Chapter Text
Eddie could feel the blood rushing out of the open wounds littering his torso. He was in so much pain that he almost couldn’t feel it, but he wasn’t there yet, and the feeling was overbearing. His vision was starting to go out, and he doesn’t have enough blood to cough up anymore. He could hear Dustin speaking quietly through his tears.
“I’m- I’m gonna look after them.”
He couldn’t put the poor kid through this. He tried to make sure he couldn’t come back. He tried to make sure he wouldn’t have to see this. He knew the kid looked up to him, and after hearing about all that he’s been through already, he had to at least try to soften the blow.
“I think I’m actually gonna graduate,” Eddie joked “I think it’s my year Henderson.” speaking was gradually getting harder and harder for him. “I think it’s.. finally my year.” He laughed a bit, knowing that his time was up. It was over. He had to say what he needed to say or no one would ever hear it. “I love you man.” And I’m sorry. He faintly heard Dustin say it back, but his hearing was starting to go now too. A tear rolled down his face. He couldn’t see anymore. Part of him was glad that he didn’t have to see the look on Dustin's face as it happened. He was gasping for air harder than he ever has before. That’s it. It was over. The rest of his organs shut down, and he was just waiting for his brain to follow suit. It didn’t take long, then he was gone.
And now he’s back. Memories of the scene were vividly playing in his head as he attempted to figure out what exactly was going on. He remembered every second of excruciating pain, did those bats want him to suffer? They didn’t try to eat him or anything, they just bit him and started circling. Then he recalled what was arguably the most painful part of that entire experience, seeing the look on Dustin’s face as he hobbled over to him. The way he tried to convince himself that Eddie might make it even though they both knew there was no hope. And finally, when everything went quiet. It was like he just fell asleep for a few minutes, or he blinked for longer than usual and woke up in a completely different location. He lifted his shirt, which he noticed was completely intact. Wounds are gone, but they left some pretty gnarly scars, which meant he hadn’t dreamt all of that. He looked around to try to figure out what was going on or where he was when he heard something moving.
“Psst!”
After hearing this, Eddie whipped his head in the complete opposite direction. The same voice then called out again, this time whisper-yelling.
“Fucking hell. Hey! Freak! Over here shit head.”
He turned in the correct direction and found the source of the voice. He had considerably longer hair and facial hair, and he was dirtier than Eddie thought possible, but this was undeniably-
“Billy Hargrove? You’re- you’re supposed to be dead. How are you not dead?”
“Yeah, I’m assuming you are too, but we don’t have time for this, so carry your stupid ass over here.”
“Jeez, what’s got his panties in a twist?” Eddie muttered and walked in towards Billy with absolutely no urgency.
Soon Billy got fed up with watching as Eddie uneasily sauntered over, and just dragged him towards himself.
“Look, we are in the upside-down, and in case you don’t know how this works, we aren’t supposed to get outta here. Now, that thing is coming, so you’re going to stay still and make absolutely no noise. Got it?” Billy told him in a fast-paced whisper.
Eddie’s eyes got wider and wider as Billy’s speech went on, and at the end, he nodded his head quickly and exaggerated.
As he watched the tall, thin, leathery creature pass it started to get harder and harder for him to breathe, though he attempted to keep quiet as to not draw its attention.
After he was sure it had passed, he turned around to look at Billy, though with the way his eyes were darting around, it was more like he was looking at everything surrounding him.
“What the shit was that?” Eddie asked in an exasperated voice, although the hyperventilating was starting to die down. “Wait a second- was that.. the Demogorgon? That is what the kids were fighting when they were twelve ? Holy shit !” He said to only himself, and as he started to spiral, Billy interrupted him
“Look, I don’t care what you call it, or who did what with it. It’s hungry and relentless. This thing will hunt us down until we’re nothing but bones.”
“We don’t have to let that happen. We- we can get out. If I can figure out where we are I can find the way out.” Eddie started walking towards what appeared to be a dried-up lake with Billy looking at him like he was losing his mind.
“Way out? What the hell are you talking about? Did you not hear me? It doesn’t want us to leave, it's not just gonna give us a way out.”
“Look I died down here, and like the dumbass I am, I came here on purpose. There are multiple ways out, I just need to find the closest one and hope it didn’t get patched up.”
He continued walking when he saw what appeared to be Bradley’s Big Buy. “Okay, okay if that’s Bradley’s Big Buy, then this has gotta be Lover’s Lake. Forest Hills should be about, I don’t know, maybe 2 miles from here? It’ll take us a bit to get there on foot, but we can make it.”
“Wait, wait, wait. One, why the hell would we need to go to the trailer park? And two, who the hell says I’m going anywhere with you?” Billy asked
“The gate- well a gate. Every time Vecna killed, he left a gate. The first kill was Crissy in my uncle’s trailer, so we just have to get there.” He looked around thoughtfully. “Wait, no. No, that won’t work. Those gates are temporary, and I doubt it’s been a short enough amount of time for them to still be open. Which means our best bet is Hawkins Lab.”
“Hawkins Lab?” Billy repeated
“Yeah, the main gate- the mothergate , as Dustin calls it. It’s the only permanent way outta here. I don’t know how long it’s been, so I can’t be sure that any of the other ones are still here. But even so, the mothergate is only 3 miles farther. But then there’s the problem of actually reaching it. If they know we’re down here it’s probably gonna be guarded, but we might be able to find a way around them when we see what we’re dealing with.” Eddie explained. “So, are you coming or would you rather stay down here and rot?”
When he didn’t hear an answer, he decided to take that as a yes. “Alright then, let’s go.”
Time skip to about 2 miles later
“You sure you don’t want to at least check if the trailer gate is still there?” Billy asked Eddie as they approached the trailer park.
“Um.. yeah. Sure, come on.”
As the pair approached the trailer Eddie’s pace got slower and slower. He clearly didn’t want to revisit this trailer for a reason Billy could not determine.
“Is there some kinda issue? You really do not seem to want to look in there. You don’t want to leave or something?”
“Of course I wanna leave, I just… A lot happened here before I died, okay?” And with that, he sped up, seemingly just to get away from Billy and his questions. As they walked in, Eddie scanned their surroundings and saw the proof of when they were there, preparing to fight Vecna in a foolish attempt to stop all of this “end of the world” bullshit, but no gate. “Like I said, not here,” Eddie said, then pushed by Billy to leave the trailer, and immediately continued his path to Hawkins Lab with Billy unenthusiastically following after him.
Despite seemingly being in such a rush a few minutes ago, he abruptly stopped with a look of shock on his face.
“What is it now?” Billy asked, slightly annoyed.
When Eddie didn’t respond, he followed his eyes to a slightly decomposed body that looked suspiciously like Eddie. “Holy. Shit.”
That’s all he said. That’s all he could say. There was nothing more disorienting than looking at a guy looking at his own dead body.
“What. The. Fuck?” Eddie said, his breathing starting to pick up pace. “So there is 100% no way that we magically survived dying, so what is going on here? Are we ghosts? Are we weird creepy shadow copies of ourselves? Can we even survive out of the upside down?”
“Uh, one concern at a time? Just worry about getting out then see what happens.” Billy said, then started walking away to make sure Eddie couldn’t see how freaked he was.
About Three Miles Later
As soon as the laboratory was in sight Eddie came to an abrupt stop, causing Billy to crash into him.
“What the hell- why did you stop?” Billy said then looked up and noticed the swarm of bats circling the building like vultures.
“We can’t get past those. We barely made it out alive with four people fighting a lot less than that. We’re screwed.” Eddie explained with a distant look in his eyes.
“You sure? There’s no way around them? There’s no way to fight them?” Billy asked, surprised that the man was giving up so easily.
“If one sees you, they all see you, so no, there’s not a way to get around them. and I’ve tried fighting them. Didn’t work out for me.”
“Didn’t work out as in…” Eddie could see the wheels turning in his head. He let out a low hum in understanding and dropped the topic of fighting them. “So what are we gonna do? If this is the only gate that’s still open, it’s our only way out. In your own words, are we gonna go or just sit here and rot?”
Billy watched as Eddie closed his eyes, took a few deep breaths, and started thinking out loud.
“Umm, okay. We would need a.. a way to get in undetected. Our only chance against these things is to make sure that they don’t see us.” With this, he started pacing. “There’s no way to hide from them and sneak in, and these things are crafty. We’d need one hell of a distraction to get past them.”
“Is there even anything that could rig an explosion down here?” Billy asked, with what Eddie could’ve sworn was a look of growing doubt in his eyes.
“Well one thing’s for sure,” Eddie started “We’re not getting outta here today. We should get away from them and think on it a little longer. We’re gonna need a solid plan if we wanna get out of here.”
Time Skip to After They Get Back to Eddie’s trailer
Billy couldn’t bring himself to go to sleep. He had this feeling that they were missing something right in front of him, but he couldn’t figure out what. “Could it be related to the gates?” He thought to himself. With the thought of “anything is better than laying on this floor” as his motivation, and despite his better judgment l, Billy decided to set out on the 2 mile walk to Lovers Lake alone without telling Eddie.
When he approached the lake, it looked just as it did the last time he’d seen it. Empty, dry, and disappointing. He let out a groan of frustration and sat down at the end of what was more like a crater than a lake and decided to rest for a minute before going back to the trailer. He closed his eyes and pushed his hair out of his face, and when he opened them, he saw a glowing red circle that definitely wasn’t there 10 seconds ago. He started going towards it in an attempt to verify that it was real, not just some sort of hallucination brought on by his year down here, when it started growing. It almost got big enough for someone to go through when it started closing again. Billy watched in shock as it grew and disappeared just as quick as it came.
He shook Eddie awake the second he got back to the trailer and told him about the gate.
“Do you think it will open again? Might be on some kind of schedule. If we find a way to record the time between each opening, maybe we’ll be able to get there in time to pry it open and get out.” Eddie said in an impressive amount of time to come up with such a solid plan.
They spent the next four months running around the shadow town collecting materials and preparing to go through Watergate. Billy searched for spare parts and eventually gathered the materials he needed to assemble four metal pipes into a loose, adjustable, and far from perfect square type shape that should hold up for long enough to hold the gate open. Eddie spent quite a bit of time near the lake with the two stopwatches he found in the Hawkins High gym, one to time how long was in between the openings and one to determine how much time they would have to get Billy’s contraption in the gate before it starts to close again. 5 weeks passed between each opening and it stayed open for 2 minutes before it started to close. If he wasn’t at the lake he was getting dragged around by Billy to help him collect and assemble parts. They inevitably started to get closer and closer during their time there, and they both could have sworn that they almost kissed a few times, but neither had the guts to bring it up. After getting all the materials and information they needed, they went to the lake to wait out the last 10 minutes until what would hopefully be their last 2 minutes in the upside down.
“So,” Eddie said, trying to make small talk “This is it,”
“Yep.” Billy replied “You excited?” He asked
“A man of many words.” He joked “Yeah I can’t wait to get out of here… but when I died the entire town thought I was a murderer and a cult leader, so that’s gonna be fun to go back to. Oh and also there’s the not really knowing what the hell we are problem.”
Billy put his hand on Eddie’s thigh and rubbed circles in it with his thumb.
“One problem at a time” He said
Eddie lifted his head and they made eye contact. They started slowly getting closer to each other when they both saw a red light out of the corner of their eyes. They rushed to get up, bring the square over, and get it in. Once it was in position, they pulled as hard as the could on one of the vertical pipes and on of the horizontal pipes, getting it large enough to go through.
“See you on the other side,” Eddie said and jumped through the gate.
“Let’s hope this works.” Billy said and followed him through to the normal world.