Archive of Our Own ^beta

001

Death is quiet. His dad once told him—sometime between the second and third prison term—his ears must have been born ringing, or else how could he stand the crap he blasted all night long. Eddie hears no ringing now nor any music to sing him to sleep. Should he not have expected a choir of angels, or a lullaby his mother may be humming wherever she ended up?

He barely hears Dustin screaming. Kid has always had such a mouth on him, Christ, but Eddie hopes he believed him when he said never change.

And look, Eddie's never fancied himself the paternal type, didn’t have much of a role model for it growing up, but he can play big brother for Dustin a final time. Reassure him with blood between his teeth that he’ll still make it to graduation, finally cash his diploma, and drive like a bat out of hell away from this cursed town. Declare ‘86 really is his year. Tell him he loves him, the one true thing.

Dustin’s tears are molten on his face, but everything else has gone cold. Dying in the hellscape version of Hawkins, it really does figure. There are jocks and pearl-clutchers up above who mistook him for this place’s king. He wishes he could’ve seen Nancy, Robin, and Steve a final time, to say he had fun playing Mystery Inc. down here with them and maybe they should do it again sometime.

He’d ask Dustin to thank them for him, but his lips have frozen. His fingers are uncomfortably numb. His eyes drift to the sky, wishing for stars. There’s nothing.

002

He wakes up.

The afterlife—hell, or heaven, or whatever, he’s never put much stock in it when high school is already its own miserable purgatory—isn’t pitch black as a void or bright white like a hospital fluorescent. It’s a sickly yellow, as if lit by the bad overhead in his—

His bedroom. The afterlife is his shitty bedroom that Wayne nags at him to clean and he swears he will but never does, and there’s something snuffling beside him, the deep snores of absolute exhaustion. Dustin sleeps with his mouth hanging open and Eddie remembers jokingly berating him for the drool puddles he left on the pillowcase during the drive over to The War Zone.

Dustin didn’t die. Dustin couldn’t have died. The bats all dropped like dive bombers and that meant Steve, Nancy, and Robin had torched Vecna into oblivion. They would’ve been on their way back to the trailer, to rescue Dustin and discover him clutching a cooling corpse. His corpse.

He stumbles out of the bed with a hand clamped over his mouth, nearly tripping on—no, no, no, not Sinclair and the baby Sinclair. Somehow, he reaches the bathroom before retching what he expects to be his intestines but is actually the remnants of his last meal on earth.

“This isn’t real, this isn’t real, this isn’t—”

“Holy shit, man, are you okay?” comes the voice of Steve Harrington, surely not heaven sent.

The plan failed. Eddie distracting the bats had been for nothing. “You’re dead. They’re all…”

“Woah, woah, hey, what are you talking about?” Steve falls to his knees beside Eddie. He reeks, or that could be the unflushed vomit in the toilet bowl. Not the stuff of Eddie’s wildest fantasies as of late. Hell, then. “Who’s dead?”

“You’re—” Eddie finally dares glance at Steve and the word dead lodges like a stopper in his throat.

Steve is in his ratty denim vest, the dressing badly tied around his wounds unchanged, all the blood and muck from the Upside Down still crusted on his bare skin. The ring around his neck smolders hot as a new branding, like he had been strangled not even an hour ago. It’s not possible.

“I think you just had a nightmare.” A hand, rough with grit, cups the nape of his neck. “Robin and Nance are with Max, Kate Bush still going strong, and I just checked on the kids in your room. They’re asleep and that’s when I realized you were…”

Gone. Checked out. Throwing in the blood-soaked towel.

“Did you think I ran?” Eddie asks quietly. He’s starting to wonder if he made it all up inside his head. Him, racing towards the danger when he had a ready escape hatch? In his dreams, or in his nightmares, as Steve so helpfully supplied.

“No, thought you just might finally be freaking out,” Steve says, and actually manages a smile. “I was right.”

“I’ve been freaking out this whole time, dude,” Eddie says with a brittle smile of his own. He shuffles back from the toilet, away from Steve’s comforting but stifling hand, and makes a go at his pockets, desperate for a smoke, before realizing the pack is somewhere molding in the Upside Down.

Steve’s got a curious look on his face. Once upon a time, Eddie would’ve argued passionately that King Harrington didn’t have any expressions outside of douchey smirk and no brain’s home. Now, Eddie’s cataloged concern, and determination, and genuine affection for everyone piled inside the trailer, save himself of course. This new expression, though, he’d dub pensive. Steve Harrington, a man of thoughts deep as an ocean’s trench. Who the fuck knew?

“I think you’ve been handling it better than you give yourself credit for,” Steve says, smooth and sure.

Their eyes hold for a long moment and Eddie worries he’ll vomit again. This can’t be the afterlife, because a guy like Steve cannot die. If the universe plays fair with anyone, it’s the rich boy who made good, the hero of the goddamn book of life.

Something in Eddie’s heavy gaze makes Steve clear his throat and the moment dissipates. Steve stands and helps Eddie to his feet, clapping his back like he’s also about to say good game. They haven’t settled into a comfortable dynamic yet, so they’re constantly falling back on old high school roles, those poorly tailored costumes—Steve, the jock, and Eddie, the jester.

What a strange world he’s fallen flat on his face into, where the shadow dimension exists, and he might be Steve Harrington’s friend-adjacent, and he had a nightmare of his own death so vivid he keeps touching his neck expecting to find it slick with blood.

Things take a trippier slant when Nancy tells them her experience with Vecna (no, Henry—no, One?) and Eddie recalls almost every word of the ensuing conversation like they’re lyrics from an old song his mom never stopped replaying. Hard to forget a fifteen year old girl offering to bait a psychotic demi-god so they’ll have a sliver of a chance to light his ass up at the one time he’s vulnerable enough to kill.

“It’s a bad idea,” Eddie blurts out before Lucas gets the chance. Everyone stares at him with owlish eyes, because he's veered off script and the studio audience has stopped laughing. He’s broken the number one rule of acting—of all storytelling, really— you don’t play the middle like you already know the end.

But he doesn’t know the end—right? He only had a nightmare, a stupid delusion of grandeur cooked up by Munson the Coward but never to be.

“He’s right: you can’t,” Lucas says, bringing them back in line. “He’ll kill you.”

Max wins the argument, but Eddie convinces himself that’s not fated; she’s a terrifying girl who could convince the sun not to rise if she wanted to sleep later. Nor is it another jigsaw piece in the universe's grand puzzle showing them the advertisement for The War Zone. They’ll need weapons no matter how tonight shakes out.

Hotwiring, well that’s just the family business, but he fumbles when Steve asks him how he learned to do it. Why is it all the same, down to Steve’s breath warm against his face?

He stops trying to reason with it. Instead, he focuses on crafting weapons and assuring Dustin stays smiling even as they’re marching one of his best friends and themselves to what may be certain death. The only time he comes close to breaking is back in the Upside Down where Harrington delivers the spiel about not playing at heroes.

“Don’t worry, you can be the hero, Steve.”

“Absolutely. I mean, look at us.” 

Eddie does look at Dustin, at his stupid hoodie drawn over his ears, secured by a camo bandana Lucas swiped him from The War Zone, and the dog tags he insists make him a carbon-copy Rambo. Those dog tags had jangled against his chest as he ran to him, bad leg dragging, still believing he had time to save the day.

None of that had actually happened—or it hasn’t happened yet, a tinny voice, for his ears alone, taunts—but Dustin is a hero nevertheless.

The demobats fall for the guitar decoy. They’re scratching at the trailer roof when a lightning shot of memory strikes him. “We have to cover the vents. Now.”

“What?”

Eddie wrestles Dustin's shield from him and nails it over the vent, seconds before the first bat jams its way through. His own shield in hand, he races for his bedroom and does the same to the vent there.

“Is it gonna hold?” Dustin asks, his voice small and eyes terrified as they stare at the rattling garbage lid. He’s such a kid, one whose mom packs all his lunches and who lights up whenever Eddie casually brings up Saturday morning cartoons. And Eddie understands then he’s going to do it all over again.

As the bats gnaw into the cheap metal roof, Eddie ensures Dustin climbs through the gate before he cuts the bedsheet.

This time—the real time, Eddie’s positive—the death is quicker. Failing to crash through the vents must have riled the damn bats up. He barely has time to tell Dustin he loves him before his vision is speckling with black spots, the photo negatives of stars.

The universe is a real mean son of a bitch, he thinks at the cusp, for making him go through this twice.

003

He wakes up.

“No, no, no, no, no, no!”

His screams rouse the pack, drawing them all to the back of the trailer. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees baby Sinclair huddled behind her brother, fingers clinging to the sleeve of his shirt like a security blanket. Robin has started her nervous chattering from the doorway, something about whether or not he’s been Vecna’d and if they need to grab a tape, but Steve charges in, savior complex activated, and grabs him by the shoulders.

“Hey, Munson, hey, you’re okay. Everything’s okay.” Steve runs his hands up and down his arms, in a manner he must believe is calming, but has Eddie wishing for a way to wriggle out of his skin.

He wants to snap, was everything okay when those fucking bats took several chunks out of your side? But Steve easily adopted a brave front as soon as the kids noticed his bandaged gut, so maybe everything is a-okay in the wonderful world of Steve Harrington. Who knows, his wounds may have magically closed by the power of being a beloved golden boy with sixteen abs. Maybe only metalhead freaks die hemorrhaging after losing a fight to a pack of blood-thirsty reptile bats.

He’s not being fair, but hasn’t he earned a pocketful of bitterness after dying two nights in a row? The first nightmare hadn’t been a nightmare after all, or a prophecy, or a bad omen. It was the world’s worst case of deja vu. It was the man in the sky hitting rewind on the horror movie that is his life. Dying once would be too good for degenerate Edward Munson. Let’s make it a double feature. Or better yet, spin the reel for eternity.

Beside him, Dustin has begun shaking, his eyes pooling with fat tears Eddie has seen enough for three lifetimes. Scaring the kids won’t fix anything and blowing his lid at Steve for the capital crime of expressing concern would certainly ensure no one slept again tonight.

“Sorry,” he spits out when he finally finishes swallowing his pounding heart. “Bad dream.”

He doesn’t say much of anything after that, not when they troop over to Max’s trailer after her mom’s left for the day, not as Nancy is reciting the life and times of Henry Creel, not after the third time Steve stops to ask him if he’s alright. At his lowest moment—of many sub-basement level low moments over the last week—he considers not showing them The War Zone advert. No weapons, no warring with Vecna.

But he caves. It’s the shame gnawing at his internal organs, future food for the demobats, that catches up with him. Once again, Max has offered to place herself on a funeral pyre, so what right does he have to deny them a place to secure weapons that may prevent Vecna from setting her alight.

Like hell if he won’t run this time around though.

He employs the shields again as vent covers, because why fuck with what isn’t broke. When the time comes to hightail it through the ceiling gate, Eddie follows behind Dustin without protest or theatrics. Cutting the bedsheet on the world right-side-up registers as a hollow victory.

“What now?” Dustin asks, hands wringing his spear. The gate pulses above them, gleefully sinister.

“We hope the bats hang around the trailer looking for us, I guess,” Eddie answers with a hard swallow.

What Eddie should have internalized years earlier is how much the universe savors transfiguring hope until it has the fangs and talons of a monster.

A bat bursts through the gate. Then another, and another, squalling as they come, calling their friends to the frenzy. Eddie drives his spear through as many as he can while trying to keep Dustin behind him, grappling for the door. A sharp cry peals behind him, all too human.

When the bats finally fall to the trailer floor in a withering mass, Eddie has to crawl over their bodies to reach Dustin. “C’mon, buddy,” he whispers, slapping his hand against Dustin’s cheek. “You gotta work with me here. C’mon, Dustin, wake up! Please, please, Dustin, you have to—”

004

He wakes up with an aborted sob.

Dreaming Dustin shuffles in his sleep, mumbling something loosely shaped like Suzie’s name. Eddie holds his palm to Dustin’s back, to where his heart beats faithfully. After a few full rests of keeping time by Dustin’s breathing, his chest begins to burn. It hurts to suck in oxygen.

Fresh air, he needs fresh air before his lungs collapse. He makes it four steps outside the trailer before his legs give out and he ends up in a pathetic ball rocking in the grass. You’re going to die here again tonight, the sick little voice whispers, unless you try to run and drag Dustin along with you.

“Eddie, dude, you can’t be out here. If someone sees—” A real voice, Steve’s, somehow reaches him. Two strong arms hook beneath his armpits, trying to pull him upright, but Eddie uses the last dredges of his strength to push away.

He has no right to Steve’s protection. If he knew what Eddie had done, he’d kill him before the angry mob of zealots had a chance. That is, if Steve even believed him.

“I—̛I’m going crazy—I’m…I’m…” Eddie staggers backwards, colliding with the trailer, and crumples to his knees.

“Uh, I think you’re…” Steve glances desperately toward the open trailer door, likely wishing Robin or Nancy had chased him out here instead, but he doesn’t call for backup. Instead, he sinks to Eddie’s level and says, “I need you to try and breathe with me, okay?”

Eddie shakes his head, all but longing for his lungs to deflate. Better that than being eaten alive.

Steve grabs one of Eddie’s shaking hands and places it against his bare chest, right at the heart. “C’mon man, work with me here.”

His next inhale, too quick, chokes him and he collapses into Steve’s unready arms.

“I ran, Steve,” Eddie whispers into the tattered fabric of his own vest. “I ran, and…”

He coughs, tasting mucus and the memory of blood. Far off in the grass, a chorus of crickets chirp, the sound mimicking the tick of the second hand on a clock.

“You know what I would have done if I saw Chrissy Cunningham floating up to my ceiling?” Steve asks. Of course, he believes Eddie meant Chrissy. “I would have pounded down Nance’s door, or Dustin’s, or Robin’s probably. Because they’re the ones who always know what to do, not me. They’re plan people. I’m has the bat and can take a punch guy. What I’m saying is, I would’ve ran, too.”

“It’s not the same,” Eddie insists as he pulls back to stare down Steve and his stupidly genuine face. “We’re not the same.”

“Why the hell not?” Steve counters, his grip on Eddie's forearms tight enough to leave fingerprinted bruises. “You’re not less than any of us because you ran once or twice. You’re here fighting with us now, and that’s what matters.”

“I’m not a fighter, Steve.” And unable to tear his arms from Steve, anchoring him like he needs to keep him there, Eddie thinks, not much of a lover, either. “I’m…I don’t even know what I am.”

“From what Dustin is always telling me—and I mean always, dude, it’s exhausting—your Dungeons and Dragons stuff gets pretty intense,” Steve says, lips splitting into a crooked smile because he knows he got the name right. “He says you think of everything, that you always have some wild twist up your sleeve. So maybe you’re not the guy who gets punched in the face, which sucks by the way. Maybe you’re also a plan person.”

“I’m no Wheeler,” Eddie scoffs.

“Yeah, no one is,” Steve says, shaking his head like he’ll never stop marveling at the force of nature that is Nancy Wheeler. Carefully, so as not to give himself away, Eddie extracts his arms from Steve’s vice grip. A flash of hurt crosses Steve’s face, there and gone again. A trick of the bleak trailer park lights. “But you’re like the kids, you actually understand some of this monster shit. That’s worth something. Maybe you can see something we can’t.”

“Not that I don’t appreciate your faith, man,” Eddie says while rising onto unsteady feet. “But Dungeons and Dragons is fiction. All this shit has been very real.”

Right down to the endless death spiral he finds himself trapped in.

“I mean it, though,” Steve says, standing gingerly and favoring his right side. No one ever does get around to changing his bandages. “You’re fighting with us, so you’re one of us. Don’t forget that.”

Apparently three days of insanity cannot compete with a Steve Harrington pep talk. Eddie musters half a rusty smile as he says, “I won’t, Harrington.”

He lets the day play out in the same way it had in the three previous cycles. Steal the camper, get the weapons, stopover at Creel House, back to the trailer, shore up its evil twin with Dustin, shred through a Metallica solo to call down his executioners, and whisk Dustin safely through the gate before he double-downs on his role as decoy.

As he bikes for his life, uselessly, he wonders why Robin and Steve never think to share any of their molotov cocktails.

005

He asks Steve to buy him a flamethrower. Digs up a fat wad of cash he has stashed in his sock drawer to pay for it. Nancy doubts they’ll have flamethrowers in stock and, if they do, that they’ll sell one to a pack of dirty, desperate teens.

“Looks like Nancy Wheeler can’t be right all the time,” he mutters as he spies Steve dashing from the store, lugging the flamethrower, and he nearly smiles.

Shame that it’s impossible to ride a bike with a flamethrower strapped to your back—his bad for not reading the instruction manual. He barely makes it off his lawn before he’s enveloped by the swarm. The flamethrower wards them off longer than trying to fight with a makeshift spear and shield, but a lone bat finds an opening and clips him in the side. Another takes the window of opportunity and ropes its tail around his neck.

He bleeds out on charred ground with new last words to Dustin. “'least I went out in a blaze of glory, huh?”

006

He wakes up with the scent of sulfur in his nostrils.

An excess of fire can’t save him, cross that off the list. He’s lucky he hadn’t set himself on fire, as he had at eight when his dad left him home alone for three days with only a half-empty box of cereal and a packet of hot dogs. He stood too close to the stove while boiling water and he ended up at Uncle Wayne’s with second-degree burns they couldn’t afford to have treated at a hospital. The skin along his abdomen bears faint traces of pink scar tissue even now. The demobats must prefer their meals lightly seared.

Eddie bolts up in bed, jostling Dustin and earning a kick in the shin. The pain is dull compared to the agony he’s been dealt the last five days and it doesn’t knock loose the idea newly arrived in his brain.

“You want to lure the demobats with...hamburgers?” Steve furrows his brow, which he always does when he’s unsure if it’s the idea that’s stupid or he is.

“I’m super down for Wheeler’s plan, think of the meat offerings as just…”

“An addendum,” comes Dustin with the save.

“And where is all this”—Robin’s lip curls—“meat coming from exactly?”

Eddie hooks his arm around Dustin’s neck, scrubbing a hand through his curls. “Dusty-bun here is gonna do a little unconventional grocery shopping.”

While Eddie fortifies Fort Munson in the Upside Down, Dustin ransacks the neighboring trailers above, periodically returning to chuck down expired hamburger meat, packets of sausages, many cans of spam, and a disturbing amount of Hamburger Helper with the explanation of “just in case.” He has Dustin construct three separate bonfires—five in a pentagram seemed too on the nose—and makes sure they have a lighter handy for the fire portion of their little show.

At the climax of his world-saving solo, Eddie yells at Dustin to go. One bonfire lights up and the other two follow with shockingly little resistance. The thick scent of roasting meat nearly overpowers the rank decay hanging over the Upside Down in a fog.

Eddie follows Dustin into the trailer and waits with bated breath. Talons scrape along the roof, but not in the manic, ravenous way they once had. Instead of above them, the screeching sounds from across the yard. It’s the beginnings of a war over food.

“Bet they’re fighting over the Hamburger Helper,” Dustin says with a proud smirk.

“Yeah, yeah, you’re a genius, Henderson, who knew.”

He waits, hands clammy around his spear and shield, for the inevitable. For the half-baked plan inspired by a hazy childhood trauma to fall apart. The bats will bore fighting over dead and rotting food and fly off in search of something fresh. They might target the trailer again or, worse, they’ll flock back to Vecna’s lair and find a three-course meal stranded there.

“I’m gonna—”

Dustin grabs his wrist and yanks him back, pressing his finger to his lips. “Do you hear anything?” he whispers.

The screeching has stopped, as has the scratching along the roof.

“Be careful,” Dustin hisses as Eddie shoulders open the door, spearing the air first to ward away any rogue bats.

The fires continue roasting, but circled around the flames, a litter of dead bats lay unmoving on the colorless grass. “Holy shit,” Eddie yells before he can contain himself. He’s been told the volume of his voice could raise the dead, but not a single hell spawn twitches.

“Holy shit,” Dustin echoes, clamoring to see over his shoulder. “Holy shit!”

They’ve done it. The trio of amateur monster hunters have slain Vecna and Eddie Munson will live to tell the tale, proudly and with a great deal of embellishment.

Not leaving anything to chance, Eddie herds Dustin, his valiant little mutt, to the gate. “Let’s get it all clean and pretty for when our heroes return.”

Eddie basks in the thrill of flipping onto his old and stained mattress. As he helps Dustin up, he pulls the damn kid straight into his arms. “We did it,” he shouts into Dustin’s hood. “We fucking did it!”

Then the world tips over.

A crack, like the earth has split down to the core, reverberates in his bones. The floor shifts under him, sending him toppling towards the ground. His head strikes the table. A mug shatters inches from where he lands, a shard biting into his cheek. He blinks, and the gate on the ceiling rips through the wall behind him.

The trailer cants sideways at the force of the tear. The last thing Eddie hears before incineration is Dustin bellowing his name.

007

He—

He wakes up.

He wiggles his toes, traces his calloused fingers along his ribs, wets his bottom lip. Little movements to prove he’s all skin and bones and not a pile of ash.

Gently, he slips from the bed, taking a moment to ground himself on the solid floor beneath his feet before padding to the bathroom to swallow two giant glasses of water in rapid succession. He’s finishing off the final gulp when he catches Steve in the doorway, fist hovering to knock.

“Sorry,” Steve says sheepishly. “I thought you might be—”

“Freaking out?” Eddie asks as he mops off his wet chin with the back of his hand. “Yeah, I am, man. I think I’ve reached some kind of freaking out nirvana where I might be in cardiac arrest, but I’m also totally numb everywhere. That part of your package, too?”

Everything had worked beautifully. He and Dustin lured the bats without killing themselves in the process. Nancy, Robin, and Steve had slain Vecna, or at least hurt him enough to severely injure the hive mind. The only part of the plan unaccounted for was Erica, Lucas, and Max.

The fourth clock toll. The fourth kill. End of the world.

Max.

“I know what’s gonna happen,” Eddie whispers, the loudest noise in the room. The numbness must have spread to his heart because he feels only a soft, resigned pang at the revelation.

“You know what’s gonna happen?” Steve asks, coming to join him leaning against the sink. So numb, Steve invading his space doesn’t send the usual shockwaves through his bloodstream.

“When Max dies—if Max dies,” Eddie amends, “The gates Vecna’s opened will connect.”

Steve shakes his head, either unable or refusing to understand. “But the gate here and the one in Lover’s Lake are nowhere near each other.”

Eddie connects the final dot for him, “So they tear through Hawkins until they meet in the middle.”

End of the world, or the end for Hawkins, Indiana. It means the same thing for most of the town’s residents. And the end for Eddie Munson. And for—he rubs at his eyes, something burning behind them—and for Max Mayfield.

“Is this in, like, a Dungeons and Dragons manual or something?” Steve asks, anxiously drumming his fingers on the edge of the sink basin. Eddie would slap his hand if he had the energy.

“Or something,” he mutters.

“Max isn’t gonna die,” Steve says with an aching amount of conviction. What Eddie wouldn’t give to burrow himself in Steve’s blissfully ignorant, utterly optimistic mind. “She’s got the walkman and she’s got us.”

It’s not enough, but no good will come from letting Steve in on his most terrible secret. And here he thought the most terrible secret he’d ever keep from him is how hot he thinks Steve looks in his vest and how much he’d like to kiss him just once before they never speak to each other again.

Later, because of their conversation, Steve ventures off-course and picks a huge fight when Max offers herself up as Vecna bait.

“Tell them what you told me,” he snaps at Eddie, his face flushed as if kissed by fire. Passion is a brilliant shade on him.

“I think…” Eddie hedges as he enters the minefield. He’s never been one to choose words wisely outside of a meticulously-crafted campaign, so he channels his inner dungeon master as he tries to explain his theory that if Vecna claims a fourth victim, all the gates in the real-world Hawkins will combine to form—

“A mega-gate,” Dustin exhales. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.”

“To be fair, it’s a pretty batshit crazy conclusion to come to, dude.” Eddie pinches the bridge of his nose, attempting to ward off a migraine. “Bat pun not intended.”

“This doesn’t change anything,” Max says, her stony face unmoved even after learning her red string of fate is knotted to the salvation or destruction of her home. “Like I said, whatever you plan on doing to stop Henry Vecna One Creel…just don’t miss.”

They don’t miss. Max dies anyway.

Incineration hurts less the second time around.

008

He wakes up hungering for a change of scenery.

“Someone needs to be in Creel with the kiddies.” The stand-off happens in the Mayfield living room, Eddie on one side and Nancy on the other, and he is determined to hold his ground against her pursed lips of righteousness. “I am just kindly volunteering for the job.”

“You just don’t wanna go back into the Upside Down,” Robin grumbles. It stings, at his pride and at his heart, but he reminds himself none of them want to go on this suicide mission. She’s as scared as he is and if he could promise her she’d live to see tomorrow, he would.

Right now, his focus is on breaking Nancy. “I can set Dustin up with my speaker system. He turns it on at the signal, gets the hell out of there through the gate, and hopefully the demobats are dumb enough to waste time trying pick the speakers apart. Humanless decoy, you’re welcome, Wheeler.”

“They’re looking for something to eat,” Nancy says with unnecessary emphasis, though she couldn’t know he’s been on the menu a week running.

“So we’ll throw out some spoiled hamburger meat. You won’t believe the shit people try to throw on the grills here.” Eddie turns to Max for an assist, but she drowned the conversation out with Kate Bush awhile ago.

Even with the shutters drawn over her eyes, Max looks so alive. She is alive and Eddie has to find out why it never stays that way.

“We don’t need a babysitter,” Lucas interrupts, arms crossed, the picture of a sulking child.

“Back-up,” Eddie corrects.

“This is ridiculous,” Nancy says, throwing up her arms. “We have a good plan here. If you’re scared—”

“Hey Nance.” Steve approaches her with soothing tones, hands raised as if already in surrender. “It’s probably not a bad idea to have everyone as far away from those bats as possible. If Eddie can get the speakers set up like he says…”

“I can,” Eddie says, crossing his heart. Cheap gags never work on Nancy though, so he ditches the act and steps forward, reaching out his hand to bridge the gap between them. “You can trust me, Wheeler.”

With a great deal of reluctance—the most minor victory there ever was—Nancy shakes.

Entering Creel House is like stepping into a tomb, silent and heavy with the presence of death. Lucas sidesteps the loose floorboards on the first floor with an expert’s precision, as if he’s the one who has done this song and dance nearly ten times before, and Eddie goes where he leads, blue lantern held aloft.

All starts seemingly well, from Erica locating Vecna to Lucas and Max hunkering down in the attic while the baby Sinclair dashes off to her signaling position. Eddie scrawls on a piece of paper he’ll keep watch by the front door, a poor excuse to give Max and Lucas some privacy and himself a minute to silently scream.

He hadn’t realized what a calming effect shredding his guitar had on him during the previous nights. With no raging metal to occupy his brain, whacking stray thoughts away like he had sent bats flying with the flat side of an oar, he has time to play back his greatest hits.

Kid, you come from a worthless lot. Better to accept that early. Life lessons courtesy of dear old dad.

I’m not saying to stop being yourself, Ed. You just have to be careful about antagonizing the wrong people. A better lesson from Uncle Wayne, one he wishes he had heeded now.

Eddie, I’ve looked over your transcripts; you always start each year so strong before you start missing deadlines and skipping major tests. It’s like you decide to…

He can fill in the blank for Ms. Kelley there: it’s like he decides to stop trying. His junior year jolly old Principal Higgins, gunning for a PTA prize, mounted a rehabilitation campaign for the freaks and forced him into a session with Ms. Kelley. Eddie felt for her, couldn’t have been easy trying to break through to the kid who considered study halls and detentions school-sanctioned nap times and spent their whole hour fouling every softball she lobbed at him. She stayed even and persistent through all sixty minutes and when she scheduled him a follow-up appointment, he really considered showing up. He had wasted hours of his life doing far worse.

He skipped out though, because he’s a worthless flake, and now he’s wondering if that was supposed to be some watershed moment in his life. Under the guidance of Ms. Kelley, he would have cleaned up his act, graduated with his original class, and gunned it out of Hawkins for good. And then another poor amateur drug dealer with so-called Satanic tendencies could have taken the fall for three supernatural murders.

Fucking time. Fucking I could have, I should have, I would have. Fucking—

Car speeding down the road, slamming to a stop on the playground turf. The doors blow open and Jason Carver steps out, in his letterman jacket and ironed polo. He might have come straight from church.

He sics his goon on Erica and Eddie rushes forward, only for the floorboards to wail up to the rafters. He wants to shout for Lucas to get Max the hell out of whatever mind prison Vecna has her trapped in, but he’d be killing Nancy, Robin, and Steve in the process.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit,” he hisses, biting into his palm until he tastes copper.

He can’t scream. He has to scream. They can’t run. They have to run.

“I knew it.” The whisper drips with reverence. Jason looms five feet from him, his white polo iridescent in the blue light. Quite the avenging angel he makes and Eddie couldn’t have written him a better climax to his revenge tale if he tried.

“You really don’t know anything, man,” Eddie says, voice wavering. He shouldn’t be scared of death anymore, but he is scared of Jason. If this is the last chance he gets to relive this day and if Hawkins somehow survives, the town will hang a medal around Jason Carver’s neck. Killed the metalhead, saved their souls.

“You killed Chrissy.” Jason hasn’t blinked once. His skin is as white as his shirt. “What else do I need to know?”

“That I’m—”

The apology gets beaten out of his mouth, along with two teeth. Jason never fires the gun he bought today, only uses it as a blunt object to crack Eddie’s stubborn skull in two.

009

He wakes up with a splitting headache and a renewed sense of purpose.

With each reset, he wakes up hoping to live, but now he has a smaller, more achievable goal for the new day: find out how Jason and his merry band of murderous meatheads end up at Creel House. If he can prevent Jason from showing up, maybe he can circumvent whatever causes Max to die no matter if they kill Vecna or not.

Convincing Nancy to change her plan is as painful as a cigarette burn to the inner wrist, even the second time around. Mercifully, Steve comes through for him again and, once he’s insured Dustin has the equipment he needs, he’s back at the murder house pacing the foyer.

Across the street, Erica climbs into position, awaiting her signal. It’s then another figure enters the frame, a mountain of a man walking his dog. He pauses, eyeballing Erica, before his attention drifts to the house. Eddie ducks beneath the window ledge, but the man has seen enough. Sonic blue light streaming from the windows of Creel will have all the alarm bells in Hawkins clanging.

Jason’s car drives up on schedule and Eddie’s waiting for him on the broken porch steps. The savage glint in Jason’s eyes rivals the gleam of the moon.

“Look, I’m surrendering,” Eddie announces, raising his arms above his head to prove himself honest. “Kill me any way you want.”

In the metal bar spaceship, Erica is whispering frantically into her walkie. There’s nothing Steve, or Dustin, or the girls can do trapped somewhere beneath his feet. Good thing they’ll never remember this happened in the morning.

Eddie dies running, three or four bullets lodged in his back. He had led them on a chase of three miles, easy—eat your heart out, Mr. Kent of sophomore PE—so they’ll never make it back to Lucas and Max.

Jason looms over him, just before the fade to black, and Eddie manages to whisper, “I’m really sorry about Chrissy.”

The gun, leveled at his forehead, clicks, but Jason has run out of bullets.

010

Erica doesn’t believe him about the dog walker. Why should she?

It throws a wrench in his plan to rejoin Dustin tonight, so he goes toe-to-toe again with Wheeler (three-for-three favoring Munson, he’ll have to lord it over Nance one day) and makes another triumphant return to Creel, his new favored place to die.

He holds up Erica at the door, flicking off his light and hers.

What are you doing? she mouths, slapping at his arm with her tiny hands.

Wait, he mouths back and pushes her to the nearest boarded-up window. They peek between the slats and, through the grime-streaked glass, watch the late-night dog walker pass the house without so much as a bored once-over.

Eddie draws out his notepad and quickly writes, if you see him starting to walk back, hide, and double-underlines the final word. Erica nods, her pupils round as quarters and her mouth hanging open in something approaching awe. She’s at the spaceship in time to receive Lucas’s signal and Eddie dares let himself exhale.

No Jeep ever appears carrying Jason and his loaded gun, but he cools his heels for a half-hour downstairs in the eerie silence before he feels confident enough to abandon his outpost and head for the attic.

He almost wishes he had stayed downstairs. Max’s trance is identical to Chrissy’s, down to the startling whites of her rolled-back eyes. Eddie stands beside Lucas, who trembles as if the floor were quaking beneath him, and places a quiet hand on his back.

When the levitation begins, Lucas dives for the walkman. The muffled notes of Kate Bush fill the attic and it needs to be enough. It has to be.

Her left arm snaps.

“Max!”

Then, she drops. Lucas is there to catch her.

“Eleven,” Max gasps out. With her good arm, she fights to sit up and Eddie rushes to her other side to support her. “El, she was there! She said she…she killed…”

“Sorry, who’s El?”

“Girl with the superpowers,” Lucas answers offhand, too focused on cradling a very living, very breathing Max in his arms.

“Thought you said she didn’t have those anymore?” Eddie’s not sure why the clarification matters to him, chocks it up to residual shock from seeing Max suspended in mid-air.

“She got them back,” Max whispers, smiling softly, not a trace of fear in its creases.

“Super glad supergirl came through for us, very Clark Kent of her,” Eddie says as he wipes the sweat from his forehead. “But all in favor of ditching creepy murder mansion now?”

In attempting to raise her hand, the pain of a broken arm finally washes over Max. Her piercing cry lances through Eddie’s chest and he switches over to autopilot, shucking off his jacket and yanking his shirt over his head.

“Uh, what are you doing?” Lucas asks.

“Gotta fashion a sling, Sinclair. Can’t leave a member of your party untreated after a battle.”

As Eddie fixes the shoddy sling to Max’s shoulder, ever mindful of her broken wing, Max quietly asks, “Where did you learn to do this?”

“Have you seen where we live, Mayfield? Place is violating like twenty different public safety ordinances,” he says, waving at Lucas to start helping Max to her feet. “I’ll have to teach you shitty health insurance first aid 101 sometime.”

Erica meets them on the porch and Eddie ropes them all into giving Henry Creel’s childhood home the middle finger before they depart for good. Under the guiding light of the stars, they begin the long trek back to the trailer park with Lucas supporting Max and Eddie carrying a lightly dozing Erica on his back.

A mile in, Lucas breaks the gentle silence. “Thanks, Eddie,” he says, uncharacteristically bashful. “For everything.”

If he didn’t have a sleeping child on his back, he’d have shrugged off the gratitude. “You don’t have to thank me for anything, Sinclair.”

Lucas doesn’t appear satisfied. “Well then, can I apologize?”

Eddie’s eyebrows fly up. “For what?”

“For abandoning Hellfire,” Lucas says. “Because I wanted to be…I dunno, popular. Normal.”

“Normalcy is overrated, as I always say,” Eddie replies with a huff. “But after all the shit you kids have been through, you don’t have to apologize for wanting the John Hughes high school experience. And despite what I might have said in the past, basketball isn’t, like, the real game for the demonically possessed. It’s actually a pretty fun time, so I’ve heard, and I’ve also heard you’re really damn good.”

“I’m okay,” Lucas says with an embarrassed smile.

“Ew Lucas, no one likes a bragger,” Erica mumbles sleepily into Eddie’s shoulder.

Max laughs, which leads to an offended Lucas having a go at tickling her sides, and soon they’re all in stitches as they journey onward. Somehow—time finally on their side, perhaps—they reach the trailer park before dawn breaks and Eddie cannot wait to hug every last one of them until they’re wheezing.

He spots Robin and Nancy first, on the steps of his trailer, Robin’s head is buried in her knees and Nancy’s wet cheek rests on her shuddering shoulder. Lucas and Max stop walking. Erica slips off his back, her legs wobbly as she lands.

“Where’s—”

Lucas never finishes his question.

Or he does, but Eddie never hears it because a fist to the face sends him sprawling onto the grass.

"You were supposed to stay with him!” Despite the ringing—always ringing, just as dear dad said—in his ears, Steve’s condemnation comes through crystal clear. “That was the original plan! You were supposed to be with him!”

“Steve…” That’s Nancy, running to help Lucas hold Steve back.

He wants to tell them both not to bother. It’s what he deserves, the split in his lip and his broken nose. “Okay, you win again,” he shouts up at the sky. In his peripheral vision, he sees Steve attempting to break from Lucas and Nancy’s hold. “Redo! Strike me down with lightning, send Jason here with his gun again, just—re-fucking-do!”

“Eddie, don’t—” Robin trips over to him, her eyes puffy and colored in red. “Steve doesn’t mean it.”

She’s right, is the really awful thing. If he lets the timeline stand, Steve will find him a few days from now and apologize for blaming him.

No, not happening. He’ll find another way.

“Where’s the shotgun?”

011 – 025

He wakes up and demands they swing the camper around Robin’s place to pick up her trumpet and then The Hideout to steal a microphone. Max makes it out of Creel House alive again; Robin and Dustin don’t make it off the roof.

He wakes up and spends every second of loose-change time he has desperately convincing Erica of the dog walker’s existence. She seems wary enough to keep a closer eye out, but he fails in his role as decoy, the bats not distracted long enough, and Nancy, Robin, and Steve never return. Hawkins is cleaved into four pieces. Start over.

He wakes up and insists they keep Mystery Inc. together. Dustin goes to Creel House with the other kids, Steve and Eddie draw the bats away on bikes, Robin and Nancy light up Vecna. He has to watch Steve die, a bat tearing into his throat, and he shreds his vocal chords begging him to open his eyes.

His screams wake him up. Eddie decides he’ll try the same plan, just with additional firepower for him and Steve. They stave off the pack of bats, but return to find the girls tangled in the hive’s vines. Start over.

The flamethrower, redux, and the spoiled meat bonfires. Start over. Team Robin and Steve fend off the bats, Team Nancy and Eddie take out Vecna. Start over. Have Max bait Vecna while staying at the trailer, keeping everyone closer together. Incineration. Start over.

Dustin dead, start over.

Max dead, Hawkins devoured, start over.

Him dead, start over.

Sometimes, he’s sure time has a proper order—not of seconds, minutes, hours in a day, but of events that have to unfold and the who, what, where, when unfolding them.

As a kid, in his golden years when he had a mom but not a pop, he spent hours with her at the library playing chess wrong. From time to time, old geezers would approach the board and humph—why was he playing the Rorschach opening when he’s already down a rook or some other jargon lost on his seven-year-old brain. He just liked keeping the stone knight next to his king. But if the loop operates like a chess board, maybe he can stumble into the exact right endgame if he moves his pieces—his people—to the exact right positions.

Steve and Robin dead, Nancy hanging on by a fraying thread, start over.

Him dead, start over.

Everyone dead, start over.

And sometimes, he wakes up weighted down by the feeling everything’s random.

Hope and despair change hands, over and over, another circuit track.

Dead.

Start over.

026

He wakes up dying for a vacation. A quick reprieve would suffice.

Tiptoeing around the Sinclairs, Eddie creeps into the hall and whispers into the dark, “Harrington?”

As all the other loops dictated, Steve is awake and ready to jump to the aid of whoever needs him. Still in the dirty vest, still poorly bandaged by a strip of Nancy’s soggy shirt.

“Bathroom,” Eddie says, swinging the door open and letting Steve in first as gentlemanly conduct demands. “We’ve gotta rebandange that. It’s been bothering me for weeks.”

“...weeks?”

It’s been over three, if Eddie has been doing the math correctly—far from a guarantee. The days have started running together, like the indigos and violets in a watercolored sky or the rolling rock melodies in a concert jam session.

Eddie ignores Steve’s questioning frown as he gets the supplies in order. The threadbare bath towel he tosses at Steve strikes his chest in much the same way his vest had. For a sports man, Steve has shockingly poor reflexes and Eddie shouldn’t find that as endearing as he does.

“Run it under the faucet,” he says, shrugging towards the narrow tub. “Clean some of the Upside Down goop off. Don’t rich kids get raised being told not to drag dirt into other people’s houses?”

He anticipates a comeback to the rich kid dig, but Steve does as he’s told with minimal grumbling. It seems Eddie has caught him at low tide.

“Okay, this might hurt like a bitch, dude.” Eddie drops Uncle Wayne’s first aid kit on the closed toilet seat and squats in front of Steve, braced on the rim of the tub. Scissors first, cutting a clean line up the bandage, and slowly he unwraps it. Steve stays stoic until he peels off the fabric sticking to the wounds, but even then, he lets out only a small gasp of pain. He chews the inside of his cheek to keep from asking who he's still acting for.

Eddie tosses the bandages into the sink and steels himself before assessing the damage.

“What’s the diagnosis, Doctor Munson,” Steve asks. His knuckles are straining from his punishing grip on the tub. “How much time do I have?”

It’s a pulpy mess, and that’s coming from someone who has experienced all manner of injury as of late. He never has to get up close and personal with his deathly blows, though, nor do they have time to fester. “You’re going to have some badass scars,” Eddie says, eyeing one deep gash in particular. It’ll get infected if they leave it open much longer. “How much do you trust me, Harrington?”

“You helped save my life earlier, so,” Steve shrugs, “That much?”

Steve trusts him with his life apparently, but his eyes do widen when Eddie reappears in the bathroom with a miniature sewing kit. “I promise I’m pretty good,” he says as he threads the needle. “If the little old church ladies weren’t so scared of me, they’d be begging me to join their sewing circle.”

“They just need to get to know you better.”

“Christ, Harrington, do you ever stop flirting?” It’s out before Eddie can stop it and he’s too tired to try taking it back. Without checking Steve’s reaction to his slip, Eddie steadies his hands and brings the needle to the edge of the gash. “Okay, start talking. Tell me something about yourself, anything.”

Steve tilts his head, hitting him with those wide, confused eyes that once had every pretty girl at Hawkins High offering to take the SATs for him. “Why?”

Eddie eases the needle through and Steve hisses. “That’s why. Distract yourself. What’s your favorite movie, Mr. Family Video?”

“The Breakfast Club,” Steve answers without needing a moment to think, teeth sinking into his bottom lip. “And I’ve never seen any of those Star Wars movies all the way through and don’t tell Dustin, but I’m never going to. And I lied about liking Risky Business, and All The Right Moves. They’re both boring as shit. Also, I think I’m better looking than Tom Cruise.” Eddie laughs, finishing off the second stitch. “Oh, and the only time I’ve ever seen Back to the Future was high on Russian drugs.”

Third stitch done, and Eddie files the Russian drug factoid away in the box of things he has to ask about later.

“The reason I worked at fucking Scoops Ahoy last summer is because I’d get these…panic attacks, I guess, at the pool. I’d be in the lifeguard chair, looking at these teen girls in the pool and all I could see was Barb Holland, dead. I…” Steve hisses again, sixth stitch. The blue thread Eddie chose is bright against Steve’s pale, ravaged skin.

“I know I wasn’t there or anything,” Eddie says, onto the seventh and last stitch. “But from what I know about what happened, it wasn’t your fault.”

“I know that, I know, but—” Steve makes the fatal mistake of glancing down and Eddie swears he sees a tear catch in his lashes. “Nancy once said something, during this stupid drunken fight we were having, about how we killed Barb. And sometimes I think if I hadn’t been such a…”

He pauses, like he wants Eddie to supply the word for him. Only he can’t, not anymore. Steve isn’t an asshole, or a douchebag, or an irredeemable dick and he never had been. He has hang-ups, same as Eddie has, and a black hole of guilt swirling somewhere in his chest. It tricks him into believing he doesn’t deserve any of the good things coming to him, because what if it’s all been at the expense of someone else?

“What if’s are killers, man.” He allows himself a sardonic chuckle as he ties off his patchwork. “Let’s just say I know a thing or two about them now.”

After snipping the dangling thread, Eddie sets the sewing kit aside and brings out a fresh roll of bandages. They begin wrapping the carnage anew in silence, but Eddie anticipates Steve has something more to say. His tells are licking his lips and glancing up left, like he’s having a consultation with himself. Another endearing thing to add to the list Eddie shouldn’t be keeping.

“I was really jealous of you, like, all year.”

Eddie scoffs. “No way, dude.”

“Dustin praised you like you were this god, and you’re into all the same nerdy shit he’s into, and I thought there was no way I could compete with that,” Steve confesses. Eddie’s suddenly afraid to continue touching him. He’s too fragile and Eddie has too rough hands. “And then soon, he wouldn’t need me anymore.”

Eddie pins the dressing in place, studiously avoiding Steve’s eyes. “He’ll always need you way more than he needs me.”

“He needs both of us,” Steve says, like it’s all so simple, like Eddie slots into this little family forged by fire perfectly. “But you’ve gotta start picking up some of the babysitting slack. Chaperoning dates, chauffeuring them to the arcade, the late night phone calls asking about the weird thing they found on their—”

“Nope, nope!” Eddie slaps his hands over his ears, having no desire to hear Henderson’s puberty woes. “I can’t believe you still want six kids after all the shit those little hellions out there put you through. You’re secretly a masochist, Harrington.”

Steve crinkles his brow. “How did you know I want six kids?”

And there go the loops, bleeding together, causing him to forget what conversations happened before today and what information he picked up through eavesdropping on conversations yet to come. Eddie’s heard Steve’s dreams for the future a dozen times now, along with the botched confession to Nancy in the woods several times over. He could never stop himself from listening. Talk about a masochist.

“All the rumors are true,” Eddie says, adopting a tone of deadly seriousness. He can gab his way out of this. “I’ve been possessed by the devil this entire time. I’ll be sucking out your soul now.”

Steve laughs—an actual laugh, one that has him clutching his sides at the risk of tearing a stitch—and Eddie beams despite himself. He’ll die tonight and tomorrow, which will just be another today, but he’ll die having heard this sound, Steve momentarily carefree.

The laughter softens. Steve has another odd look on his face, not pensive this time, or concerned, or determined. It could be affection, with how sparkling his eyes are. 

“Your smile…” Steve drops his eyes to Eddie’s lips. Of all the bizarre things Eddie has heard and seen over twenty-odd days, those two words are the strangest. Realizing the strangeness for himself, Steve scrubs a tired hand over his face and says, “Sorry, man, ignore me. It’s been a long…I don’t even know.”

“Can I ask you an insane question?” Eddie says, forcing himself into a do-or-die decision.

“Hard to see how things could get more insane, so…”

It’ll be worth the punch in the face, Eddie tells himself, just to find out if it’s possible. “In case I die tonight, can I kiss you?”

Steve’s lips part in surprise. The electric buzz of the dim vanity light is the only noise in the room. Ten second pass, neither of them moving, before Eddie takes the silence as an answer and nods his head, wordlessly letting Steve off the hook. He goes to stand when Steve’s hand encircles his wrist, bringing him back to his knees in front of the tub and between Steve's splayed legs.

“You can kiss me,” Steve says, swallowing thickly, thumb dragging along Eddie’s dirt-streaked wrist. “But you’re not going to die tonight.”

Everything slows in the moment he stretches up, covering both of Steve’s hands with his own, and presses his lips tentatively to his. The kiss is slow, too, nothing but light pressure and dry, chapped lips. Their noses brushing together, his bottom lip moving just a breath, their chests rising and falling adagio—a kiss of two people with all the time in the universe.

Not wanting to press his luck, Eddie pulls away first and moves his hand to Steve’s chest to keep him from chasing after him. “Promise me something?”

“Uhm—” Steve blinks, his powers of speech momentarily lost. “Sure, yeah, anything.”

“Remember this tomorrow?”

He’s collecting a promise made to be broken, but he lives his life surrounded by broken things. The mugs his uncle decorates the trailer with all have chipped handles and warped lips. He still has the tuneless harmonica his mother wore on a string of twine around her neck. Somewhere buried beneath the trailer is the jammed gun his dad used to hold-up a bank, the crime responsible for his current prison term. If he could cap Steve’s promise like it was a physical thing to behold, trap it in a jar as a kid would a firefly, he’d keep the jar on his bedside table. So every time he woke up on the same day, death a spectre just over his shoulder, he could see the promise and remember he’s kissed Steve Harrington. And Steve wanted to remember it.

“I’m not gonna forget this,” Steve says, incapable of knowing he’s told a lie. “Not to feed your massive ego or anything.”

“Oh, god forbid.”

He dies by bats, the old standard, but as Dustin’s running to him, Eddie has the ridiculous urge to shout for him to fetch a sewing kit.

027

Another round of fisticuffs with destiny, and a slightly refreshed Eddie convinces Steve to take his place holding down the trailer fort. He sets him and Dustin up with his electric’s speaker system and the loudest tape he owns before heading off with Nancy and Robin to Vecna’s lair.

He knows he’ll die—this particular plan is a two-parter; Wheeler would be proud—but before he does, he’ll hopefully know at precisely what time the vines start withering. Whatever hurts the hive so badly is outside Eddie’s control, but he hopes that means it’s a fixed point, something none of his other future decisions in the loop can affect. If he gets the timing down though, maybe he can convince Nancy not to enter the house until someone’s already landed a blow.

Choking to death messes with your vision just as badly as getting devoured alive by demon bats or beaten to a pulp by a psychopathic basketballer. If he somehow escapes the loop with his life, he’ll have to do a ranking. Top ten most excruciating ways to die: tales from a man who’s experienced it all.

The vines release Nancy and Robin before he blacks out. 11:34.

11:34, 11:34, he chants silently. Robin takes her ax to one of the vines ensnaring his wrist, but too little, too late. These are the moments he’s glad none of them will remember when the universe hits reset. They don’t deserve the burden of any more what if’s.

028

He wakes up clawing at his neck and remembers. 11:34.

“We’re going in as soon as Vecna is in Max’s mind,” Nancy says, her patience a thin switch Eddie has snapped in two. 

“Please, please trust me on this, Wheeler.” He zeroes his attention on Max, her eyes trained on Nancy’s sawed-off shotgun, and appeals to her, “You said Vecna—Henry, whatever—seems to only focus on the darkness.”

Her eyes dart up, narrowing. He shouldn’t have known that, but he’s rounded a corner on caring about eavesdropping when he’s seen this girl dead before midnight countless times.

“And you’re going to hide in a good memory, right?” Eddie asks. “How good are you at hide and seek, Mayfield? Do you think you can fake this freak out until 11:34?”

“I won’t exactly be keeping my eyes on a clock, but…” Max twists the cord of her walkman around her index and middle fingers, pulling until the skin above the knuckles drains of color. “You seem weirdly sure, so yeah, consider me the hide and seek world champion as long as it means we kill him once and for all.”

For the first time in what feels like a dozen loops, Eddie grins, wide and real. Nancy wants to argue, what else is new, but the only person she’s ever deferred to concerning the plan is Max and he’s convinced Max to trust him.

Stranger and stranger things keep happening in these loops; he’s certain less than a month ago Max would have wrinkled her nose in disgust at the mere mention of his name. Eddie’s aware he’s a nuisance of a neighbor, with his devil driving and metal music and that little thing where he’s a minor drug dealer. He never cared before because the people in the park all had their own damage and fuck them if they wanted to start casting stones from their glass trailers.

But maybe he could have been kinder to the lonely girl across the grass patch, who apparently watched her stepbrother die and then got dealt her stepfather ditching town, her mom finding solace in a bottle, and, the trump card, her brain ransacked by a serial killer from another dimension.

It’s not the ideal time for an overture of neighborly love, but when Steve brings the camper to a stop outside Creel, Eddie follows the three haunted house ducklings to the door.

“Hey, Red, hold up a minute,” he says, catching her before she steps onto the pavement. Max tucks one headphone behind her ear, face carefully blank. Stone-cold fighter to the last, this girl. “When all this shit is over, you know you can knock on my door anytime. It’s the trailer right across from yours, gaping hole in the ceiling, you know the one?”

Her lips twitch. “Yeah, the one that always smells like a dead skunk.”

Eddie grins, second time in so many hours; he and Max are gunning for a record. “Well, maybe tomorrow we can—” He glimpses Nancy leveling him an unimpressed glare and amends, “Drink sodapop and watch Annie on home video. Just say no.”

Max rolls her eyes at his mock-Reagan screed, but she nods at him like she might take him up on the offer or, at the very least, she appreciates it exists. Steve waits to put the camper back into drive until Lucas, Erica, and Max are through the Creel’s front door and Eddie keeps his eyes trained on the house until it disappears within the trees.

He senses Steve staring and decides there can’t be much harm in calling him out. “Got something on my face, Harrington, or am I just that pretty?” Eddie leans against the back of the passenger seat, Nancy’s cloud of hair tickling his wrists. A tiny spark of amusement twinkles in her eyes, so she does have a sense of humor after all.

Steve snaps his neck back to the road, letting out a small puff of air. “Nah, it’s just that was a nice thing you did.”

“Almost offering drugs to a kid?” Eddie asks.

Steve smiles, bemused, but shakes his head. “Offering her a…friend, I guess.”

He shifts back on his heels, wishing now he had retreated to the back of the camper. “She’s got plenty of those.”

“Yeah, but she can’t get to any of us at like four in the morning if something’s wrong.”

“Just doing my neighborly duty.”

Steve opens his mouth to retort, but Nancy beats him to it, flashing Eddie one of her knowing smiles, “Whatever you say.”

He’s too gone on these people, even his polar opposite Nancy Wheeler with her booksmart, life smart, battle smart brain and her no-bullshit stride. This has to be the final circle around this time loop’s sun because he can’t watch any of them die anymore. 

Not when he can so clearly picture Nancy in a student commons, painstakingly organizing her planner with a color-coded highlighter for every class. Or Robin in the passenger seat of Steve’s expensive car, everything she owns stuffed in boxes piled in the trunk, off to start her real life in an unoppressive town. Lucas swishing three-pointers at the buzzer, Dustin framing a glossy edition of a new comic not on the market yet, Erica plotting a campaign of her own, Max discovering a few new favorite songs.

Steve, cheering from the bleachers, and driving an hour to the better comic book store, and pretending he isn’t listening when the kids talk DnD but he could rattle off their character names in his sleep, and singing Bowie off-key to see Mayfield laugh. Steve and his six kids.

Brutal efficiency is the name of this loop’s game. He’s told Erica to heed the dog walker—light threats of banning her from Hellfire may have been involved. He takes, doesn’t ask, for a couple of Steve and Robin’s molotov cocktails and sends Dustin on the trailer park meat run. Instead of using their shields to cover the vents later, he drives ten nails each into two sheets of metal.

It’s perfect, kismet, and thus only he could fuck it up.

The bats grow restless outside, the spoiled meat a pitiful replacement for something alive and squirming. The longer it takes for the trio to enter the lair and take out Vecna, the longer it’ll be until the bats’ destined demise. He hears wings beating, the swarm taking flight again, and he cuts the bedsheet.

Death drags this time around. The demobats have less time to pick at his bones before they’re dead themselves. He lingers long enough for Nancy, Robin, and Steve to come running—a first. Who said nothing in the loops could surprise him anymore.

“We can get a first aid kit or something, right?” Robin asks, panicked and green in the face. “Nance, you can rip your shirt again and we’ll tie it off, hoist him through the gate, get him in the camper, take him to the hospital. That all sounds like a plan, a really good plan, so let’s go. Why is no one going?”

Nancy holds one of his hands, Dustin the other. Steve hovers above them, hair matted, askew, and falling into his tearing eyes.

“You gotta get up, man,” Steve pleads without offering him a hand, because he knows.

“I love you.”

He never clarifies who he’s saying it to.

029

He wakes up, crying.

Given the grave physical and psychological toll of death, he’s woken up crying nearly every time before, but this belongs to a different order. It’s not sobs, or a whimper, or the blistering tears of a strangulation. The tears fall without him having to blink, unconscious action. It’s his body saying, this is what we’re doing, nothing to be done.

Instead of heading for the bathroom, he crawls out the window and flinches a pack of cigarettes from cranky Mr. Rogers who should be retired by now but works a night shift and hounds the neighbors during daylight from the trailer behind his. He smokes on the front steps, testing luck he’s never had, and when Steve joins him, he’s still crying.

“Sorry, I thought you might be—”

“Freaking out.”

Eddie passes the cigarette to Steve without asking whether he wanted it, so he has no one to blame but himself when Steve stamps it out. “You really can’t be out here, dude. Jason—”

“Has already killed me three or four times.” He won’t say it aloud, but the deaths at Carver’s hands hurt the worst. The bats, the gate, the vines—none have a vendetta or a soul. It’s pure, blind destruction. Jason will still want to kill him tomorrow, if there ever is one. He’s on a mission from God.

He lights up another of Mr. Rogers’ cheap, unfiltered cigarettes. “Ignore me,” he says because Steve hasn’t come up with a response to Eddie’s careless mention of his immortality. “I’m just really tired, man.”

“I know.”

“You really don’t,” Eddie says, blowing a ring of smoke towards the Mayfield trailer. At three in the morning, the world above mirrors the world below. The trailer park has the same gray cast as the Upside Down, the same chill, but the fog rolling over the ground is kinder, more mystical. He inadvertently picked a beautiful day to die. “But it’s fine.”

“Try me.”

Eddie snaps his eyes to Steve, momentarily terrified he has gained the ability to read his thoughts a couple of loops ago. He’s sitting next to the same earnest Steve, though, with his perfect hair and his swimmer muscles he insists on using to carry everyone else’s emotional burdens.

“Fuck it.” Eddie has exhausted every other plan, A right down to Z. What would it hurt having Harrington think he’s a nut for twelve hours he’ll never miss. “I’ve already lived this whole day, dude, like twenty times at least. Nothing I—we do ever works. I’ve seen Max die, Sinclair die, Nancy, Robin, Dustin, you die. And nine times out of fucking ten, I die, too and the times I technically don’t…” The phantom memory of smoking metal on his tongue sends a shiver down his spine. “There’s no way we get through this fight without one of us, or half of us, or all of us dying, man. It’s hopeless.”

He takes a shaky drag of his cigarette. Over at the Petersons’ trailer, a raccoon roots through their overflowing trash can. In the next life, Eddie has decided he’d like to come back as a skittish scavenger rather than a person. Human is the wrong fit for him.

“Okay, so uh, that was all really crazy and disturbing and—”

Eddie treats Steve to a withering glare.

“...you already know that.” Steve collapses beside him, heaving out a sigh seemingly unearthed from the pit of his being. “But what doesn’t make sense—if any of what you’re saying is true, which I’m not saying it is—why would everything keep resetting if it was impossible for everyone to live? Seems like a pretty sick joke.”

“So, my life then,” Eddie says, sending a bitter laugh up to the heavens. How many nights had he spent here flat on his back, redrawing the constellations, thinking about how one day he’ll get the last laugh at the universe. What a stupid, naive idiot he’s always been. “Maybe whatever this is, it’s just waiting for me to give up. Or maybe I died the first time, for real, and now I’m in hell.”

“Ouch, Munson.” Steve lets his shoulder fall against Eddie’s and Eddie catches the wince he tries to hide at that minuscule movement. He’ll play doctor again with him in the next reset, make it a permanent part of the routine. “Talking to me is torturous enough to be part of your hell?”

Oh Harrington, you don’t know the half of it, is what Eddie refuses to say. Not this go-a-round anyway. He’s too exhausted to steal another kiss and what will it matter this time tomorrow—today, endlessly—anyway. No, Harrington really could never comprehend how completely the universe has screwed one Edward Munson.

“Wait, so if you’ve lived this day, like…”

“Two dozen times.” It’s a random number. He’s embarrassed to admit he’s lost track of how many deaths he’s endured. At the trashcan treasure trove, the raccoon is making off with a thick slice of pizza, the lucky bastard. Every reset, the raccoon gets pizza and Eddie gets the painful non-release of death. Being human is a curse.

“Okay, so how many times have we had this exact conversation?” Steve asks. At Eddie’s answer—brandishing his middle finger—he sighs, “I’m serious, dude.”

“I’m serious, too, Harrington. Deadly serious,” Eddie says, finishing off his cigarette and fishing for another. “This is the first time we’ve had this conversation. You’re actually the only person I’ve ever told.”

He could’ve told him Dustin secretly talks of how much he hates him at every Hellfire meeting and he’s convinced Steve would look less crushed than he does now.

“You’ve never told any of us before now?” Steve asks, voice pitched low. “You’ve died over twenty times and…”

“I thought you didn’t believe me,” Eddie says, drenching each word in acid. He tosses the cigarette, unlit, and tosses the rest of the pack with it. The time to head back inside has arrived.

“I don’t,” Steve says quickly, but now Eddie’s the nonbeliever. “I’m not sure. After all the shit we’ve been through, I guess anything is possible. I just don’t get why you wouldn’t have told me, or Dustin. What about Dustin?”

“How would you’ve wanted me to approach that conversation, man?” Eddie snaps, with such force the rickety metal steps unsuited for two fully grown half-adults jolts, agitated. “Pull Dustin aside and go ‘hey pal, bad news first: I’m probably going to bleed out in your arms tonight while you’re totally alone. Good news is I’m stuck in a time loop that resets anytime I die, so I’ve actually died in your arms a bunch of times and you just don’t remember it. Neat-o, huh?’”

“He’d just want to help you,” Steve says, eyes hardening, anger fracturing his amiable facade.

“There’s no helping the damned, Steve.” Eddie rises, another early morning heart-to-heart with the boy of his dreams, nightmares, and everything in between put on the books. “Trust me, you don’t wanna know what happens when I drag others down with me.”

Eddie kicks open the door—kid, if you keep doing that, I’m gonna kill you but Uncle Wayne can’t even squash a spider—and pretends not to notice the girls startle awake, Nancy grappling for a gun she’ll buy six hours from now.

“You’re wrong.”

He freezes in the doorway, but doesn’t turn around. Too much direct exposure to Steve’s disappointment will surely give him emotional radiation poisoning.

“I’ll always want to know.”

Even with Steve needling at him for the rest of the day, all but demanding he speak up anytime they’re cementing parts of the battle plan, Eddie just falls in line like a good little soldier with a scarlet X on his back, drawn in permanent marker. When he tells Dustin he loves him this time, he doesn’t want Dustin to say it back.

030 – 052

He wakes up, gives up. For a while, anyway.

Demobats, incineration, demobats, demobats, incineration, bats, bats, bats. Steve, with terrifying consistency, always notices he’s half-there nowadays, his body going through the motions but his consciousness floating somewhere above it all. He bears witness to the same scenes, with a handful of derivations, but his power to stop the impending tragedy amounts to the power screaming at actors up on a silver screen has in changing the film’s ending. No one’s listening. No one knows he’s there.

He never allows Dustin to die though, so maybe that'll count for something.

053

“Alright, Harrington, you win,” Eddie announces, slumping at the feet of Robin and Steve and interrupting best friend molotov cocktail making time.

“What did I win exactly?” Steve asks, a bottle of vodka poised in his hand.

“You got all pissy last time because I waited until a month in to tell you I’ve been stuck in a time loop where I die every night, so now I’ve decided I’m just going to tell you every day from now on,” Eddie says, and, dusting off his jazz hands, adds, “Welcome to hell!”

Robin and Steve exchange a panicked glance. Has Upside Down madness of this magnitude never infected their party before? They seem woefully underprepared to deal with what Eddie recognizes from the outside looking in appears to be a massive mental break.

“Oh, and your majesty, since you’re going to reset later and forget this conversation ever happened, we also made out a little bit during one of the loops,” Eddie says sweetly. Robin’s comically wide eyes alone make the quick detour worth it. “You’re not the best I’ve ever had, but I think with some time and practice we might get your skills up to a 7.5, 8 if we’re feeling ambitious.”

“Nancy!” Steve shouts, his cheeks the hue of a devastating sunburn. “We need some help over here!”

That’s how he ends up stuffed in the back of the camper, everyone clustered around him, listening to Nancy review the lackluster details he gave of his trials thus far.

“So you say the day always resets when you die,” she repeats for the third time. “You’ve never been able to save yourself?”

“Wheeler, I know you would’ve been able to save yourself and everyone else on the first do-over, but some of us are late-bloomers.” He’d rather she and the rest of them believe he’s a monumental screw-up than have to share with the class the number of times he's had to take matters into his own hands to reset the loop.

Because his eyes keep falling on Erica, her youth a constant slap in the face. She should be at home cutting the hair off her Barbies, but instead she has her hands on her hips, her voice oozing incredulity when she asks, “How do we even know he’s for real? It sounds like he’s just totally lost it.”

Dustin snaps his fingers, making the room flinch. “He’s gotta tell us something he wouldn’t know otherwise.”

Seven sets of eyes peer at him curiously and he spies quite a few knees bouncing. Everyone thinks they might’ve spilled a dark secret to him over the course of fifty or so days, when the reality is he mostly collected more skeletons for his own overstuffed closet.

“Apologies in advance, dude,” Eddie tells Steve, and means it. “Harrington over here dreams of one day having six kids and driving them around the grand ole’ US of A in a camper van just like this one. Oh, and Nance, congratulations: they’re yours.”

He hopes the last part doesn’t sound overtly spiteful. Anyone might have guessed Steve wants a big family; Eddie’s an only child, too, with the negligent dad and the same itch to ditch Hawkins and see what else the country has to offer a small-town boy with few prospects. He and Steve are poster children for creating a family to fill the chasm the family that bore them left behind. Steve holding out hope his future will include Nancy is the actual secret.

“Uhm, yeah, I don’t know how he knew that, but…” The mortification ripe on Steve’s face turns Eddie’s heart inside out, but he tells himself it had to be done. “Yeah, he’s right.”

“A time loop,” Dustin breathes out. “Oh my god, oh my god.”

“Okay,” Nancy says, clearly intent on driving straight past the future Mrs. Harrington admission. “You’re going to walk us through every single loop. You’re not going to leave anything out”—Eddie raises a finger to protest only to get summarily shut down with a scowl— “even if it’s violent or you think we don’t need to hear it. There’s too much at stake here. We need to know everything.”

He tells them. Without euphemisms, without silver linings or a bright side, Eddie tells them. About the demobats, about the four gates connecting, about the appearance of Jason, about the vines in Vecna’s lair and the mysterious force that hurts them, about all the ways he’s died and they’ve died, everything as Nancy instructed. He tells the story to the tarnished rings on his fingers and the scuffed camper floor instead of to their faces, but they know now. Or at least this loop’s versions of them know.

His head is lighter when he’s finished, as is his body. It’s as if he’s exorcized an entire person from inside himself, or fifty other scared, scarred people.

“All that time,” Dustin says, the first one to speak, “and you didn’t tell any of us? You didn’t tell me?”

Steve snaps his fingers, pointing emphatically at Dustin. “That’s exactly what I said the last time!” Catching Eddie’s questioning squint, he coughs, “Apparently.”

“I’m sorry.” Eddie looks Henderson straight in the face, no matter how hard it is, so he knows he’s telling the truth. “I didn’t want to scare you, any of you.”

Max slides into the space beside him, leaving a scant inch of distance between them. Every day, no matter the script changes, Max will at some point call herself marked. Today, she’s learned it’s in more ways than one. She should be allowed to run screaming and cursing straight out of town, but all she says is, “Our lives are already scary. This is just the poisoned icing on top, right?”

She doesn’t hug him, but Dustin does, squeezing tight enough to crack a rib. In the background, Erica scrunches her nose at the display and asks, “Okay, but did you get any better dirt? I’d prefer if it was on Lucas.”

Lucas groans. “Seriously, Erica?”

Eddie taps his chin, pretending to rack his brain. “Not to kick poor Stevie when he’s down, but he also once told me he thinks he’s hotter than Tom Cruise.”

“What?” Nancy and Max yell simultaneously.

“Huh, is that why your face always gets so red when the Top Gun commercial comes on in the store, Harrington?” Robin asks with an indulgent smirk. “Jealousy?”

There really is no God if Eddie doesn’t get to live to be best friends with Robin Buckley.

Steve claps his hands together, demanding the meeting end, “Okay, okay, this has been great. Don’t you assholes have weapons to finish?”

The kids race outside, bubbling with an optimism completely foreign to Eddie. Even Nancy and Robin are holding their heads higher. He’s never seen his loop as a blessing, not when it’s burned him so many times with false hope, but hasn’t he seen his friends die in fifty variations on a theme and yet here they are still, more determined than ever to fight for the one timeline where everyone survives?

“Hey, we gotta talk, man,” Steve says, last to leave the camper and the only one who seems more anxious than hopeful.

“Yeah, hey, I’m sorry for having to air your shit in there. Next time—”

“No, there isn’t going to be a next time,” Steve declares.

Eddie finds the way Steve has planted himself in the grass cute, even when he knows Steve is shooting for intimidating. “Because you’re going to kill me yourself?”

“Because you’re going to set up the speakers with Dustin, do the whole hamburger bonfire thing, and then you’re going through the gate.” Steve’s tone brooks no argument. “Between me, Robin, and Nancy, we can handle whatever bats come back.”

“Did you check out in there? Did you not hear about the time you got it in the neck—again.” The ring around Steve’s neck glares daggers at him.

“I heard that, along with the hundred times those things killed you,” Steve says, glowering. “You’re going through the gate with Dustin.”

“You can’t tell me what to do, Steve,” Eddie says icily. “I’m not running.”

“Why are you acting like you have something to prove to us? Or—or…” Steve balls his hand into a fist, releases it, balls it again. “Like you have to atone for something.”

“I don’t have to be the hero, Harrington. You already booked that part.” Eddie cracks his knuckles, feeling the desperate urge to stalk away, but there’s nowhere he can go where Steve can’t follow. “I just can’t be the reason anyone else dies.”

The exasperation on Steve’s face melts, revealing the intense concern it had been concealing. He has to look away, though Steve persists, “You’re not the reason anyone’s died, Eddie.”

See, he understands now, distantly, that he couldn’t have prevented Chrissy’s death alone. If he were allowed the same infinite number of do-overs for that day, he never would have guessed to ask Dustin Henderson, the overactive Pomeranian of a freshman he adopted, if any supernatural shit had happened in Hawkins before. He wouldn’t have known to play music for Chrissy, because Nancy and Robin wouldn’t discover that failsafe until days later. What, could he have warned her to stay out of her own head?

The best he could’ve done was told her to stay the hell away from him, dodge a murder rap. He could have only helped himself.

“Eddie, I’m serious.” Steve steps forward and grabs him by the shoulders of his leather jacket. “That guilt you’re feeling about leaving Chrissy? Yeah, it’s probably going to stick around for life. Trust me, dude, I should know.”

“You quit your job,” Eddie blurts out, another bleed from an old loop. “The lifeguarding thing, you…”

“I told you that?” Steve asks, quietly stunned, and Eddie realizes he had never shared that anxiety before, not with anyone. Steve takes a beat to reorient himself to this world where he digs up long-buried secrets with the town pariah before continuing, “But so yeah, Barb and what happened to her, it’s guilt I’m just going to have with me, forever. I made mistakes because I was young and an insensitive idiot. You left because you got scared like a normal human being. Neither of us are bad people, especially you. I mean, have you left since?”

“I told you, all of you, I ran that time with Dustin—”

“You went through the gate like we told you to,” Steve argues, his frustrated passion returning. “You’ve done all of this, like what, over fifty times, and you haven’t tried running off in the middle of the night even once? I think we might need to get your head checked after all if you really still think you're a coward.”

“Honestly,” Eddie says, rubbing at his chest because something traitorous there is beating too hard. “It never occurred to me to ditch. I’ll have to try that tomorrow…or, the tomorrow that is the next today.”

“But you won’t.”

It’s borderline painful to hear Steve talk like he knows Eddie, really knows him. Possesses a lifelong breadth of knowledge. Steve has been able to tolerate his company for less than a week, while Eddie has gotten to know Steve over a month and a half of cyclical conversations. It’s not enough, not to justify how helplessly Eddie has fallen for him.

“Also,” Steve says, the apples of his cheeks flushing pink. “You said you kissed me. Earlier, before unloading all the really crazy stuff. You said…”

Eddie’s own cheeks feel feverish and he ducks out of Steve’s hold, trying to play it off with a laugh. “Yeah, well, I kissed your ex-girlfriend, too. Several times actually. You’re not special.”

Steve exhales through his nose, the same way he does when Dustin mouths off at him. “You really think we have time for this?”

“Time is pretty fucking relative, Steve.”

Can’t argue with an amateur time traveler on that. Steve folds his arms across his chest, shaking his head in fond irritation, and says again, “You kissed me.”

“I did,” Eddie confirms, all out of denial.

“And we’ll talk about it tomorrow?” Steve asks with an odd note of hope in his voice.

Eddie swallows, unsure if hallucinations are a new symptom of the loop. “Uh, yeah. Anything for you, Harrington.”

Nancy is confident in the plan, reinforced by the information Eddie’s gleaned, and her confidence is infectious. Erica knows to hide from the dog walker, the trio of slayers will wait as long as they can to enter the lair, and Dustin delivers even more boxes of Hamburger Helper than he’s ever pillaged.

Hope tastes musty, like an attic rarely opened, and it sounds like “Master of Puppets” by Metallica played on his most prized possession, bought with birthday money and a loan his uncle has never come to collect. Hope is Dustin smiling at him like he may actually be a hero.

And defeat burns.

Overexcited from the day’s information overload, Dustin fumbles with the lighter on the final bonfire. Eddie screams at him to leave it, to book his ass inside, but the kid just won’t listen.

He dies, body shielding Dustin’s, to a symphony of wings flapping, much harder than a butterfly’s.

054 – 073

Even in the new normal, where he spills his guts about time being trapped in a looped signal, patterns emerge. Nancy always wrings him out like a rag for details on how various versions of the night unfold. The existence of time travel consistently blows Lucas and Dustin’s geeky minds and sets Robin off on a three minute tangent concerning Back to the Future.

Hearing the full story behind the Russian torture session Robin and Steve underwent last summer? Check, times ten.

Erica pretends she doesn’t care while shadowing Eddie for the remainder of the day, his personal pint-sized bodyguard. Steve checks in at fifteen minutes intervals, like he’s afraid Eddie might spontaneously combust if left alone too long. It’s sweet and suffocating in turn.

And Max keeps her distance, until the daylight is dying and they’ll have to go soon. She approaches him in the field while he’s shooing Dustin back to the camper with a box full of leftover rusted nails.

Same question, every time. “Does it hurt?” she asks, chin jutted in a show of bravery. It is brave. “Does death…”

He’s run the gamut on answers: just like falling asleep, a big fat lie, or it hurts like Satan’s bitch but it doesn’t last, not comforting but honest, or everyone has to do it eventually, a worthless platitude.

Here’s all he does anymore: a kamikaze hug, ignoring how she beats her hard fists against his stomach, until she begrudgingly accepts the inevitable and tucks her face into his chest, refusing to cry.

“We’re gonna get through this, Red. You and me, both.”

074

He wakes up, and decides it’s high time he starts saying what he feels.

Eddie’s a deceptively open guy—he designed himself that way. He proudly wears the marks of his musical taste, and interests, and even sexual predilections if anyone cared to look closely. He talks boldly and often. He does it for himself, because hiding everything he loves in a shoebox under his bed would have guaranteed he OD’d by eighteen, but also for the geeky kids with braces and cowlicks and Weird Al t-shirts who need someone to be themself loudly so they can be themselves at a normal volume.

But if he were to diagnose himself like a shrink would, he’d say the brashness and layers of studded clothing hid the scrawny kid he’ll always be, the one petrified he’ll end up in prison like his father or dead before twenty-seven like his mother. He doesn’t say “I love you” enough because he could count on two fingers the number of people who’ve said it to him before today. He doesn’t let people know how much they mean to him because he’s scared to discover how little he means to them.

Compared to the physical agony he’s endured, though, having his heart battered might be a dream.

Somehow, Nancy winds up being the first. It’s rare, him getting to see her blow Vecna away with her sawed-off shotgun. She’s nothing like the fair princess Mike told him she once played in an ancient, long-gone campaign. Wheeler has warrior in her blood.

They’re staring at the ashes the fleeing Vecna left in his wake when Eddie tells her, “You’re the most badass woman I’ve ever beheld and when this is over, I think we should platonically have 2.5 babies who will one day take over the world.”

Instead of biting his head off for not taking this seriously, Nancy Wheeler blushes. Just before the earthquake hits.

075

At some point, Steve accidentally pours vodka—or potentially lighter fluid—on his hands and disappears into the camper to wash it off.

Eddie steals the opportunity to saddle up to Robin and soak in a few rays of the setting sun.

A picture of cool and casual, he opens with, “Hey, so I know you’ve got a great thing going with Harrington and all, but I am ragefully jealous and if for any reason you ever need or want to ditch him, I’m here, first in line.”

Robin has so many offbeat expressions, a triple rainbow’s worth, but the face she pulls when she thinks she might be conversing with one of the stupidest men alive is Eddie’s all-time favorite. “Okay, cool. Right. But you know Steve and I are just friends, right? Platonic—”

“Platonic with a capital P, that’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Eddie says, wholly sincere. “I’m offering up my best friend services, free of charge. Say yes, Buckley. Elope with me in a friendship sorta way.”

Robin frowns thoughtfully. “How much would you complain during Doctor Zhivago?”

“The whole time.”

She laughs a band kid laugh, so one in exactly the right key. “I think you and Steve would be the better friends.”

The camper door squeaks on its hinges as it opens, so Eddie gets to shoot Steve a suggestive grin as he says, “Nah, I can’t stand him.”

“Are you talking about me?”

He has never had very clear flashes of his own future, but suddenly pictures himself leaning against the counter at Family Video, throwing popcorn at the screen while some actor play-pretending to be a doctor named Zhivago frowns in a close-up. Robin berates him for being a pig, but Steve agrees the movie is a snoozefest and why can’t they watch Fast Times instead?

Eddie wants to be their best friend, plural, the package deal. If being Steve’s best friend also involves making out in the back room of Family Video, no complaints here.

Robin doesn’t make it this time around. Somehow, Eddie must have precipitated her demise by simply asking to be her friend.

078

He sits cross-legged in the attic with Lucas, powerless together as they wait out Max’s trance.

I failed her, Lucas writes frantically on his notepad.

Eddie doesn’t hesitate writing back, You didn’t. A lot of people did but not you.

He’ll never grow accustomed to seeing Max die, to Lucas rocking her body in his arms and begging Eddie and Erica to help when nothing can be done. Stepping into the path of the opening gate is a mercy.

081

He hasn’t had a death at the hands of Jason in what would be a full lunar cycle.

Beams of moonlight cut through the trees, but it doesn’t make the woodland path any easier to navigate. The bullet wound in his left side howls, but he pushes forward because he has to draw Jason away from Max and Lucas.

He narrowly avoids decapitating himself on a jutting branch, but forgets to mind the ground and the root system snaking around them so much like the corded vines in the Upside Down. He hears his ankle snap more than he feels it, not that he’d have had the chance to scramble up and away. Jason’s boot slams down on his back, pinning him to the dirt.

Jason invokes her name. “Chrissy, this is for you.”

He closes his eyes and prays Jason has better aim at close range.

A thunk, not a shot, echoes through the woods. The foot eases off his back, then another thunk and the foot is gone. Jason’s unconscious body falls beside him, a trickle of blood serpentining down his forehead.

Erica has grass stains on her dress and a two-by-four held like a broadsword in her hands.

“Jesus Christ.”

“Don’t tell me that’s the first time I’ve saved your life,” she says, but her bottom lip is quivering and when Eddie opens his arms, she flings herself into them.

“You’re going to be the greatest of us all,” Eddie whispers, failing to keep his tears out of her hair.

Max lives, Dustin and Nancy don’t.

Eddie deposits Erica into Steve’s arms and asks him to drive everyone else far away so they can’t see what happens next.

085

After stitching up Steve, he drags him to the trailer roof to smoke.

It’s a funhouse mirror’s distorted reflection of a quintessential high school experience: stargazing with the person who sets the butterflies free in your stomach, the one who you hope will reach over and take your hand. Steve Harrington, former high school royalty, and Eddie Munson, super senior and dark lord of the freaks, battered and bloodied and brushing knuckles while whatever is up in the sky seems to actively want them dead.

Stars once soothed Eddie; now, his brain short-circuits in its attempts to realign them.

“I’m worried I’ll forget everything, if this ever ends,” Eddie says, mentally stealing a star from Orion’s Belt and attaching it to Leo’s tail. “Which is fucking crazy because I should want to forget all the pain and shit I’ve gone through, but what if…”

What if he finally gets it right, rearranges the stars in precisely the right order, and that day becomes the only day to have existed. He already tries to recall past loops and finds the images blurred, like someone has taken an eraser to the slate and left his memories streaked with dust. 

If the slate gets wiped completely when the days stop repeating, he’ll forget he ever kissed Steve. He’ll forget Steve might have kissed him back.

“If you have a way to forget the bats, you have to tell me,” Steve says, smoothing two fingers along his neck.

“I have a way to forget for a little while,” Eddie says, because what if this is the day. What if. “You know, if you’re at all interested.”

Eddie whistles a wisp of smoke at Steve and watches his dark eyes lock on his lips. He rolls over and kisses him in the midst of his nod.

It’s so perfect, Eddie almost converts back to the faithful. He and Dustin haven’t even come down from their metal high yet when Nancy and Robin return without Steve.

Nancy refuses to give him the shotgun. “He said you’re not allowed to do it over.”

Over her shoulder, he sees Dustin swaying in the trailer doorway, unmoored. He hasn’t cried yet, but Robin hasn’t stopped.

“Steve can’t tell me what to do. He’s dead.” 

If Eddie is not allowed to be the self-sacrificial hero, neither is Steve.

086

He wakes up, and announces to the universe, “Okay, once more with feeling!”

Erica tells him to shut up, in a pleasant start to the day.

Once more with feeling, because after this loop, Eddie will have to accept this is forever. Whether it be heaven or hell—heaven because he spends every day with his best friends or hell because they’re miserable and scared and all he can do is die before any of them can follow after—he must make peace with the fact there’s no way out.

He hews as closely to the original day as possible. No witching hour chats with Steve and save tending to his wounds for tomorrow. He listens diligently to the omen Vecna gifted Nancy, tosses in a few dramatic expletives for appearances, and doesn’t protest when Max offers herself up as bait. He’s tempted to ask for the flamethrower when they arrive at The War Zone, but it’s never amounted to anything more than dead weight. He’ll have to settle for the tried but not so true spears and shields.

His first minor deviation is in the field with Lucas and Erica.

“Hey Sinclairs, just a heads-up: I used to deal near Creel and there’s a complete asshole who lives around there, always walks his dog at night, won’t hesitate to call the cops if he sees anything he doesn’t like. Maybe keep some of the lights off until you absolutely need them.”

He resists telling them anything more, even though he might as well have the exact time of the walk tattooed on his wrist where a watch would be. Nothing too concrete, lest he raise suspicions.

His second deviation is sending Dustin on the stolen grocery run.

“What? We’ve got a little time and I’d prefer those demon bats munch on dead cow than me, thanks.”

Steve grimaces, hand drifting to his abdomen, and Nancy relents. With the run proposed so last minute, Dustin doesn’t procure half of the haul he’s brought in the past, but it’ll do.

The last deviation is at the goodbyes outside the trailer.

“Don’t worry, you can be the hero, Steve.”

“Or don’t be,” Eddie cuts in, forced to make it flippant and not a desperate plea. “I think being a hero is massively overrated.”

He has a last line to deliver and his voice cracks calling Steve’s name.

“Make him pay.”

Steve nods, but suddenly his eyes widen in a disturbed way they never had in previous iterations. Eddie checks over his shoulder, but the trailer stands vine-covered and unchanged. When he looks back, Steve hasn’t stopped staring at him, though his breathing has picked up, evident in how fast his chest is rising.

“You good, man?” Eddie asks carefully. They can’t go too much further off the main path of the timeline.

The question snaps Steve out of the unnerving spell he had fallen under. “I’m…yeah, I’m good. I’m good,” he says, like the repetition will convince him it's true.

He, Nancy, and Robin set off, but Eddie catches Steve glancing over his shoulder three times before they disappear out of sight. Such a sharp change in demeanor has Eddie antsy, but he has to trust Steve’s confession to Nancy will bring him back on course. He channels the nervous energy into fortress preparation and building two bonfires.

He steps back with Dustin to admire their handiwork. The grin on Dustin’s face is the brightest point in a starless place and Eddie has to cheat, hopefully for a final time.

“Hey, buddy.” Eddie snags Dustin by the collar, looping his arms around his sturdy shoulders. “If I die…”

“We don’t talk like that,” Dustin interrupts. “We’re all gonna make it.”

Eddie pinches Dustin’s ear, ignoring his squawk of protest. “Of course we’re all gonna make it, but you ever heard of a backup plan? I see you’ve retained nothing from all our Hellfire sessions.”

“Having a plan for if someone dies isn’t an actual backup plan,” Dustin argues.

“Humor me, Henderson, please.” Eddie places his hands on either side of Dustin’s face and squeezes his cheeks, because he needs the kid to stop yammering or he’ll not be able to say his peace. “If I die, don’t worry about taking my body back, okay? Tell Harrington I said that, because he won’t listen to it just coming from you, shrimp.”

“Fine, but—”

“You’re not gonna die, blah, blah, blah.” Eddie lets Dustin go, reluctantly. “You hear that? I think the bats are dying for the doors to open on the most metal concert the shadow dimension has ever seen.”

He shreds Metallica like he’ll never play his guitar again. At the concert’s end—no return engagements— he and Dustin move in perfect sync, lighting a bonfire each and sealing the vents. It’s perfect, again, so Eddie knows it’ll never last.

“Excelsior!” he calls as he hoists Dustin through the gate. Dustin’s cries register as static when he cuts the rope.

The bats are gathering in their vortex formation, ready to take to the skies, when Eddie runs back outside with his shield and spear in hand. No bike this time since, after all, he is a runner by nature. He outpaces them for longer than he ever has, so perhaps the nights he spent running from Jason were worth something, but he’s swallowed into the eye of the storm eventually.

A half dozen bats meet an end to his shield of nails, another five to his spear. He feels different tonight, invincible. Tomorrow, he’ll resign himself to hell. Today, he obeys no master, not even the universe and its puppet strings called fate.

“Hey! Eddie!”

A bottle flies through the air, crashing a foot from the spiraling bats and lighting the grass on fire. The bats closest to the flames wail and peel off. Those not close enough to feel afraid turn their fury to the source of the fire.

Steve.

He has one last cocktail left and he waves it above his head as a taunt, or a threat, or both. The pitiful creatures, chained to their hive, are torn between attacking the firestarter or finishing off the music maker. In the confusion, Eddie brings down a further four bats.

Steve holds his ground until a solid group of bats dive towards him and only then does he hurl the bottle. Their dying screams would sound glorious pressed on a record.

A bat nips him in the shoulder, but Eddie takes it down with his spear. A new voice—Dustin—shouts for him, then Steve. He’s halfway through yelling at Dustin to get back inside, but it doesn’t matter.

His body, which has memorized every major milestone of this day and has the timing down to the second, knows it’s the end before his mind can catch up. The remaining bats plummet to their deaths at the same moment Eddie drops to his knees.

The girls got him.

He’s hysterical when Steve reaches him, aiding a limping Dustin along. Dustin leaves tracks of sticky tears on his neck, muttering, “You’re so stupid, you’re so stupid, you’re so stupid. Who even says excelsior?”

Steve eases down onto his other side, wincing all the way, but the slap he lands on Eddie’s shoulder is surprisingly strong. “Sorry, it’s just…” The immediate apology renders the slap pretty meaningless, but Eddie forgives him. It’s Steve. “What did I tell you about not being a hero?”

Eddie manages to stop laughing long enough to choke out, “No apologies necessary, dude. You punched me in the face before, that was nothing.”

“I never—”

“How did you know to come back?” Eddie asks, because if he has his way, he’ll never be explaining a full eighty-six days of time loops again.

“I don’t know. I…” Steve is close, so close Eddie can see the dark circles inked around his eyes. “I just had this terrible feeling, like I could see myself coming back here and finding you…it’s crazy, I know. Kind of like really strong…”

“Deja vu,” Eddie finishes, and the hysterical laughter begins again. Steve and Dustin both join him.

He refuses to believe it’s over until he’s refashioning a rope through the rapidly closing gate and shepherding Dustin, Robin, and Nancy home. A man of irritating, charming habits, Steve insists on going last and Eddie appeases him.

No, it’s not over until they rush into the camper and floor the gas. They find Lucas, Erica, and Max walking down the road on their way back to the trailer. Eddie leaps out of the camper and whisks Max into his arms, twirling her around and smacking a kiss against her flaming hair.

“Ow, ow, ow.”

“Oh shit, the arm, I forgot.” Eddie returns her to the ground gently, mindful of the break.

Max narrows her eyes at him. “You…forgot?”

Hugs of salvation take precedence over explaining a little slip. An outsider strolling by—perhaps walking a dog—would think they're survivors of an apocalypse. And aren't they? No one but he knows how perilously close they came to seeing the fall of Hawkins, of their homes. He’ll tell them one day, when the wounds have scabbed over.

For now, he wants to watch the kids cheering for themselves, reliving only the best parts of the night. Dustin is currently ripping through a solo on an air guitar. God, Eddie hopes he didn’t look that stupid while playing.

“Are we square now?” Eddie glances up at the sky, then down at the ground just to cover his bases.

“Are you square with who?” Steve asks as he breaks from Nancy and Robin’s huddle to join him on the outskirts of the party.

Eddie points to the asphalt and whispers, “The man downstairs. All the rumors are true. I’m possessed and will be sucking out your soul now.”

Steve laughs like he’s never heard the joke before, because he hasn’t. There are so many memories he has of Steve—of all of them—that they’ll only ever get to hear as stories, not as moments they lived with him. He’s grateful, genuinely, because most of the memories are bad, but there’s a little good.

That’s why they’re all here, alive. That’s why he’s alive. There had been good.

He was good.

000

“I don’t want to go to sleep.”

The clock on Steve’s bedside table flashes a neon red 3:13 in the afternoon. Stripes of sunlight streaming through the blinds cut across Steve’s bed, shining in his eyes, which should make refusing to sleep easy. His body, after arguably two and a half months of no sleep, has other ideas.

“You really”—a yawn—“should, dude.”

Steve’s clock keeping time, Steve’s terrible blinds not blocking out the light, Steve’s bed, under Steve’s covers, in Steve’s borrowed pajama bottoms. Steve.

They’re lying on their backs, exactly as they had been the night Eddie brought him up to the roof. Steve's ceiling has no stars, even of the plastic and glowing variety. That’s fine by him—he’s sick of staring at stars, and the sky, and into the dark.

He really doesn’t want to sleep.

“What if this is pretend?” Eddie asks, so scared even saying it may make it so. “What if we lost and this is the universe’s final fuck you? Making us think we won and that we’re in the epilogue, but then…fuck you.”

“What if’s are killers.” Steve sounds so far away, even laying a few inches from him. “You said that to me once, I think.”

He had, in his most memorable loop, the loop where he first had the nerve to kiss Steve. When he drew out a promise from him that he’d remember.

“Go to sleep,” Steve mumbles, his eyes closed, already wandering into a dream.

But under the sheets, his hand slips into Eddie’s, intertwining their fingers. It may be a new promise: if you get dragged back, they’re dragging me back with you.

Or maybe, just maybe, they’re two teenagers holding hands on a bed, in a suburban house, on a quiet street, within a small town, and the universe is bored of them.

He falls asleep.