. A talisman against inaction.
“So yeah,” she finishes. “I’d say we need to keep doing stuff.”
She smiles at him, and together they leap back into hell.