Chapter Text
༺𓆩☠︎︎𓆪༻
Eddie had always considered his pain tolerance to be pretty high. Well above average, definitely. He’d barely even winced through all of his scratch tattoos, he’d pierced his own ear with a safety pin on more than one occasion, and he’d gotten into so many fist fights over the years that his nose felt more or less permanently broken. He’d once sprained his wrist really fucking badly after he came off his bike in seventh grade, and he’d refused to let Wayne take him to the hospital because they couldn’t afford to even sit in the waiting room, let alone get a sling and a cast. And besides, he’d been totally fine splinting it himself while he figured out how to write with his left hand until it at least halfway healed.
Pain wasn’t always splintered joints and nose bleeds, though. It could bury itself, make a home in the foundations, dig past skin and muscle and carve itself into his bones instead. It always felt more like an ache, too deep to pinpoint where it started. Maybe not quite as sharp as the scratch of a needle, but far bigger, and far more oppressive, like a storm cloud looming against the horizon. He’d always kind of felt it, perched on his shoulder like an ugly, eager little gargoyle, even back when he was too young to really understand what it was. It sparked and caught, like an open flame put to a trail of gasoline, when Eddie lost his mom. When he grew up a little too fast because he had to deal with his dad, when he started to feel more and more like a burden once Wayne took him in. The apathy that came after was sore, like the deep purple of a fresh bruise. Not quite as heavy, but somehow a million times worse because it lingered.
Still, it all paled in comparison to dying.
He remembered it in bits and pieces. He remembered the adrenaline pumping through his veins with the familiar weight of his guitar dangling from his shoulders. He remembered the uncontrollable shout of laughter as it popped and exploded in his throat like a hastily opened bottle of cheap champagne. He remembered how it almost immediately curdled on the back of his tongue when he heard the scratch of claws against battered sheet metal, thousands of little talons clambering eagerly across the roof of his trailer and towards the vents. He remembered the ache in his arm as he jammed both the makeshift spear and his trash can shield up against the interdimensional version of his bedroom ceiling. He remembered the panic and the fear, not for himself but because he needed to keep everyone safe, because he’d promised to keep everyone safe. He very vaguely remembered the echoing scream of his name coming through the portal in the living room as he shoved his way back out of his trailer. He remembered how the dead air suddenly felt so thick, whipped into a storm by hundreds, thousands of skeletal wings, he remembered the sweat sliding down the back of his neck, he remembered the shake in his hands as he held up stupid, shitty makeshift weapons that he knew, deep down, would be utterly useless against a swarming cloud of killer bats - and he was a bard, for god sake, he only made a spear and shield because… well, he’d wanted to match, but he couldn’t remember what exactly. Eddie could still hear the unrelenting shriek of the horde and how it made his ears ring, and he remembered his feet slipping out from under him, and he remembered staring up at a sky that he didn’t recognise as an oily tail wrapped itself around his neck like a noose. He remembered screaming until his throat was raw. But really, the only part of it that Eddie could remember properly, in painstaking clarity, was just how much it’d hurt.
There’d been no sense of calm, no sudden burst of euphoria. He’d been chewed up, and spat out, and Eddie always assumed that he had a pretty high pain threshold, but that was before he was fucking eaten alive.
Waking up again felt somehow even worse. Dying had been like falling, as easy as he always thought it’d be. A gentle hand splayed out between his shoulder blades, shoving him unceremoniously over the edge of a cliff.
Opening his eyes again was so much more work. It was like his face couldn’t remember which muscles to use. He squinted, immediately screwing them shut when harsh red starbursts started firing at the edge of his vision. They burrowed deeper, pushing eagerly into his head until it felt like his skull was being cracked open, and he heard a strangled gasp, grossly wet as it popped past cracked lips. It took a little while to realise it was his own uneven breathing.
“It’s okay,” a calm voice said. Not his. Someone different, somewhere to his right, maybe. “You’re okay, Edward. Just breathe, okay?”
The heat in his head surged, excited and sharp enough to make Eddie whine. The sound came out low and reedy as it whistled past his teeth. He fucking hurt everywhere. Everywhere. His entire body felt like it was on fire, like meat slapped on a grill until the fat popped and burst, like he was covered in salt and cooking on a bed of cracked white coals, like he was a pot left to boil over on the stove, thick angry bubbles bleaching the steel.
“I know this must be confusing, but try to stay calm, son. Everything’s okay. I promise, everything is just fine.”
Bullshit, Eddie thought. He’d have said it if he could stand to suck in a full breath and loosen his jaw. He sure as hell didn’t feel fine. He felt like he was dying all over again, and while that seemed particularly unfair, maybe it was what he deserved. He didn’t stick to the plan, and so Eddie had fucked everything up. Because he should’ve stayed. He should’ve stuck to the plan, he should’ve done his job, he should’ve stayed, he should’ve stayed, should’ve stayed, should’ve stayed.
“Edward,” the voice said again, a little more emphatic, laced with a thin layer of almost sympathetic frustration. Eddie heard a heavy sigh, and the creaking roll of something heavy and plastic, and then the delicate clatter of something metal.
He kept his eyes squeezed shut, watching the firework display of angry red sparks dancing in the dark. He ground his teeth against the dull ache in his gums to try and stop his brain from dribbling out of his ears. The half-breath he’d been valiantly holding onto shuddered out of him when he felt something cold and sharp lance against the skin of his elbow, and then the red melted into black, and Eddie couldn’t hear anything at all.
When he woke up again, he could hear the dense pop-pop-pop of his skin splitting at the seams, he could feel the agonising stretch and eventual snap when it inevitably ran out of give, the crack of his bones was sharp and fucking loud, and he was sure, he was so, so sure, that he was dying all over again. He hadn’t ever had any sort of inclination to believe there was a god, and so by default there was no devil either, aside from the fun ones he wrote about. No heaven, no hell, and so no purgatory. But it felt like something close to it, because it was just more of the same, over and over again and somehow more painful every single time.
Eddie fell apart. Eddie screamed. Eddie squeezed his eyes shut so hard that it all went black, and then he woke up again, and the cycle restarted.
He couldn’t fucking breathe. He wasn’t sure if his body even belonged to him anymore. He felt like Frankenstein’s monster, just an amorphous thing hastily stitched back together whenever it fell apart, and hang the bits that leaked through the gaps in the thread. It hurt so badly. Maybe he was being tortured. Not completely outside the realm of possibility, all things considered. He was a murder suspect after all, and he’d been on the interdimensional frontlines, so maybe he was just a prisoner of war. Collateral. Cannon fodder.
Eddie kept his eyes shut and took it.
Every time his bones snapped, and the hot, wet run of blood spilt out of him from all the places he’d been torn apart, Eddie refused to open his eyes. He could hear the screams clawing up his throat, he could hear the sobs echoing in his chest, but he kept his eyes shut, because if he saw it, if he watched it happen, then it’d become real, and that felt like it’d hurt so much more. The pain rattled well past his skin and his muscles and then further still, into his heart, into the pit of his stomach, into whatever he was past a corporeal form. He sometimes helped the slough of his own flesh with hands that felt too sharp to be his own, just to get it over with, just to hurry it along, because despite the agony of it he always got the bliss of unconsciousness at the very end. He had a pretty good pain threshold. He could take it. He had to take it, because if he didn’t then he wouldn’t be able to float in the nothingness that came after, and then it’d never stop.
The agony of it started to wane eventually, though, and Eddie panicked. He’d become used to it. He had a pretty good pain threshold. He could take it. He deserved it. He wasn’t entirely sure how much time had passed, but when he next woke up, there was no more red swimming eagerly at the edge of his vision. No infernal shade rippling in the corner of his eye, just a deep black that grew a little harsher with the light as his eyelids shuddered and twitched. He still hurt everywhere, but it no longer felt like his limbs were being ripped from his body. It didn’t feel like he was being actively disemboweled. It was more of an alive sort of pain, terrifyingly normal, and Eddie groaned as his head flopped to the side and his spine jolted with the dull ache of being stuck in one position too long.
“Hi, Edward. How are you feeling?” The same voice as before, nowhere near as frustrated. It sounded almost excited.
Eddie moaned again, the sound dry and crunchy in the back of his throat. He was so fucking scared to open his eyes. What if the garden-variety torture had finally stopped, and that meant it was time for the psychological shit? The Stephen King bonus round? Eddie was fine with being beaten up, chewed into a paste and spat out, he was fine with being hit, kicked, shoved into lockers, punched in the face, strangled, eaten alive, he’d done all that and got the fucking t-shirt, but if it was all in his head now… well, he was more afraid of what was in there than any swarm of supernatural killer bats.
“Edward?” The voice came out soft but a little gruff. Not his uncle. His uncle never called him Edward. So someone new.
“Eddie,” he mumbled, wincing at the harsh pinch in his throat. He kept his eyes screwed resolutely shut. “M’name… s’Eddie.”
“Eddie,” the voice said with a gentle chuckle. “Apologies, we only had your driver’s license to go by.”
Eddie sighed, but even that felt like he was coughing up razorblades, and when he finally opened his eyes, he immediately squinted and sucked a hiss of air through his teeth at the harsh, clinical white strip bulb buzzing above his head. The reflection on the stainless steel trays of medical equipment was so bright that he felt the breath almost immediately leave him in an uncoordinated rasp, and he could hear the creak of old pipes in the walls, the electronic hum of machines and computers somewhere down the hall, the steady, even breathing of the man sitting in an old office wheelie chair beside Eddie’s bed. He glanced down at himself, blinking dumbly. He was in an ugly hospital gown and sprawled out on an old gurney, with a threadbare teal blanket pulled up around his waist. He could smell the old metal and the years of bleach build-up in the bed mechanism below. He had wires attached to his head, and the back of his hands, and the crook of his elbow, and all over his chest, the incessant beep of the equipment he was hooked up to almost as loud as a fucking brass band. The man sitting at his bedside just smiled serenely, watching patiently as Eddie caught his breath.
“Where…” Eddie swallowed thickly, wincing and stretching his neck. It made one of the wires pull across his chest, and he inhaled sharply through his nose. He could smell the man’s deodorant, his aftershave, the mustard he’d had on his sandwich at lunch, the cigarette he’d smoked on his break. Damn, Eddie wanted a fucking cigarette. “I died.”
“Yes,” the man said, his smile unwavering. “And then you came back.”
“I don’t… don’t understand.”
“Get some more rest, Eddie,” the man said, pushing himself away from the edge of his hospital bed and making the hydraulic in his chair shriek indignantly. Eddie winced. “I’ll do my best to explain everything when you wake up again, okay?”
“No,” Eddie said immediately, maybe a little too loudly because the monitors beeped a hell of a lot quicker before he sucked a breath in and held it. “No, I… m’fine. Really, just…”
“My name is Dr Owens,” the man said. He flicked his fingers against a namebadge dangling from the pocket of his white coat. “And you’re absolutely right, you did die, but considering the circumstances, well… how much do you remember, Eddie?”
Eddie blinked and resisted the urge to throw the blanket away and rip his hospital gown off so he could count just how many bitemarks were chewed into his skin. “The bats,” he muttered. “I know how I died, doc.”
“So you know you died in the Upside Down.”
Eddie felt his eyes widen, could almost feel his pupils dilating in surprise, and Dr Owens chuckled as he patted his leg absentmindedly.
“Yeah, I know a lot more than you think, kid. Maybe even more than you.” Dr Owens sighed heavily, glancing at the door and then at the furthest corner of the room. Eddie didn’t need to crane his neck around; he could hear the whir of the camera lens as it zoomed in on them. “I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that your grand plan worked. The younger members of your party explained all the fantastical names to me, but I can tell you that Vecna is dead, and the Mind Flayer, what a great name, really, the Mind Flayer - or what was left of it - was banished. Eleven confirmed it, she closed all the gates, of course, but before she returned to Hawkins, we had routine patrols within the Upside Down just on the off chance Vecna made a reappearance, or one of his nasty little pets managed to wriggle through a gate. And that… is how we found you.”
“M’sure you’ve got… plenty of medical miracles, with the superpowered kids and the whole ‘nother dimension, but…” Eddie huffed and winced and shoved himself up into the pillows, frowning at the wire sticking out of his hand. “W-when… when did you even find me?”
“Did you know, the longest recorded case of successful resuscitation is about three hours,” Dr Owens said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his legs. “A little girl in Utah, she fell into a half-frozen river and was of course pronounced dead, bless her heart, but after she warmed up in the emergency room, she was right as rain. Pretty impressive, right?”
Eddie didn’t say anything.
“A couple of days, at least,” the doctor admitted. “Maybe a week or so.”
“How’m I… how?”
Dr Owens sighed heavily and scratched the back of his neck. Eddie could hear the erratic thump echoing inside his chest, and he could taste something like bile on the back of his own tongue, and he could feel the sharp pull of stitches below the hospital gown as he tried to sit up a little more.
“Considering all the fantasy games you and your friends play, I’m assuming you’re familiar with the concept of vampires?” Dr Owens looked almost sheepish, like the explanation was stupid, and it was fucking stupid, but considering everything Eddie had seen since he’d become a goddamn murder suspect, it actually made an annoying amount of sense. The doctor must’ve seen the cogs turning in his head, because he nodded with a grim smile. “All of the bats died during your, ahh, your siege, so we never got to study a living specimen, but… well, their teeth were hollow, so we assumed they were venomous in some capacity. Their saliva had potential anticoagulant and anaesthetic properties -”
Eddie snorted, and Dr Owens studied him with a sad look floating in his eyes. Like he felt bad. Eddie ground his teeth.
“Whatever they killed you with, Eddie,” Owens said gently. “It’s what brought you back.”
“I can…” Eddie swallowed the spit building in his mouth. “I can hear the fucking bulbs buzzing, man.”
“Yes, well… we imagined the minor changes would naturally enhance your senses, particularly your hearing and perhaps your strength and agility, although let’s get you healed up properly before we put you on the assault course, hmm?”
“And the… what about the major… changes?”
Dr Owens glanced up at the camera again. “We… we don’t know the true extent of… well, we don’t know. Not yet, and that’s why we just need you to rest, and then we can -”
“Am I a prisoner?” Eddie interrupted, and he tried to ignore the flare of heat in the pit of his stomach. “Are you gonna… gonna run tests on me and like, probe me and shit, or -”
“No, Eddie,” Dr Owens said hurriedly. Eddie stared at where the doctor’s hand was squeezing his ankle beneath the loose thread of the hospital blanket. “No no no, not at all. But for your own safety and well-being, I -”
“So I… so I died, and… and all those bats turned me into - Jesus, into a proper freak now, huh, and so, what? You wanna run tests on me like some, some lab rat, no, I need to… I need to leave, I have to leave -”
The heat was unbearable. He could feel it scorching a path up his spine, igniting across his shoulder blades and making him hunch over with a groan as it burned up all the air in his lungs. It felt like he was vibrating. He could feel every inch of his skin prickling and catching with a fire he couldn’t control, his blood was starting to boil in his veins, he could feel his bones aching and grinding against each other as they started to move all on their own. Eddie groaned again, louder, sucking a fiery breath in through his teeth as the heat spread like wildfire. The machines were going crazy. Eddie could hear just how fast Owens’ heart was beating inside his chest. He could smell the nervous sweat gathering beneath the doctor’s collar.
“Eddie, just breathe.” His voice sounded far away, like he was shouting down a corridor. The echo of it made it difficult to decipher what he was saying. “Try and stay calm, Eddie, control it, you can control it, c’mon now…”
Everything started to bleed red at the edges. Eddie blinked through the tears building in the corner of his eyes and hunched over, wrapping his arms around his legs so he could bury his head between the meagre space between his knees, his forehead pressing into where the blanket had pulled tight. It was a trick his uncle had taught him when he was really little. When he wanted to block out his mom’s cries or his dad’s shouting. When he felt panicky. Just stick your head between your legs, son, and breathe in through your nose and then out through your mouth. Easy peasy. Except Eddie couldn’t suck enough air in without it shuddering out of his mouth ten times hotter than before, and it hurt, it hurt so badly, his chest was so tight, his back was screaming at him, his spine felt like it was close to snapping clean in half all over again, and so he screwed his eyes shut with a pathetic little whine, knowing exactly what was coming.
“You can control this, Eddie.”
Eddie groaned, mashing his forehead into his knees.
“It’s just a part of you, like breathing, like blinking, and you can control it, I know you can.”
His jaw was clenched so tight it felt like his teeth were about to crumble to dust.
“Focus,” Owens said, although he sounded so far away, and Eddie wasn’t entirely convinced he wasn’t just hallucinating it all at this point. “Control it, Eddie. You can do this, I know you can, it’s okay, I’m right here, I -”
“Owens, get out of there.”
“There, see that’s good, Eddie, you’re doing great, deep breaths, try and harness it -”
“Owens, that’s an order.”
“He’s fine!” Owens snapped. “He’s already changed a dozen times; his muscle memory will kick in. He can do this.”
“Can’t…” Eddie whined, practically doubled over and folded in half because the fire twisting up his back was burning through all the cartilage and tendons and the soft squishiness of his insides until it turned to ash. “Fuck - can’t, can’t… hurts…”
“I know, Eddie, I know it must be awful, but you mustn’t let it -”
“Owens!”
Eddie very faintly heard the clatter of the doctor’s chair, and he ripped his head up just as the world turned red. Something growled, low and feral and dangerous, and Eddie blinked, only half-recognising the way it rumbled in his own chest. His chest, which was previously covered with a starched hospital gown, and was now thick with corded muscle and shiny grey skin, pulled tight and splattered with red. He was so much bigger. Eddie blinked, and everything shuddered, like it was covered with television static. Red at the edges. Redder when his eyes landed on Owens, and Eddie could see the rush of blood coursing through every single vein and artery in his body.
“Eddie…” the doctor said calmly. A lie. His voice wavered at the end, and Eddie could smell the fear congealing within him. It made the sweet scent of blood turn bitter. But it also made it rush faster, and Eddie felt a long line of saliva drip out of his mouth and into his lap. “Focus, Eddie. Just try to focus.”
The doctor had his hands out. His wrists smelled delicious, and Eddie sucked a breath in through his nose. It only made him drool more, and when he opened his mouth to accommodate it, something sharp nicked the inside of his bottom lip. Fangs. Huh. Well, that made sense. He pushed at the razor-sharp edge with the tip of his tongue, and another growl rippled in his throat when it only slightly alleviated the ache in his gums.
“Eddie,” the doctor said again, a little firmer. “Focus. You can focus. Your name is Eddie Munson. You come from Hawkins, Indiana. You live in Forest Hills. You’re twenty years old. Your name is Eddie Munson. You come from Hawkins. You live in Forest Hills. Your name is -”
“Eddie.” His voice sounded foreign. Deep and guttural, different vocal cords, a different mouth, fangs in the way and making him slur like he’d chugged a forty, drool dripping from a tongue twice the size of the one he was used to. “Name… Eddie.”
“Yes!” The doctor said, clapping his hands together with a shout of laughter. The other voice, the one that buzzed through a speaker, was finally silent. Eddie blinked. “Yes, that’s right. Do you remember my name?”
Eddie’s top lip curled. He remembered. Mustard on his sandwich. Cigarette and cheap coffee. The detergent clinging to his clothes. He started to say it, but when he inhaled through his nose, he couldn’t stop the snarl from ripping its way up his throat. His nose twitched as it flooded with the stench of fresh blood, and his eyes flickered shut as he breathed him in. He smelled so good.
“Eddie,” the doctor said sharply. “Do you remember my name?”
The red haze dripped over his eyes, thick and soupy and so pretty, and he blinked. He nodded slowly, and the doctor waited. He nodded again and swallowed, trying not to inhale when he opened his mouth.
“Owens.”
“Oh, brilliant, Eddie, you’re doing great, doing really well.” Dr Owens was flushed, the heat of his blood pushing against the delicate skin of his cheeks and the side of his neck, where his pulse thumped hardest. “Can you… what can you hear? How do you feel? Anything you can tell me is going to help.”
Eddie shook his head. Rolled his neck and felt his lips pull back against his teeth. He couldn’t stop the growl as it rumbled in his chest, vibrating against the thick column of his throat, and he couldn’t stop himself from tilting forward to get closer to the pretty blush sitting at the height of the doctor’s cheeks. He was still drooling. His jaw ached so badly.
“It’s okay, Eddie.” Dr Owens moved to grab a clipboard from the medical tray beside his bed, and his neck pushed against the collar of his shirt. A snarl crunched in Eddie’s throat, and another long, thick line of saliva pooled between his knees. “We can just take it slow. We can just sit together, how does that sound?”
Boring. Eddie wanted to lunge forward and take a bite out of him.
“You know, I did a little bit of research about vampires,” Dr Owens said. His words were forced, too casual, and Eddie could tell he was plucking them out of his head and laying them out one by one on the flat of his tongue. He could pretend to be calm, but he couldn’t hide the rush of his blood beneath his skin, the rabbit of his heart inside his chest. “I was never really one for horror movies, though. It might come as a surprise, considering… well, everything, but I’m actually a bit of a scaredy cat.”
Eddie leaned forward, sniffing the air and studying the haze of darker red that pulsed in an aura around the doctor.
“I couldn’t find much, really, because although I can see what’s happening to you, of course, I don’t know how it feels. I don’t know what you see, or what you hear. The change, it seems to happen on a whim, though I imagine it’s mostly stress-related, circumstantial depending on your emotions, but even when we initially found you, it happened so often that we could barely keep you contained, and safe, but then eventually you managed to perhaps subconsciously control it all on your own, so -”
Eddie huffed when he couldn’t get any closer. His back was straining where he was practically folded in half, and when he rolled his neck again, something huge and heavy unfurled from between his shoulder blades. Eddie’s spine twitched, and he sighed with relief as brand new muscles, freshly laid bone, and shiny, sinewy flesh finally stretched out behind him. He watched as Dr Owens froze. A prey animal, eyes wide and unblinking.
“Eddie…” he said in a low voice. “You’re still in there. I know you are, it’s okay, just try and focus for me, Eddie, just focus on me. Your name is Eddie Munson. You live in Forest Hills. You come from Hawkins, Indiana. You’re twenty years old.”
He stretched even more, and the limbs at his back spread so wide that it made a shadow fall over the gurney, dripping over the edges until it bloomed across the linoleum floor. It felt good. He felt big. Strong. If Owens was the prey, then surely that made him the predator?
“Your name is Eddie… Munson, Eddie Munson, and you live in Forest Hills. You come from Hawkins, Indiana. Twenty years old. Eddie Munson. You live in -”
Owens had moved. His chair had wheeled itself back a little, and Eddie watched unblinkingly as the doctor extended a hand again as he slowly, slowly pulled himself to his feet. His blood was thundering around his body. Like he was showing it off. Like he was offering himself up on a silver platter, trussed up with an apple between his teeth.
Eddie kept moving forward as Owens moved back, enough to force him to extend his own arms to crawl over the gurney. His skin was a dark, mottled grey, no more tattoos or freckles, no rings on his fingers, just bare skin glistening with blood that didn’t appeal half as much as what was flowing through the doctor’s weak little body. His nails were sharp and long, curved into points that sliced clean through the thin bedding and the foam of the mattress, and when he growled again, louder than before and enough to bare his teeth properly, Owens stumbled into his own chair as he took a hasty step back towards the door.
“Eddie Munson. Forest Hills. Hawkins, Indiana, Eddie -”
Eddie leapt forward. The gurney smashed into the opposite wall with a huge clatter, and the machines screamed and then went quiet when the last of the wires still attached to his body fell to the floor. Eddie loomed, at least two feet taller than usual, and Owens let out a shout as the door behind him burst open.
The sheer amount of heartbeats made Eddie stumble back with a whine, suddenly spoiled for choice as Owens tripped and scurried behind the wave of soldiers storming into the room. They were shouting up at Eddie, although he couldn’t hear what they were saying past the rush behind his ears, and by the time he blinked in confusion, something harsh and sharp had bled across his chest enough to make him fall to his knees. He snarled, but it was a pitiful thing, especially when another shock of pain spread across his shoulder and down his arm, and Owens was shouting again, far louder than before, and Eddie felt his entire body shudder and convulse as something bright and sadistic started jabbing into his chest over and over and over again. The red faded as he stared up at the stained ceiling tiles, and the black came rushing up to meet him again as he let his eyes flicker shut.
Eddie Munson. Forest Hills. Hawkins, Indiana.
Eddie Munson. Hawkins. Eddie Munson. A freak.
A monster.