Work Text:
Eddie Munson is dead, and he’s gone to hell.
It was easy not to believe, when all of it seemed like an abstraction, or something he could use to shock people with, but the stark reality of it is different. Hell isn’t Hawkins High, or everyone in town thinking he’s a murderer. Hell is dying, and being left behind, and it’s the smell of the dead and dying demobats that surround him and his own blood in his teeth and the pain—
Wait. He rolls onto his side and it’s easier than he thought. There’s no pain. He spits the blood from his mouth and sits up. His shirt’s a loss, but the wounds—the wounds have healed into thin raised scars. What the fuck is happening? He’s not dead? He’s not dead. And there’s a ringing echo in the hollow of his ear, so faint it sounds like a memory—
You will restore the balance.
He shakes it off and looks up, at the gray sky, the gate above the trailer roof closed. “Fuck.” There’s no way he’s getting back now. But does he want to go back? He’s always said he doesn’t care, but…it’s too much. The wide rift of the gate reaches back from the trailer toward the center of town. If it’s like this here, what’s it like on the other side?
And how will they find a way to blame him for it?
No. He can’t go back. He already told Dustin to take care of everyone, he has to trust that the kid can do it. Sometimes you roll a one, and he’s no stranger to failure. It’s all in what you do with it.
Maybe this is what that voice meant by restoring the balance. He stays here—he dies here, for good this time—and the rest of them will live. He told them this year was his year, and now he won’t graduate, like he wanted. What he wanted doesn’t matter, now.
Eddie doesn't know shit about calculus. He can't diagram a sentence. He's forgotten when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. But the one thing he does know, inside his bones, is the music. It comes back to him now, in the blank and deafening quiet, the howl against the void.
When he picks up the guitar, when the first chord rings out against the dark and featureless sky, he expects that the demobats will return. What's left for him now, with the gates closed? Where can he go from here? He's lost everything—everyone—and died once already. What’s another death?
He feels the cloud of demobats before he can see them, the rush of air from their leathery wings. The pain will hit any second now, the wave will break on the shore, the riptide will pull him under and down into the oblivion he craves—
The demobats slice past him and around him and launch back up into the sky, a squawking mist that hovers and swirls over the trailer. They aren't attacking him. He's called them, provoked them, just like before, but they aren't coming anywhere near him.
What the fuck is happening?
There’s no way to tell what day it is. Time doesn’t exist here. He eats when he’s hungry, sleeps when he’s tired. Plays the guitar until his fingers ache. All the songs he found so difficult before fall perfectly into place now. It’s too bad there’s no one around to hear him.
The demobats leave him alone, for the most part. But some of them perch on the edges of the trailer roof and—listen? “Go,” he says, and they go. The next time, when one of the little ones gets close, he stops for a moment and picks up a stick. “Fetch,” he says, throws it for distance, and goes back to Ace of Spades.
Less than a minute later, during the bridge, the little demobat drops the stick back at his feet. And waits, expectant, with its head cocked like a dog. Now that’s interesting.
It works when he isn’t playing, too. He has to keep the commands simple, they aren’t smart enough for anything complex. He climbs one of the tentacles to the top of the warped building that was Hawkins High and shouts, “Here,” just to see what will happen. To see how many of them there are. But he loses count around eight hundred or so.
Still. It’s enough to make an army.
In the timeless time (maybe it’s three weeks? maybe it’s a month?) after he’s conquered the demobats (for he thinks of it as a conquest), the little demobat that fetches lands next to him, whimpering, with a ragged, bleeding bite taken from its wing. Even here they seek him out, these lost and broken things.
He slings the guitar across his back and scoops up the demobat, feather-light, leathery, shivering. “Show me.”
The little demobat squeaks as he walks, deeper into the forest, the rest of the demobats hovering above or crawling behind. Toward what is likely the lair of the demogorgons. It strikes him, as he goes, that this is such a dumb idea. He doesn’t have anything to fight them with, besides the demobats, and the one that was shaking in his arms, now crawling up to sit on his shoulder, is proof of what they can do to the unprepared. But he’s here now. He’ll do his best for all of them.
The little demobat on his shoulder gurgles, in its throat. It reminds him of how he’d imagined— “Gollum.” It chirrups and nestles into his hair. “Aw, you like that name, little guy?”
A twig snaps under his sneakers and a hiss echoes through the trees. Shit.
“Who…are…you…” Wait. There’s no one here but him. He hasn’t seen anyone since he woke up. Nothing but his own voice and the sounds of the demobats and the guitar. Does this mean that demogorgons…can talk?
He clears his throat. “Eddie.” It comes out shakier than he means it to. Gollum’s claws dig into his shoulder.
“Eddie…” The only sound, after that, is the demobats’ wings in the air. No movement in the trees. They aren’t attacking. It feels like he’s got the initiative, like they’re waiting for him to make the next move. And he’s always been good at thinking on his feet.
“Eddie!” He yells, and gets a hiss of recoil in return. “They’re mine, do you hear me?” He advances, and the demobats advance with him, the hissing in the trees grows softer, in deference. He can feel Gollum—is that purring, can demobats purr, that’s a question for later—“You leave them alone, they belong to me!”
“They belong…to Eddie…” the chorus comes. He can’t tell how many of the voices there are. “We…hear Eddie.”
He smells the smoke before anything. Sour and acrid, rotting memories. This reckoning can’t be put off forever. But this time, he has his weapons, he has his knowledge, he has his army. He will fight.
The pillars of smoke stretch down from the sky, engulfing the trailer. It’s a blacker shade of pitch outside than inside, it hurts to breathe, and he chokes out a single word, “Shred—”
The demobats rise, eight hundred strong, a vortex of wind that lifts the smoke on the ground, and attack with a single, piercing screech. And as he watches, he feels a perverse sense of glee. Should he get the guitar and provide his own soundtrack of triumph?
“Call them off,” the mind flayer roars, above the din. The demobats whirl through the smoke and tear it to wispy threads. He can see the sky through one spidery limb, a gaping hole in another. “Call them off.” Is that—is it pleading now? “Call them off!”
“Stop,” he says, under his breath, and the demobats fold their wings, plummet to the ground, perch on the trees, and wait.
“I pledge my loyalty.” The smoke curls around him as the demobats chitter. “As I served Vecna, so shall I serve you.”
This isn’t happening. Of all the fucked-up shit he’s been through in the last however-long-it’s been, he’s not hearing the mind flayer—the one thing he’s been dreading this entire time—kissing his ass. And yet a thin thread of victory winds its way through. If they could see him now, Jason and the rest of those assholes back in the cafeteria, they’d choke on their words.
“I had not expected you to be such a—”
“Such a what?” he shouts, and if it’s possible for a cloud of smoke to recoil, this one does. “Such a freak? Such a loser? Such a coward?” It shrinks with every sentence.
“Such a one as you are,” the mind flayer says, chastened. “Such a one as you will become.”
“Patrol,” he says to Gollum, out of habit, and closes the trailer door. There’s nothing to guard against. As far as he knows, all the threats of the Upside Down have been neutralized.
Save one.
That night (?), Eddie dreams.
He’s back in Hawkins. There’s a sun in the sky instead of the featureless gray. It’s autumn and the leaves lie thick on the ground. The forest, the lake.
He blinks and he’s in the cafeteria. Alone. The leaves crackle as he walks. He opens a door and there’s the clearing, Chrissy smiling at him from the picnic table.
“Are you—”
She opens her mouth and a ticking emanates that fills the forest, rattles the tree branches. He runs—to her, not away from her—she dissolves into smoke—he blinks again and there’s a dungeon master’s screen on the end of the table. He throws it aside and sees—
A set of scales, swinging wildly. On one of the plates, a mummified hand, holding an eyeball; on the other, a pile of sticks, the remnants of a sign flapping at the top. It’s too small to read. And between them, in the middle of the scale, a barrier made of light, nearly invisible. He touches it and the resounding chime of a grandfather clock echoes through him, rattles his teeth.
When the ringing in his ears stops, he hears the voice again, the one from when he first woke up in the Upside Down, after that first aborted death—
You will restore the balance.
“How?” he screams, to the swinging scales, to the sun-dappled forest. “How?” he gasps, to the bleak gray of the trailer, to the sky outside the windows dusky with demobats. “How?” he cries, to himself, to no one else.
“You know I love it when you drop by, big boy,” Eddie says, with a cough, “but you gotta give me some kind of warning first. Let me grab my gas mask or something.”
If it’s possible for a cloud of smoke to look perturbed, that’s what the mind flayer is doing, as the demobats chitter. “This is not a social visit,” the mind flayer booms. “I have been called.”
“Called? Who’s calling you?”
“Vecna.” The demobats recoil, as with one voice, and Eddie can feel the demogorgons, in their lair, shiver and hiss.
“I thought you were loyal to me.”
“It is for that reason that I come to you now.” The mind flayer sighs, which would be funny to see if Eddie weren’t so annoyed. “I believed he was gone. I chose to serve you. I am compelled to serve him.”
“So where are we going?”
“We?”
Eddie snaps his fingers and the demobats rise from their perches, the demogorgons stir in their dens. He ties the bandanna around his nose and mouth, which makes it a little easier to breathe. The mind flayer reaches—an arm, maybe—down to lift him and place him squarely behind where he imagines its head must be. There’s something solid beneath his feet even as the smoke swirls around his sneakers, as Gollum and the rest of the demobats fly in formation next to him, as the demogorgons await their orders.
“Let’s all go see what Vecna’s cooking up, big boy.”