Chapter Text
Eddie Munson was the unlikely hero who saved the town that betrayed him. The “devil music” he lived by was what saved Hawkins from the latest evil from The Upside Down and even returned normalcy to the little town. For a little while anyway.
While a few narrow-headed townsfolk remained to believe that the eccentric dark-haired 19-year-old was still responsible for Chrissy Cunningham’s death, the satanic ritual rumors seemed to be forgotten with the easy return to their lives of mediocrity and chopped liver.
The truth was, that Eddie did feel responsible for her death. Not directly, sure, but it was his uncle’s trailer where her bones snapped and eyes popped, and he’d brought her there to forget about how fucked up the world was for a bit. Only, Eddie would be the only one to remember.
He liked Chrissy in their short time together, not long enough to know how, but there was more to the head cheerleader than school pride and conformity - something that haunted her deep, but in a relatable way. The night she died was the most she ever scared him and ever would, even though he was the one everyone feared.
His uncle got a new trailer. It wasn’t any nicer - God forbid their town had a fund for victims of The Upside Down - but it helped Eddie forget how he left her broken body alone on the floor and fled, which probably saved his life, but the Queen of Hawkins High deserved better than that.
It had been two months since Eddie had brought the sounds of Corroded Coffin to The Upside Down, and by some miracle, stopped Vecna for good.
By some other miracle, he’d be graduating next month. After everything that happened, he tried just hard enough for passing grades to make it to the class of 1986. For the cheerleader who couldn’t. For the little gold ‘86 necklace he found under the couch and told no one about before they took the old trailer away.
He also didn’t tell anyone about how much it hurt it was to see her again on that pillar, eyes gouged and body limp, like a Goddamn trophy. Killing what killed her felt that much sweeter.
In his shoebox of a bedroom, Eddie sat against the wall at the top of his twin-sized bed with a notepad against bent knees where he fleshed out ideas for a new D&D campaign. From the mismatched nightstand, a portable radio played his favorite station - the only one with metal music that reached Hawkins.
At least, when the connection wasn’t faulty and the radio waves didn’t cross and fade his favorite Iron Maiden song into Madonna. Fucking Madonna.
With a roll of his eyes, Eddie picked up the radio.
-Open your heart to me, baby, I hold the lock and you hold the key-
It was Chrissy’s favorite song when she died and there was a part of her soul still connected to the earth where the old trailer sat. She’d been floating in nothingness, dark, but still unable to see, now awoken and confused, so she tried to speak:
“Hello?”
The voice made Eddie throw the radio across the room, and the music turned into static when it hit the floor. His overhead light flickered when she spoke again, this time more clear, but increasingly frightened.
“H-Hello?”
He sat stiff, but after everything he had seen, he was open to indulging the voice on the other side.
“Um, hi?” he answered cautiously, leaning forward in his bed.
“Eddie?”
There was a crack of relief in the soft voice, a transition he’s heard before deep in the woods behind the high school.
“Cr-Crissy?” he said, pushing away from the wall. The bed springs croaked with his departure and he rushed to the ground where the radio sat askew next to a bookshelf with no books.
“Eddie, what happened? Where am I?”
He slowly picked up the radio and stood up. “Uhhh.”
“We were at your house, right?”
“Yeah,” he answered slowly, sadly.
“I don’t see you.”
She couldn’t see anything.
When Eddie spoke, he didn’t care what people thought of him, but he struggled to tell Chrissy that she was dead, let alone that he watched it happen and continued to see it when he closed his eyes.
“Does it hurt?” he finally asked, sitting down on the edge of his bed.
“Does what? No,” she laughed freely, “I-I feel great, actually.”
“Good, great…listen, Chrissy…”
“Yeah?”
He took a deep breath. “Yeah, don’t…don’t freak out, okay?”
And so he laid back on the bed and told a story into the radio about Henry Creel, The Upside Down, and the curse that targeted Chrissy and their classmates. Eddie was a jokester. She didn’t believe him until she remembered the visions of clocks and black widows and how her parents turned into the demons they hid below their skin to the outside world. It was the last thing she remembered and none of it was real.
It was oddly calming to know that she was dead.
“You were with me?” she softly asked.
“Yeah, but I’ll, uh, spare you the details.” Passing it off like it was no big deal was easier. His throat clenched. He fidgeted at the hem of his T-shirt. “Everyone thought I did it.”
“You? How?”
“Hey, even you thought I would be mean and scary,” he lightly chuckled and then sighed. “You ever see the movie, Frankenstein? Like the scene where an angry mob marches around town with torches? Kinda like that.”
“Eddie, I’m sorry.”
There was something so genuine and comforting about her tone, or maybe no one had ever cared about him like that before.
“Thanks. It’s okay now.”
Just like how with him she felt free, even before death.
Chrissy was quiet for a moment. He thought he almost lost her.
“I liked hanging out with you.”
His lips pursed into a smile. “And not just because I could get you drugs?”
“No,” she laughed. For that reason.
“Me too, Chris.”
If she still had knees they would be weak.
It was his turn to hold the awkward silence. Eddie blinked up at the ceiling.
“Can I ask you something? And look, I can’t talk but…what did you want to forget so bad?”
If she could gulp, that’s what he heard. “You won’t tell anyone?”
“As the alleged leader of the Satanic Church of Hawkins, we never speak ill of the dead.”
If she could smile, she did briefly at him, but it’d drop quickly.
“My mom. My whole family really, but I was never good enough for her, and I couldn’t keep up so I…threw up a lot. I started to see the school counselor. It didn’t help.”
“Yeah, they kinda just talk at you. Say what they're supposed to say, check a box then go home to their perfect lives…my family sucked too.”
Eddie was the least judgemental person for having the loudest opinion in any room.
“I’ve never told anyone that.” Her voice flickered.
“Not even Jason?”
The water was high and murky.
She scoffed. “Especially not Jason.”
“He was…uh, kinda the head of the angry mob,” Eddie confessed.
“I did run off with the class freak after his big win.”
“See, I thought we decided that you were the freak.”
She laughed that sweet laugh through the radio waves and he chuckled along - the dam breaking.
“You deserved better, Chrissy,” he said, once the air settled. “All of it.”
She wished she got to know him that well in the physical world. That they got high together before she died. Maybe she would have kissed Eddie in his uncle’s trailer and for the first time known what it was like to be understood.
“If I died…how is this real? How long do we have…can I…come back?”
“I…don’t know,” he said. “The radio, it wigged out, Madonna came on, and suddenly, you were here.”
“I like Madonna.”
“Of course you do,” he mocked playfully before clearing his throat. “This monster thing, something about music made it weak. That’s how I…we defeated it. Maybe if we knew that sooner, you’d still be here.”
He was so sad she almost felt it.
“We can pretend,” she sweetly suggested. “Close your eyes.”
“Chrissy,” he chided, unsure his heart could take it.
“Are they closed?”
Eddie sighed quietly, shut his eyes, and nestled his back into the bed. “Yeah.”
“Is it like I’m next to you?”
“Kinda.”
“Is your hair the same?”
A smile broke through. “Yeah”
“Just checking.”
He pictured her like his memory from the woods but curled up on his bed, her bare knees just touching his ripped jeans, and their hands innocently apart on their stomachs. She smelled like her mother’s perfume, an attempt to mirror her biggest critic for acceptance, and her ponytail draped over his shoulder.
Jason would have already had his hand up her pleated skirt. Not that she was never curious about how Eddie’s rings would feel on her thighs, but she wanted to know if the curly shag on his head was soft, or if the tattoos on his arms felt like skin. She couldn’t feel a thing and these things she’d never know.
“Can we stay like this for a while?” Chrissy asked, almost like she knew what was in his head.
“Lucky for you, my ever-so-busy social calendar just cleared,” he teased, and Chrissy giggled. “We can do this until we can’t, okay?”
“Okay.”
When he didn’t speak, she listened to him breathe and wondered what he listened for in the silence. She could have fallen in love with him. It would have been so easy, for them at least, their town another story.
He mourned her and she mourned the opportunity to be at the front of the stage at The Hideout on Tuesdays with the five drunks. It’d take her a while, but she’d become as fearless as him to the whispers.
“Hey, Eddie?”
“Yeah?”
“Play some Corroded Coffin for me?”
He grinned. “It’d be my pleasure.”
Eddie kept this vision of Chrissy, alive and perfect and lying next to him behind his eyelids a few seconds longer before letting her go. He placed the radio back on the nightstand and stood off the bed to grab his faithful guitar off the wall.
At the risk of the amplifier disrupting whatever in the universe that brought her through the radio, he sat back down on the bed with his electric guitar unplugged.
He checked if she was still there before starting to play one of their new songs for the muse no one knew inspired it.
The sound brought her back to middle school, to the boy a couple of years older than her with the shaved head at the talent show. How invisible he was to her back then and how in another life they could have run Hawkins High.
Hours passed until she started to fade with the batteries that ran the radio like the AAs powered her too. They both knew their time was numbered - a living breathing boy, a dead girl, and the invisible string that had been fraying since puberty.
He’d heard it in her voice during the tenth or odd round of 20 Questions they played just to fill the time, and then they stopped. Eddie closed his eyes again and she listened to him breathe until just after midnight when the lights in his bedroom flickered like they did when she first spoke.
“I don’t want to go,” she whimpered.
He opened his eyes and turned to the radio like she really was there with him.“You’re crying? Chrissy, don’t cry.”
“Maybe? I’m not sure.”
Death was strange.
He leaned forward from the comfortable spot he’d sunk into on his bed over the hours and snatched up the radio in his hands. “Hey, I’ll find you again, okay? The Madonna song…open your heart to me…”
His half-singing was panicked.
“Eddie?”
“Yeah?”
“You deserved better, too.”
The lights stilled and the glow of the red “ON” button on the radio faded. He stared at the gray box clenched in front of his chest before leaving his bed to take the batteries from the remote in the TV room. He changed them quickly and turned the radio back on. A cheesy ad for an auto-body shop played.
“Chrissy?” he whispered, hopeful, but she was gone.
He was alone again, but a little less lonely. Maybe it was a stroke of luck, or maybe he was losing his mind, but Eddie had a new memory of Chrissy Cunningham when he closed his eyes. Her voice was his new favorite song, and he’d do anything to hear her on the radio again.