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Eddie looked at him. They sat on the edge of Steve’s pool, or what once was Steve’s pool. The place where Barbara Holland disappeared to, years ago. “You should be getting back. People will worry.”
Steve frowned. “They always worry.”
But he still got up and walked through the portal Eddie created for him with just a wave and a small smile.
Eddie looked at the portal for a few moments before closing it. Steve would come back. He always did.
He had to believe that.
~.~
After that final threat, after Vecna tore Hawkins in two, but before they managed to put it back together, there was Eddie.
Eddie, back, and, in every way that mattered, whole. He was alive, with injuries that inexplicably looked months, if not years, old. He was his normal animated self. That first night he gave all of his friends hugs, and swore he couldn’t answer how he was there, that he didn’t know, simply that he was. Nancy questioned him, and, after he seemed to pass muster, everything went back to how it was days before, the exception being Dustin clinging to him as if his life depended on it. Slipped right back into his role of reluctant collaborator, swearing there would be no more heroics.
He was happy. He was healthy. He was safe.
~.~
Or, more accurately, they thought he was safe.
~.~
It was the moment Vecna was dead for good, the moment the hivemind was cut off completely from their queen.
Eddie fell. It was like all of his strings had been cut, everything that kept him upright and alive just…gone in an instant. Robin, who was standing next to him, checked his pulse, checked his breathing. He seemed fine, so they navigated him onto a couch and waited.
And waited.
After four days, he was still unresponsive. They had gone to a hospital after twelve hours, possible repercussions for the man be damned - better in jail where they could fight for him than dead. They had agreed to let the creepy government doctors poke at him after three days.
No one could figure out what was wrong with him. It was like he was just…asleep. When Mike saw him, he made a crack about Sleeping Beauty that didn’t land.
On the fifth day, Dustin had an idea.
“What if he’s connected to the Upside Down?” He said, so quiet, like he was afraid he was right. “What if that’s how he came back? What if what we did hurt him?”
They did the only thing they could think of. They brought him back.
~.~
On the fifth day, Eddie woke up.
~.~
They are sitting in a facsimile of Steve’s room from when he was about 17. Eddie is idly playing with a cockroach (demoroach?) on his hand, seeing if he can anticipate its movements before it moves. Steve is watching him with what he is sure is poorly concealed fondness.
“How’s Max?” Eddie asks, seemingly suddenly.
It’s not, of course. The kids are always the first thing he asks about.
“She’s good.” Steve responds. “The Sinclairs are helping to bring her to physical therapy, they think maybe she’ll be able to handle walking around with a cane soon.”
Eddie nods, lost in thought, watching the cockroach walk around and around and around his hand, him moving just so that it is always rightside up.
~.~
Through trial and error, on the fifth through seventh days, they find out two things. The first was that Eddie cannot leave the Upside Down, at least not as it was. Perhaps it was his injuries, the injuries that the Upside Down healed, somehow, tethering him to it. Perhaps it just had not fully healed him, something about it wanting to keep him safe.
Perhaps it was something else entirely.
The result was that, every time Eddie attempted to leave, he would collapse. Physically, he was fine, but he would lose all of his functionality. He would effectively slip into a coma, until someone could pull him back through the Gate he went through.
The second, they learned by accident. They were on a rotation, monitoring Eddie, the adults and the older teens. No one wanted to leave him alone, but no one wanted to spend more time than they had to in the Upside Down, either.
Currently, it was Jonathan. Eddie knew him in passing before this started, and during that final battle, he really started hoping they could become friends. And that feeling hadn’t gone away. But he could tell the other boy wanted to go home, to be with his family, and so he couldn’t look at him with anything other than guilt, even as they held a casual conversation about music.
The Demogorgan came out of nowhere, out of sight one second and on top of them the next. They had a small arsenal of weapons, of course they did, they knew this was a dangerous place - but they were at rest, weren’t expecting a fight, when it struck. They couldn’t call for backup, and both of them were cornered.
To his credit, Jonathan switched gears quickly, going to hit the creature with a large rod before it could attack them.
Eddie tried to do the same, but he was still recovering from the final battle, and he usually ran away under the best of circumstances. His mental litany of please go away please just leave us alone was almost palpable.
Less than two feet away from them, the Demogorgan stopped, closed its mouth, and tilted its head, not unlike a dog. Then, it looked directly at Eddie, and slowly, as if in reverence, bowed its head and backed away, before eventually turning fully and running in the opposite direction.
Eddie and Jonathan, still primed for battle, turn to stare at each other with confusion.
~.~
A hive doesn’t always die without its queen.
Usually, it picks a new one.
~.~
One day, Steve brings him an acoustic guitar.
“It’s…I know time moves strangely here, but up there it’s Christmas. I know it’s not the same, and I know you can’t - but we all chipped in.”
Sometimes, Eddie daydreams about confessing to Steve that he loves him. That the others visit, of course they visit, but that Steve is his real connection to the outside world, the person that makes him feel human. He thinks if Steve stops coming, he’d fade away into the rotting mess of this parallel universe, at least until Dustin could convince everyone that he’s old enough and seasoned enough that visiting Eddie would be safe. That he would keep him here by any means necessary if he was just a bit more selfish, his warm heart in the middle of a cold, dank world. Eddie ripping himself open, hoping something about him could be worth something to Steve, despite Eddie having a literal universe of baggage.
Usually, he imagines Steve metaphorically stomping on his heart. Looking at him with disgust, demanding that Eddie let him leave. And Eddie - Eddie is a monster, but not that kind. He’d let him go, of course he would, he’d let Steve leave and he would close the Gate behind him and never open a new one, not even when someone tried to contact him through the lights that they wanted to come and say ‘hi.’ He’d shut himself away, he’d keep them safe from everything here, including himself.
Sometimes, he imagines Steve looking at him like he had hoped he would say it. That he feels the same. That he doesn’t care how hard this would be, that Eddie’s worth it, that it doesn’t matter, that nothing matters but them, together. Just how Eddie feels when he sees him.
Sometimes, he laughs at the idea so hard he starts sobbing.
Now, Steve is looking at him from under his lashes as if he thinks Eddie will laugh, or get mad, or do anything other than take the guitar with shaking fingers.
“Thank you, Stevie.” he says, because he doesn’t think he can manage anything else, and when he sees Steve blush, he thinks it’s a figment of his love-addled brain.
~.~
Once he knew what he was looking for, he could feel it. The vines, the creatures, the very ground itself, pulsing in a dark corner of his brain. He poked at it, prodded, tried to see what it would do. He could do this, annoying people was practically his calling. What’s the difference between that and poking at a sentient dimension?
Eventually, the Dimension perked its head up. Felt back.
He could feel it examining him.
~.~
When a queen bee dies, worker bees will need a new one. Sometimes, the bees will kill the old queen to make way for a new one, which they will raise. Other times, the queen will be killed suddenly. In the wild, this can result in a swarm.
Beekeepers try to prevent this sort of behavior by incorporating a new queen into the hive. However, sometimes, despite their best efforts, a queen will be rejected. Sometimes it is an issue of biology - she smells off or cannot reproduce - others it is an issue of trust.
The reasons are always different, but the result is always the same. The workers will come together to kill her, smothering her and biting her until there is nothing left. An entire hive, overthrowing their foreign ruler - an invader - from the inside, where no one can do a thing about it.
~.~
In that moment, although he did not know it, the Upside Down could have done that to him. It could have looked at him, from inside his own head, and found him lacking. It could have smothered him, killed him, and no one could have done a thing. A broken boy which it had fixed, deciding to take it all back.
~.~
The Upside Down looked at Eddie Munson, and did not find him lacking.
~.~
After that day, it was like Eddie could not ignore it. It was there, present, always. When he accidentally stepped on a vine, he could feel it, as if someone had stepped on him.
He tried to pretend he hadn’t also, primally, understood what the Upside Down had done, what it had decided he is. He tried to pretend that this alternate hellscape had not looked at him and said yes, this is all yours, if only you would take it.
~.~
The Upside Down, of course, was not easily controlled. Vecna ruled it with an iron fist, his creatures might as well have been his own eyes and ears, the vines his own limbs.
Eddie was not created of the Upside Down. Perhaps that was why, or perhaps it was just his disposition, but he refused to rule like that. He would, if he had to, but he would prefer to rule through trust. Mutual affection.
When he told the others what he was, what he could do, what he didn’t want to do unless he had to, they believed him. They trusted him. They told him good luck, that they would help him when they could.
~.~
He pretended he didn’t notice, but he wasn’t stupid.
And he had asked Steve. Steve, who, when asked, told him he was angry they were keeping this from him in the first place.
“It’s not you.” He said, because of course he did. “Really. If it was, we’d all stop coming completely.”
Eddie wasn’t stupid. He could tell when people were avoiding him while trying to show that they weren’t avoiding him. The stilted conversations when anyone - anyone but Steve - came to visit him, the way Robin and Nancy and Joyce stopped coming alone. The way people would pretend they didn’t hear him when he asked if the kids could come by some time, even with adult supervision.
“It’s just -” Steve continued, stopped, ran his hand through his hair, continued again. “We know you’re working on control. They just want to make sure this place is safe for people other than you. There were comparisons made to it being feral, especially without Vecna. It - Dustin feels bad about this, but he made an offhanded comment that we shouldn’t make it jealous, that it could try to hurt us out of spite.”
Eddie hadn’t thought about that. He wanted more than anything for them not to be afraid.
Of anything. But especially not of him. Of something he couldn't control about himself, yet.
He wanted to cry. He wanted to scream that it wasn’t fair, that he was trapped here and that no one wanted to even see him because they were afraid that the alternate universe connected to his brain could hurt them. That he couldn’t graduate high school but he was tasked with bringing an entire dimension under his control.
He wouldn’t do that, not in front of Steve. Instead, Eddie grinned and said, “What about you, you’re not scared?”
Steve didn’t respond. They sat in silence, before Eddie wordlessly opened a portal to let him out.
(He found he could do that soon after he discovered the rope that connects him to everything here. Nancy had said she had seen something like it when she encountered the Demogorgan in the woods, when she was still looking for Barb. No one cared how. It meant that everything could be fixed, and Eddie still had access to everyone whenever he wished. Everyone rejoiced, but deep down, even still, he fears that one day he’ll lose the ability, that he’ll be trapped here, alone with the vines and the creatures and the blood red sky. Forever.)
Steve, with one leg into the real world, turned back to look him in the eye. “Some things are worth being scared for.”
~.~
Eddie gained full control when he stopped running.
It had been months since he tried to leave - he knew better now. In the beginning, he thought he would be able to leave through his own portals, like the Demogorgan Nancy and Jonathan had seen years before. He could leave and come back at his own pace.
After the fourth time he had to be dragged back through his Gate, he gave up physically.
Giving up mentally took longer. He would ask visitors if they had a breakthrough, on the off chance the government could give him an out. He would fantasize about what he would do when - when - he left.
He didn’t know it, time moved strangely here, but it took about a year for him to realize he was never leaving. That this was his reality. He was no longer angry or sad at the concept. Resigned to his fate at worst, excited for the future at best.
The Upside Down acknowledged the realization, and opened itself up to him fully.
~.~
At Steve’s next visit, Eddie told him.
“This is never going to end.” Eddie said, “This is me. This is always going to be me. I realize that now.”
Steve smiled. Looked at him like he knew. Like everyone knew, but no one wanted to tell him. Like he was happy he could stop pretending.
Eddie took a deep breath. “I think - no. I love you. But I have this now. It’s not going away. I can’t ask you to deal with this forever. With me forever. But I needed you to know.”
Steve stared into the middle distance for a moment before speaking. “You should.”
“What?”
“Ask me.”
Eddie’s head snapped up. “Steve, I -”
Steve looked at him, with the look he thought he had caught from him the first time Eddie had gotten a demodog to approach Steve as if it was a real puppy. “I’m with you for the long run no matter what, Eddie. I thought you knew that by now. I’m with you in whatever way you’ll have me.”
Eddie gazed at him for a moment, before taking Steve’s hand in his. “Be with me. Here. For as long as you’ll have me.”
Steve smiled, looking over the desolate wasteland of Eddie’s kingdom. “There’s nowhere I’d rather be.”
~.~
Eddie looked at him. He feels lighter, nowadays, but this part is always the hardest. “You should be getting back. People will worry.”
Steve smiled, rolled over in bed. “They always worry.”
But he still got up and walked through the portal Eddie created for him in their room, pausing briefly to kiss the man goodbye.
Eddie looked at the portal for a few moments before closing it. Steve would come back. He always did. Nancy and Robin would be through soon, too, and the kids. They always tried to visit him as much as they could, at least once a week. He keeps it safe for them, whispered to the creatures in this land that they were safe, that they were friends, that he would brutalize any of them (any of his subjects, a part of him that he tried to ignore said) that tried to cause them harm. He had the power, and he was a benevolent ruler, but he would not allow that.
He had been thinking of leaving, recently. Just one more time. Just to see what would happen. He always thought - hoped - after some time, after he accepted this as who he was, the Upside Down would loosen its leash. Let him visit Hawkins proper, if only briefly. In a perfect world, he would love to surprise people, show up on their doorsteps, take them out to dinner, see a movie. See what they’re like, when they aren’t making a special trip to see him. He wishes it could be a surprise, but he needs someone to be close when he tries, in case he’s wrong, in case he is stuck in this place forever, no way out. In a way, he is like this universe’s parent, and the Upside Down could be a particularly clingy child. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he would be trapped here.
But he knew it knew he would not be gone forever. He would comfort it in his absence, promise it he would be home soon. And he would not be lying.
He thinks, perhaps, he will ask Steve. Steve, at least, will let him try, catch him if he falls. They were both, occasionally, too stupid for their own good. Maybe he wouldn’t ask him tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that. But, eventually, he would. And he could count on the fact that he didn’t need to rush himself.
It wouldn’t fix everything. He knew, now, that this is his home. Would be his home for the rest of his life.
But, they would all be back. Even Steve. Especially Steve.
In the meantime, he made himself useful.