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It was so often now that the demons would come when I wasn’t able to stop them. Our minds can be the most unrelenting of prisons and no one but Eleven had fully found a way to stay safe anywhere but the physical present. Dreams- Nightmares always insisted on pulling me into my past, dragging my body through the void of endless agony, to relive those moments again and again, over and over till he knew I would break. I’d had plenty of trauma before Vecna but this was…it was different. The haunting felt so real sometimes, like Eddie had come back as a puppet, dragged forward to taunt me not just by Vecna’s imagination but physically in the upside down, purely from that monsters will. I’d left him down there after all; broken and bleeding, battered and dying just to die all alone.
Dustin forgave himself after a while, the pain of our loss never left but the survivor’s guilt, the abandonment did lessen and eventually fade away like ashes in wind. My guilt was stronger, a more ferocious storm, it brewed thick and fog-like, it was always lurking in my mind. I’d been seeing things. I know what it means. But I’d been seeing things for weeks and nothing had happened. I should have told somebody but I wanted to join Eddie, it just hurt so much. And then nothing happened, I was being taunted, haunted yet not taken, Vecna knew how wrenching it was on my poor wounded heart. Maybe he was buttering me up, the fear and anxiety, the overwhelming build-up of it all would make the kill sweeter for him. At this point I just wanted the torment to be over.
Everytime I close my eyes, I see him. Eddie, my Eddie, is just lying there surrounded by his own blood and the muck of those putrid bats that Vecna borderline tamed (only to himself, there was nothing truly tame about the beasts). And I see myself crying and grasping at him, at Eddie, just begging him, “WAKE UP.” Over and over the words, the motions they all just replay. “WAKE UP.” But he doesn’t. He just lies there. And Dustin is hobbling to pull me, begging himself that we just get help, that he’ll be alright if we just get help. I didn’t want to leave. And then those gates opened again, what little hope we both had of sending some sort of ambulance or rescue surface through a supernatural portal to another world was shattered into nothingness when the world, our world, began to burn.
Eleven stopped it. She did but it’s begun blossoming again and Nancy knows it’s because Vecna’s not really gone. Eddie. Eddie’s death was the fourth victim he needed to pry open the portals again. He probably found his body or something. Nancy said that’s not possible because these gates reopening are only small, not big enough for the end of Hawkins, not big enough for Eddie’s death to be the fourth horseman of the goddamned apocalypse. I believe her for now. It’s just guilt trying to add on the burning shit pile, I left Eddie to die, I might as well as killed him myself and now I’m bringing the apocalypse? Trauma laps that shit up.
These past few nights, my dreams- nightmares, have been different. Like a vision covered in smoke, it’s softer and less jarring although the same images flash before me but I can block them like squinting my eyes. It makes it easier, however, this smoke is smothering and hot and choking me. It got worse, the worst, tonight. I thought I woke up but I was in the Upside Down. I was in Eddie’s trailer, in his bed on that manky old stained mattress (god what was wrong with that boy and hygiene). It’s like it’s real, that tingling sensation in my fingertips down through my nerves to my spine, it just feels so vivid.
I rise, a smooth movement as I basically glide through the doors of the trailer, a feeling of floating across concrete as I pass the front of his trailer. I know where I’m going and it’s not happening again. I can’t see this one more time, not again. I’m screaming and crying, except, I’m not. No sound, no movement. Just this flying through the suffocating particles in the air. When I get there, there’s no body, no blood and no bats. I stop. I freeze in place, only for a moment, if to catch my breath, question what’s happening or to just keep freaking out then I’m turning on my back. It’s still a soft, smooth movement no matter what. My whole body lowers to the ground, exactly where Eddie’s corpse had lay until I feel like we are positioned as one.
I look at the sky and a swirling tornado of that same black smoke is descending steadily upon me. I can’t move, I can’t speak. I can’t do anything but watch as scenes unfold like a well rehearsed play. The silence is cut through with footsteps, large booming claps of footsteps resound everywhere at once. Something is coming and it’s coming incredibly fast. I think a tear slips free, wedging it’s way from upon the ledge of my eyelid and drifting into my hairline quickly. “Somebody help me.” I whisper without moving my lips an atom. “Somebody.”
The footsteps stop and although my head hasn’t turned, I can envision big black boots, grime covered and worn but clearly loved with the way the laces are woven into a star, a pentagram. Eddie did that with his shoelaces sometimes. “You. You shouldn’t be here.” A voice is muffled beneath a filter that can only be described as metallic as a figure drifts into my actual vision, hands grasping at my top to lift me up. I suddenly regain every sense that had been held hostage before. Gasping breaths being taken in as speedily as possible as these foreign hands cradle my face, “Just breathe, that’s it. It’s hard here I know.”
My chest is shuddering with the air filling my lungs as I take in the thing before me, I can’t make out much, it’s just a blurred figure before me, swathed in cloaks and those boots and a spear. “Who are you?” I refrain from screaming, it looks humanoid, and it talks. It’s not Vecna but that doesn’t make it a friend. “It’s me. You know me! I’m…I am…” The voice drifts, it too does not know it’s own identity. Neither of you can name the one before you. “I’m- I’m the banished. The banished- be- Betrayer Kas. Kas the betrayer.” Kas. This Kas is way too fond with his fingers as they sift through my hair. “Do…Do I know you?” I can’t deny this familiarity though and I grip his shoulder as hard as I can. I treat Kas like an anchor in this sea of horror. He keeps me stationary on else throttling waves. “You know me. You do. I know you.” It’s like Kas is trying to convince himself of something he’d once been told but never believed himself. I know that feeling and I want him to convince me too because deep down there’s this pull, it’s screaming ‘YOU KNOW. YOU KNOW HIM.’ And I don’t understand what it means.
“Kas?? Kas I’m…I-“ I feel myself slipping through his fingers, fading away into the void again and the one permanence that I’d known for few seconds in otherwise hours of darkness is disappearing. I shouldn’t trust this world, this scape of night terrors. But Kas his heart is breaking in front of me as he whispers, “Don’t go.” But all I hear is Eddie’s voice in his place. “Don’t leave me. Not again.” And my soul shatters completely before I jolt upright in my real bed, in the real world.
What the hell just happened?