Chapter Text
“Wake up.”
An unfamiliar voice, grabbing onto his unwinding threads of consciousness and weaving them back together, pulling him up, up, up until he breaches the surface. He opens his eyes with a small gasp, jerking back in surprise as an unfamiliar face—serious brown eyes, close-shaven head, furrowed brow—peers back at him. The face moves back too, seemingly surprised by his sudden movement, and he sees that it is attached to a body.
A girl is kneeling over him, concern and maybe a little bit of fear clouding her deep brown eyes, her hands flitting nervously at her sides. She’s wearing a cute white shirt with tiny little flowers all over it, a sharp contrast to her severe haircut and her grave expression. He likes it. The contrast. It makes her look… there’s a word he’s looking for, just on the tip of his tongue, but he can’t find it. He frowns, wondering why it won’t come to him. It feels important somehow, like a part of himself.
“Eddie,” says the girl, still leaning over him. “Are you Eddie?”
Eddie.
He turns the syllables over in his brain, finding that they fit nicely into the contours of his mind. Like an old friend. Eddie. Comforting and familiar, real and solid. Like that word that’s just on the tip of his tongue. He nods.
“Eddie,” he says back, his voice hoarse and unfamiliar to his own ears. Something tickles at the back of his mind, another set of syllables. He opens his mouth again. “Eddie Munson.” His name. That’s what it is. Eddie Munson. The girl smiles, some of the severity leaving her expression.
“Hello, Eddie,” she says. “My name is Eleven. But you can call me El. That is what all of my friends call me.”
Eddie feels the tickling at the back of his mind again. Remembered fragments of a conversation. We usually rely on this girl who has superpowers. It had been an important conversation, he thinks. He wonders why he can’t remember more. He should remember more. He makes a frustrated noise in the back of his throat.
“Can you sit up?” the girl asks. She holds out a hand to him. He takes it, letting her do most of the work as she pulls him into a sitting position. It’s a strange sensation. He sees his hand in her smaller one, watches the slight strain of her muscles as she hoists him up, and yet he can’t feel anything. No skin on skin contact, no tensing of his own muscles as his body changes positions. He frowns again.
He looks down at his legs, splayed out beneath him awkwardly in a way that looks like it must be uncomfortable, and yet the discomfort doesn’t register. He notices that there’s a thin layer of water all around him, or at least it must be thin because it barely covers his fingers when he lays his hand on the ground. But he can’t see the bottom, only a reflection of large brown eyes and shaggy brown hair framing a pale, blood-spattered face. His face, he recognizes.
The water seeps into the black jeans he’s wearing, but he doesn’t feel damp. He knows, somehow, that wet jeans are just about the most uncomfortable thing to have on your body, but he doesn’t feel a thing. He dimly registers that this isn’t normal, that maybe this is something worth freaking out over, but he somehow can’t bring himself to care. Instead, he looks around him, taking in his surroundings.
Which amounts to exactly nothing. He seems to be in some kind of void, everything a deep, impenetrable darkness except for the girl in front of him. El. Her white clothes stand out sharply against the deep black surroundings. She shifts slightly and ripples spread from her shoes, on and on and on into the darkness. Eddie watches them go, endlessly into oblivion. He wonders how he got here. Wherever “here” is.
“Where are we?” His voice still has that unfamiliar rasp to it, as if something is constricting his throat. He can’t feel anything.
“We are in your mind,” El says simply, as if it’s the most natural statement in the world.
“My mind?” Eddie replies, because even though he can’t remember much, even though he can’t feel a thing, he knows that that’s not normal. “How?”
“Dustin sent me.”
Dustin. It’s like a gut punch. Memories. Curly, curly hair, a charming smile, soft hands, sharp wit. Laughing, laughing hard, a warm feeling spreading through his chest. Protect. Sitting at the head of a table, papers strewn everywhere, hiding his grin as frustrated groans echo across the room. Dice rolling across the table. Triumphant yells. And then, faster. Flashes of the same face, round cheeks, kind eyes, reaching hands, calming him down, holding him close, keeping him anchored. We’re on your side. A feeling of relief. A voice over a walkie-talkie, Eddie, Eddie are you okay? Scrambling through the woods. Strumming his guitar. His guitar. A grinning face across from him, that same warm feeling. Protect, protect, protect. A mantra running through his brain. Looking up through the ceiling, a silent goodbye. Then running, running, a voice calling his name, Eddie, desperation tinging the cries, flashing red lights, fear, then pain, so much pain, all across his torso, his chest, his cheeks, around his neck. Arms cradling him, tears falling on his shoulders. I love you, man. Choked sobs. I love you too. Then nothing.
Eddie gasps, water splashing around him as his limbs flail, nearly catching El’s chin with an elbow before she shrinks back, alarm plainly written on her face.
“Dustin?” Eddie chokes out. “He’s— Is he okay?”
“Dustin is okay,” El whispers. Eddie lets out a breath. “He misses you.” Eddie’s heart throbs in his chest. Finally, something he can feel.
El reaches out and brushes a tentative finger against Eddie’s cheek. He nearly flinches back at the touch, but it doesn’t register. So much for feeling. El’s brow furrows again.
“You are crying,” she states. Eddie brushes his own hand against his cheek. It comes away wet, but he can’t tell if it’s from tears or from the water surrounding him. He decides to take El’s word for it.
“Dustin cries too. They all do.”
They all do. More memories. A girl with a flash of red hair, a smirk hiding something much darker, much more broken. Then another, this one with fumbling hands, mousey hair, a smattering of freckles underneath earnest blue eyes, a heart hammering hard against his chest as he holds her up. A third with dark curls, intelligent eyes, fierce loyalty, a shotgun. A younger girl in a pink dress, always prepared with a sarcastic comeback and almost shocking competence. Then a boy, the girl's brother, he thinks, with a shy smile, a vicious protective streak, strong, basketball-worn hands. And— Eddie’s stomach flips. An older boy, with a swoop of brown hair. Downturned hazel eyes. Nails hammered haphazardly into a bat. Strong arms, Eddie’s battle vest, bandages, and a whispered conversation in the woods. Then another, Don’t try to be the hero. Then the fear again, the pain. Always the pain. It feels like too much, so much more than anyone should be able to handle.
“Am I dead?” he asks.
“No,” El replies, as though he’s missing something. “I already told you. We are in your mind.”
“Okay, yeah, sure, but, uh. How am I not dead?” El pauses at this, seemingly just as stumped as he is.
“You are stuck,” she says finally.
“Stuck?”
“Your mind is small.” Like that should explain everything. Eddie can’t help but feel just the slightest bit insulted. Sure, his memories have only just begun to flow back, and he remembers he’s on to his third senior year of high school, just barely passing his classes; he knows he’s not the brightest bulb of the bunch. But there’s no way his actual brain is smaller than it’s supposed to be, right?
“He is keeping you trapped,” El elaborates, maybe registering the confusion he’s sure is present on his face. “He took the rest of your mind away from you. He only left you this small part.” Eddie sure as hell doesn’t like the sound of that, but at least she’s not insulting his intelligence.
Something else catches Eddie’s attention, though, something that makes his stomach drop out with a fear he can’t quite place. Dreading the answer but needing to know all the same, he tentatively asks: “Who’s ‘he’? Do you know who did this to me?”
El pauses, an unreadable look crossing her face. Then—
“He is my brother.” And sure, Eddie’s memory is hazy at best, but he’s positive this isn’t the answer he was expecting.
“Your brother?”
“One,” she continues, as if that clarifies anything. “Papa made him just like he made me. He is my brother.” Nothing that El is saying makes any sense to Eddie’s already muddled brain, and he’s sure his confusion is clear on his face. El looks at him in consideration and then continues.
“Dustin says you call him…” she trails off, her face screwed up in concentration. “Venca,” she says finally.
This is the name Eddie’s been expecting, he knows it. It inspires a thrill of fear through his entire body, and he looks down to see that his hands are shaking violently in his lap. He clenches them into fists before turning back to El.
“So, you’re saying, Vecna, Supreme Evil Of The Universe or whatever, has taken over most of my mind and now I’m stuck here in this little black void?” El nods. “Great. Amazing. Sounds good.” Eddie nods along with her like what she’s saying is completely reasonable, and not one of the most terrifying things he’s ever heard. Which, if his gradually returning memories are anything to go by, is saying a lot. He seems to have been through some pretty terrifying shit in his life.
“No, Eddie,” says El, her mouth turning down at the corners. “This is bad.”
“I—” Eddie can’t tell if she’s being serious. “Yeah, I know.” El only looks more confused. “Jesus, kid, ever heard of sarcasm before?”
“S- Sarcasm?” El stutters.
“Um. Yeah,” Eddie hesitates. El just looks at him, eyebrows drawn together.
“Okay,” he breathes. “Okay, sorry, uh, sarcasm is, like, when you say something that’s kind of the opposite of what you’re actually trying to say. To make it funnier. Or, sometimes, to be mean. Or something,” he finishes lamely. Christ, not only was he failing English class for the third year in a row, but also apparently his mind had been taken over and all his memories were gone. And here he was trying to explain rhetorical devices to a fourteen year old kid. No wonder she still looked confused.
“Like Mike?” she eventually questions, causing Eddie’s mind to be flooded with images of a lanky, dark haired boy, stubborn and moody at the best of times, and most definitely sarcastic. Eddie lets out a small chuckle.
“Yeah,” he agrees, nodding his head. “Exactly like Mike.” El gives him a shy little grin, Eddie’s own face stretching into a smile in response. He likes her, he thinks. And not just because she's providing him company in his half-possessed mind.
“So,” Eddie continues eventually. “I’m trapped by Vecna, and he’s keeping me in a small corner of my mind. And that’s very bad,” he clarifies, making sure there’s no uncertainty, just in case. “What do I do about it?”
All traces of possible confusion clear off El’s face and she sits down, crossing her legs underneath her like an obedient schoolchild.
“I think I can help you,” she says, and suddenly her face is lighting up with a grin, her eyes sparkling. “I think I can fight him. But I need your help too.”
“Yeah, okay. What do I do?”
“Find your happy place,” El says, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. “Just like Max.” Her voice flattens a little on the name, a bit of her newfound confidence trickling out of her.
Max. Red hair and a knife’s-edge grin. A pair of headphones ever present around her neck. She had been preparing for something, he remembers. Some kind of big showdown. He remembers now, she had had to find happy memories to hide in. Eddie just has one problem.
“I can’t…” he trails off. El looks at him expectantly with her deep brown eyes. “I can’t remember,” he mumbles.
“What can’t you remember?”
“Anything.” El frowns. “Well, I have bits and pieces. But nothing concrete. I don’t even have a clue what happened to me. I just have little snippets, people’s names or their faces, little chunks of conversation. Nothing big enough to be my ‘happy place.’”
“Oh,” says El. Her frown deepens. Eddie thinks she’s far too young to be wearing such a serious expression all the time. He scrambles for something to say that could possibly erase that furrow between her eyebrows.
“Maybe…” he flounders, watching as El’s eyes track over his face. An idea begins to take shape in his mind. “Maybe you could, y’know, tell me stories. About them. About your— about our friends.” El continues to look confused. “It’s just that, when you mentioned Dustin’s name, suddenly I had all these flashes of memories with him. Maybe if you tell me more, my memories will come back.”
Hell, it’s worth a shot. It might even work. And the small smile El gives him again is certainly worth it, her brow smoothing over as she studies him intently.
“Will is the storyteller,” she says, ducking her head a little. “But I will try my best.”
And in her soft, halting voice, she begins to weave him stories, threading these people together just as she’d done with Eddie himself. She tells him about three boys, a rainy night in the woods, the first friends she’d ever known. A girl whose dreams were too large for this town, but who was stuck here anyway, and who lost her best friend and her innocent smile somewhere in all the horror. A boy who was trapped in a different world, until he wasn’t, until he was again, but in a different way, until he was finally free; a boy who became her brother and her best friend. Another boy, another brother, this one older and more distant but just as precious. A man, gruff and angry and yet so kind, taking her in from the cold and dark and offering her a home. A woman, picking her up off the ground when she was lost, giving her a new home when she needed it most. Another girl, the first girl her age that she’d ever met, a girl with fiery red hair to match her fiery spark of a personality, a girl who helped her discover herself. An older boy, a boy who always took care of her and her friends, who fought off bullies for them and saved them from “evil Russians.” A girl at his side, clever and sweet if a little bit awkward, facing her fears and fighting fiercely for all of them. A younger girl, the sister of one of her friends, smart as a whip and always watching their backs, even if she would never let them see that she cared.
As El paints pictures for him of their friends, her family, names start to trickle through Eddie’s hijacked mind. Dustin comes first, the boy with the curls, one of El’s boys from the woods. Eddie remembers him, remembers his exuberance and his horrible puns and his brilliant ideas. Then Mike and Lucas, the other boys from the woods, Eddie’s other Hellfire boys, complete the picture. And Erica, Lucas’s snarky little sister. Nancy Wheeler, Mike’s older sister, grounded and strong and freakishly smart, with her 4.0 GPA and her sawed-off shotgun. Max, a streak of red hair, those ever-present headphones, prickly at first but secretly sweet deep under the surface. Unfamiliar names mixing with the familiar: Will Byers, whose name Eddie only recognizes from the paper, but who El describes as kind, shy, and one of her best friends in the world. Jonathan, their older brother, who Eddie remembers seeing a few times at school. And Joyce, their mother, an absolute force. He hears about Hopper, broken police chief turned father, rescuing her from the woods in the dead of winter. And Robin, Robin he remembers. Hunt the freak. He remembers the understanding that had passed between them, how he’d stuck close to her side after that, even following her into the depths of some deep, dark lake.
Robin’s other half, Steve Harrington, comes crashing back into Eddie’s memory with the vicious swing of bat’s tail, breaking the dam holding everything else at bay. Conversations come flooding back to him, stolen moments while walking through the woods, while in the front of an RV. Friendly teasing that elicited a reaction so far from what he expected, he couldn’t help but do it more. Something deep in his stomach opening its jaws as he watched Steve literally rip a bat in half with his bare hands. The way that creature within him had uncurled and arched its back at the sight of Steve shirtless and bloody in Eddie’s battle vest. The shocking revelation that not only did Steve Harrington look good, he also acted good—taking care of the kids like his life depended on it, volunteering himself for the more dangerous situations before anyone else could. All of this hits Eddie like a wall of water, rushing past him and taking him under, and he’s sure if he could feel anything his cheeks would be flushed with heat right now.
But intertwined with the stories of the others, Eddie also learns about himself—or rather, himself as the others see him. He hears about how Mike went to California overflowing with stories about Eddie’s campaigns, his clothes, his hair. How Lucas would light up while talking about how Eddie approached the three boys in the cafeteria and asked them to come sit with him. How Dustin had looked at El with tears in his eyes and told her that Eddie was one of the few people who made him feel safe and understood. Eddie has to take a deep breath after that one, staving off the tears that have welled up in the corners of his eyes, obscuring his vision.
El tells him about Nancy calling Eddie brave, Erica calling him stupid but heroic. She tells him about how Robin had told her through sniffles that Eddie was unlike anyone she’d ever met, that she needed him, because he was the only one who was like her. El says she doesn’t understand what Robin meant, but Eddie does, and he has to catch his breath again.
El doesn’t mention Steve, but that’s okay, because they really haven’t known each other for that long and it doesn’t matter anyway, it’s not like Eddie needs to know what Steve thinks of him, he doesn’t care, really.
El finishes up her storytelling, and Eddie marvels at the difference it makes. He feels somehow so much more whole, so much more Eddie, as his memories fall back into place. He can piece together his life for the past year-ish; now he has an almost complete timeline from when he first saw Dustin, Mike, and Lucas in the cafeteria, up until this very moment. Everything before then is a bit patchy, but he figures he has what he needs to find some semblance of a “happy place,” at least for now. He relays this information to El, and she practically beams.
“My stories helped?” she asks tentatively.
“Yeah, kid,” Eddie replies with a small chuckle. “You’re as talented a storyteller as I’ve ever seen.” Her smile stretches impossibly bigger at this, and Eddie can’t help it, he smiles back. Even though his mind’s been taken over by some barely-known entity. Even though he still can’t feel anything in his body, or remember anything past nine months ago. He grins at this girl and she grins back, the two of them the only pinpricks of light in the vast darkness surrounding them, like two orbiting stars.
And then she says, “I have to go.”
Eddie’s grin falters. “What do you mean?” he asks, embarrassed by how small his voice suddenly sounds. But he can’t help it, the idea of being left alone in this endless abyss with nothing but his barely-functioning thoughts for company is certainly less than appealing.
“I need to help our friends,” El explains. “They are still in danger. They need me.” Eddie’s pulse picks up at this.
“Oh,” he begins lamely. Of course he isn’t El’s main priority, and if their friends are still in harm’s way, he could handle hanging out in the dark until she’s saved them from whatever it is that’s going on. “Okay, yeah, go help them. I’ll uh. I’ll just be here, I guess.”
El gives him a look that can only be described as pitying. Eddie bristles a little bit.
“I will be back,” she reassures him.
“What should I do?” he asks, anything to wipe that look off her face. She cocks her head to the side questioningly. “Like, is there something I should do while you’re gone? Something that will make me better?”
“Find your happy place,” she says again, repeating her earlier advice. “That way you will stay safe until I can come back.”
“Okay,” he nods, hesitating. “When… when will you come back, do you think?” Again, the slight waver in his voice that he hates, revealing his vulnerability.
“I do not know,” El replies simply. “Soon.” Eddie just nods again, knowing that he’s likely not going to get a better answer than that.
“Okay,” he says again. “Well, then, see ya soon, El.”
El nods and gives him another one of her small smiles, and he waits for her to turn away and start walking. Instead, she simply stands in place, staring straight ahead before disappearing into a puff of what can only be described as smoke. Eddie sits in shock, staring at the place where, just seconds ago, a very real, very solid girl had stood, now indistinguishable from the impenetrable darkness around him. Then he pulls his knees up to his chest, sits back on his hands, and starts to think.