Chapter Text
He was no more than a baby then.
Well, he seemed broken-hearted
Something within him.
But the moment that I first laid eyes on him,
All alone on the edge of seventeen
- Stevie Nicks (1981)
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:
- John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
Eddie came to in sudden whirl of pain, the scent of blood filling his nostrils, and the fluttering of wings, gentle against his cheeks.
“Eddie,” a voice whispered from above him. “Open your eyes, Eddie.”
His eyes moved behind his lids, but he couldn’t seem to open them; they felt so heavy.
The voice was small and squeaky and demanding. “Open your eyes.”
Frustration filled him. He tried to open his mouth to tell the voice he couldn’t, but like his eyes, he couldn’t seem to make his lips move. He tried to push his tongue through the seam of his lips, but when a familiar metallic tang flooded his tastebuds, he realized they were cemented shut with dried blood.
“Open your eyes!” The voice grew higher pitched, infused with some sort of power. Eddie felt it deep within him, digging into his muscles and bones, forcing them to respond with jerky movement.
“Eddie!”
Suddenly his eyes snapped open, and he pried his lips apart, feeling the skin pull painfully. He blinked and a gasping moan emerged from deep within; his voice sounded like his throat had been shredded.
“Good,” The voice whispered again, this time near his right ear. “Now get up.”
He briefly wondered if Dustin and the others had managed to bring his body back to the right dimension, but it didn’t feel like home, and the voice in his ear, while strangely familiar, wasn’t anyone he knew.
“Am I dead?” he croaked out, hot tears forming in his eyes. His sight blurred and he could no longer see.
“Yes,” the squeaky voice seemed to sigh. “But death is not the end, Eddie, and you need to get up. Get up!”
He felt the voice like a surge of energy, burning hot as it ran through him. He sat up, his torn stomach burning at the effort.
“Where am I?” he gasped out, blinking away the tears. “Who are you?”
“This place has no name,” the voice said softly.
Eddie blinked slowly. He saw a shadowy figure before him as his sight came back to him, but is came into focus, he reeled back in fear.
Before him was a bat. Its black wings, small eyes, and sharp teeth filled him with a terror he had not known before dying in the Upside-Down, torn apart by the fucked up bats that haunted its orange skies.
Ignoring his pain, he scrambled to his feet. “No! Get away!” His voice was high-pitched, and he was imbued with the fear that there would soon be more pain to come. He flung his hands out as if to ward off an attack and squeezed his eyes shut.
But the bat did not attack. Instead, it said in a very exasperated tone, “Oh, stop being so dramatic. I’m not one of those bats.”
He felt the soft flutter of wind from its wings across his cheeks and flinched. It took most of what small self-discipline he had not to jerk away completely.
“Just look at me.”
Eddie slowly opened one eye, and then the other. He let his hands fall to his sides and stared. It hadn’t been lying. It wasn’t a Demo-Bat, or whatever Dustin had called them, but a small, normal-sized, black bat with leathery wings and a small snout. Its eyes were dark and had no reflection within them.
He flushed, feeling stupid. He cleared his throat. “Um. You’re not going to eat me?”
The bat snorted, and said, its voice full of disdain, “Of course not. I don’t eat.”
Its tone sounded suspiciously like himself; the one he had regularly used with Dustin and the other kids in the Hellfire Club.
“Alright,” he responded slowly, wiping his hands on his jeans. He might be dead, but he could still feel the dampness they created, the nerves fluttering in his belly. His mouth tasted foul, and when he spat, bits of dried blood peppered the ground at his feet. His stomach lurching with nausea and his wounds hurt as the skin stretched. It wasn’t as bad as it was just a few minutes ago when he’s first woken up.
He grimaced as he looked down at his blood-soaked shirt. Carefully, he peeled it away from where it stuck and inspected the skin beneath. He could see the puncture wounds from the demo-bat’s fangs; they were still oozing blood, but it seemed to be slowing down.
“It should stop eventually,” the bat said, answering Eddie’s unspoken question. “Wounds heal slowly here, but they do heal.” He paused. “Sort of.”
Eddie didn’t respond, but let his shirt fall back into place. Now he was certain he wasn’t going to be impaled with fangs longer than his fingers, he looked up, taking in his surroundings.
He was standing in a clearing in a forest of trees of varying shades of blue and gray, from the lightest being the leaves that jutted out stiffly from the branches of the trees, to the darkest that colored the shadows beyond his line of sight, disappearing deep into the forest. And the trees were uncanny; they all the same size and the same shape, like one might see in a children’s book illustration. He tilted his head back to look at the black sky; it was dark and colorless, not like the orange sky of the Upside-Down. No stars shone, only a pale-yellow moon upon its strange canvas, casting an anemic light into the clearing in which he stood. There was no breeze except that which came from the little bat’s wings. It was a little creepy, and nothing like anything he’d seen in life, or even in the Upside-Down.
“What the hell is this place?”
“Why do you say that?” The bat sounded surprised. “Do you think you’re in Hell?”
Eddie raised an eyebrow. “I’m dead, aren’t I?”
“You are,” it admitted. “But this isn’t hell.” It drew closer, hovering near his shoulder.
“Then where is it?” Eddie pulled a face. “It’s definitely not heaven.”
“I told you before, this place has no name. Sometimes it’s called the middling—”
“The middling?” Out of habit, Eddie took a lock of his hair and pulled it to his mouth. Now stringy with dirt and blood, he spat it back out. “Like Middle Earth?”
The bat blinked rapidly. “More like the Undying Lands.”
He wasn’t really expecting an answer, but the one he got sent his eyebrows into his hairline. “You know Tolkien?” His voice went high pitched in disbelief.
The bat tilted its head. “You know Tolkien; therefore, I do.”
The words were simple, but Eddie didn’t understand. “What do you mean?”
“I know what you know. And a little more. That’s it.”
Are you some kind of guardian angel or demon or—or what?"
The bat suddenly swooped, causing Eddie to jump back; but then he did it again, almost playfully. “What do you think?”
“How the fuck should I know?” Frustration shot through him, and he felt the need to yell. “Stop being so cryptic!”
The bat fluttered closer its leathery wings touching his upper arm.
“Look,” it said. “Under your jacket, what do you see?”
Eddie frowned, eying it warily.
“Go on.”
Eddie did as he was told and shrugged off his coat. It too was covered in blood, and he felt a pang of sadness as he let it fall to the ground.
“Under your sleeve.”
He lifted his sleeve and felt his eyes widen in shock. There, where his tattoo of bats should have been, was nothing but pale skin.
Shocked, he looked back to the very real bat before him.
“It’s gone,” he said in a strangled tone. “It’s missing.”
“Yes,” The bat squeaked, its dark eyes staring straight into Eddie’s. “Do you understand?”
Eddie tilted his head slightly, observing the little creature before him. Yes, there was some resemblance there. He didn’t answer, but hesitantly stretched out his hand. With a whispery flutter of air, the bat gently settled on his thumb and grasped his fingers with its tiny claws. Eddie stared at the little creature in wonder. It looked so vulnerable clinging to his fingers, not at all frightening.
“What are you?” he asked in a whisper of awe.
The bat tilted its head but didn’t answer the question. “I’m your guide here. That’s all that matters.”
Eddie accepted this silently, letting his eyes take in the tiny bat that was somehow part of him.
“Do you have a name?”
The bat blinked. “No.”
There was a moment where it had hesitated before it answered, but Eddie decided to ignore it for now. He rolled his eyes. “Well, I can’t just say, ‘you there’ or call you ‘bat.’ You need a name. Are you male or female?”
“I don’t really have a gender, but I suppose you might think of me as male,” it said thoughtfully. “You’re male, right?”
Eddie was taken aback. Then he felt alarmed. Was it possible for him to become something else here? “Uh. Yeah. Last time I checked.”
“Alright then, call me what you like.” It took off into the air before saying, “And no, you didn’t lose your dick, I promise.”
“Stop reading my mind!” Eddie said through gritted teeth, unable to stop himself from brushing his hand over the front of his jeans, just to make sure.
“I can’t help it,” it said smugly. “I know what you know.”
“Then why don’t I know what you know?” he muttered, readjusting himself. Everything was as it should be, except of course, the fact that he was dead.
The bat once again swooped out of the darkness. “So, what name did you decide on?”
Eddie thought it sounded oddly interested, despite its seeming disinterest earlier. He was tempted to give it a Dungeons and Dragons name or something cool, but all the creatures of the Upside-Down had been given names from D&D, and they instilled horror. This bat—his bat— wasn’t frightening at all. In fact, it was rather… adorable, in an odd sort of way. At that warm thought, memories of childhood before everything went to hell skittered through his consciousness.
“Batty,” he said. But as soon as the word came out of his mouth, he winced in regret. Maybe it would laugh at the silly name, make fun of him for choosing something so childish. He would have done so if it were him.
But the bat didn’t laugh. “Batty?” Again, he tilted his head, as though pondering the name. Then he said, “I like it.”
Eddie looked up, squinting warily. “You do?”
“Of course.” Batty said matter-of-factly. “It’s better than Demo-Bat.”
Eddie felt a pinch of fear. “Yeah, he said quietly. “It is.”
They remained silent for a long moment, and then Batty said, almost inaudibly, “You always did like Sesame Street, didn’t you?”
A dull pain flashed through Eddie’s chest that had nothing to do with his injuries. He watched Batty fly off towards the edge of the forest and contemplated his death at the fangs of the creatures in the Upside-Down. It was hard to imagine that not a week earlier he’d known nothing about it, living his loser life as a third-year senior, dealing weed for Reefer Rick, pining for a girl he couldn’t have—
He shut his eyes tightly and sucked in a deep breath. They were both dead; there was no use thinking about what could have been. He looked around him at the strange landscape and pushed down his worries and the sadness that threatened to well within him. He had to figure out what to do next.
“Batty?” He called, wanting to ask him what the hell they were supposed to be doing, but before he could, he heard a noise in the distance. He froze and trained his ear on the sounds.
It was lilt of voices and the jingling of bells. Then came the strange music, almost like that of a carnival, eerie and strange. In life he might have enjoyed it, but now he felt a swoop of fear in his belly. He turned to Batty, but he wasn’t paying him any attention. Instead, he was hovering in place, looking into the forest in the same direction of the music.
“Batty?”
Again, Batty didn’t answer, and fresh nerves crawled into his already squirming stomach.
Eddie went over to him, snapping his fingers in front of the little bat’s face. “Hey, Batty!”
The bat suddenly turned settled his dark eyes on Eddie’s. “What?” he asked, sounding way too much like Eddie did when he was irritated.
Eddie rolled his eyes and decided to let it go. “The music?” He kept his voice calm, though he felt anything but. “What is it?”
“You’ll soon find out,” Batty flew towards the forest, calling back, “Come on!”