Work Text:
It’s a stupid thing - to reach for his guitar in a moment like this.
The girl he’s been crushing on since middle school, yes middle school, is currently having some kind of episode in his living room, and all he can think to do is start strumming a tune.
He doesn’t know how he knows Chrissy Cunningham’s favorite song. The two of them have had all but one interaction since he was a lanky, awkward preteen with a buzzcut and she was a kid donning ribboned pigtails and a winning smile as she told him she liked what his band had played.
There’s no explanation for their immaterial connection, no logic or reason that can possibly justify why they - of all people - would share a moment so integral to the very fabric of the universe.
‘Just go with it, ’ he thinks briefly before springing into action, his fingers plucking away at notes he can scarcely believe he remembers.
“You fill up my senses, like a night in the forest. Like the mountains in springtime. Like a walk in the rain,” he sings, softly at first.
He’s never had the best voice, full of raspy tones and pitchy high notes, but it doesn’t matter now. All that matters is Chrissy hearing his song and letting it bring her back to reality. Their reality.
With each lyric he sings comes a memory - the smell of pancakes cooking on the stove, the crackle of vinyl as John Denver plays, the sweet sound of his mom humming from the kitchen as she works.
“Turn it back!” she’d called from the kitchen when the song ended, and eight-year-old Eddie obliged, jumping up from his seat and carefully setting the needle on the edge of the record.
He sings louder as Chrissy’s body begins to float, feet dangling inches above the floor. His voice catches on the words his dad revered more than the others. “Let me drown in your laughter, let me die in your arms.”
It was the first song he learned on his little acoustic guitar, gifted to him by parents who scrounged for and saved every penny so that their son could get what he wanted for Christmas. He’d already stopped believing in Santa by then, disillusioned by the children who sported leather crossbody bags and bragged about their Hot Wheels tracks and Erector Sets after December 25th came and went. But that winter, he didn’t require the manufactured wizardry of some overgrown elf to make him happy; his parents were all the magic he needed.
“Teach me Annie’s Song,” he’d said, looking up at his dad through grateful, glossy eyes.
“Let me lay down beside you. Let me always be with you. Come, let me love you. Come love me again.”
Chrissy drifts further towards the ceiling.
He was too young to process death when it had happened to him the first time, too naïve to recognize how finite it all was. His mother slipped on ice outside their trailer while they were playing tag, hit her head, and that was that. His dad turned to drinking before turning to gambling before turning to armed robbery, and soon enough, Eddie was moving in with Uncle Wayne while his dad moved into a prison cell.
He wonders what memories Chrissy holds, what tendrils of gravity and flashes of unsullied moments tether her to the earth to keep her here instead of inside Vecna’s grasp.
“Let me give my life to you,” he pleads, tears streaming down his face as he struggles to choke out the words, “Come, let me love you. Come love me again.”
Chrissy gasps as if it’s the first time she’s ever taken a breath, as if she’d been underwater for centuries and her lungs are desperate for air. Eddie just about has the wherewithal to toss his guitar to the side and catch her as she collapses in his arms.
-
Eddie awakes with a start to the sound of his alarm. He runs a hand over his face, brushing the sleep from his eyes and the drivel from his lips before slamming his fist on the ‘off’ button of the bedside clock. Golden light streams through the dusty curtains of his room, and it feels wrong that the earth is still turning and the sun is still shining after everything he’s witnessed. After Chrissy is gone.
He reaches again for his guitar - just as he did in his dream - so that he can finish the song.
“You fill up my senses,” he croons, thinking of the smell of Chrissy’s sweet perfume, her harmonic laughter, glitter on her eyelashes as she stared at him through watchful eyes, the softness of her cardigan brushing against his hand.
“Come fill me again.”