Chapter Text
Eddie woke up to sunlight streaming into his window. He scrunched his eyes and flung his quilt over his face to block it out. He had the worst hangover ever, his head pounding and the afternoon sunlight only made it worse. What the fuck had he done last night?
He tried to think as he slowly suffocated under the quilt but kept coming up blank. Probably not worth remembering if he couldn’t. Just another night hanging out on his roof drinking too much beer and smoking too much pot until he stumbled back into his bedroom and passed out.
Except that didn’t sound right either. He wanted to roll over and go back to sleep but his bladder wouldn’t be ignored and frankly, his pasty mouth couldn’t be ignored either. He threw back the quilt and took a deep breath of the cool air inside his bedroom. The trailer had some shitty wall heaters, but without his turned on, and with the door to his bedroom closed, his room was frosty inside, enough where he could see his breath.
He stepped out of his bedroom and into the cabin fully expecting to find it empty. He felt in his bones Wayne would be at work so he wouldn’t embarrass himself walking around in his boxers and t-shirt. Except he opened the door, and like a bunch of meerkats from a Wild Kingdom episode, a crowd of people looked over at him with wide, expectant eyes. He thought about ducking back into his room for some pants, but thought fuck it - they wanted a peep show, hanging out in his trailer for no reason, they'd get one.
“Morning.” His voice cracked and he smacked his lips together. He desperately needed a glass of water. First thing was the bathroom though. He peed like a racehorse and wondered how much beer he drank the night before to be this bad first thing in the morning. He was just glad he didn’t have morning wood, attempting to help him keep it all in, since Nancy fucking Wheeler was one of the people in his living room.
He came back outside and said, “Pants, then water” before disappearing back into his room to put on pants and a sweatshirt. He was rapidly losing the warmth of his bed and the rest of the trailer was cold too. Finally he got himself a big glass of water in one of the plastic beer pint glasses from the Cardinals with the ‘82 season calendar printed on the side, even if half of it had worn off after repeated use. He drank the whole thing in one go, before turning back to the sink to refill it again. He held out a finger at the group of people to hold them off for just a bit longer while he grabbed some aspirin from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and took a few of them for his raging headache.
Finally, he sat down on the couch and said, “alright, why are you guys over here?” He put the glass of water down and rubbed his eyes. Nancy, Steve, and Jonathan were sitting around his trailer. Wayne was nowhere in sight so he had no idea how they even got into the trailer let alone why they were here.
“We’re the latest rotation.” Steve said as if that made a lick of sense.
“Rotation of what?” Eddie took another sip of water.
“Eddie Watch, 1984.” Steve said in a flat, sarcastic tone.
“I’m hungover, man. Be nice. Why is it Eddie Watch, 1984? What did I do last night?”
“You can’t remember?” Jonathan asked right before Nancy could, her mouth still slightly open before she shut it with a snap.
Eddie shook his head and regretted it immediately. He hoped the aspirin would kick in soon.
“You were playing DnD with the kids.” Jonathan prompted. “And you got out the Magic 8 Ball.”
At first Eddie was waiting for the next detail to be filled in for him. Like “and then we all hung out and got fucked up, you’re the last one to wake up this morning” or something like that.
“And?” He asked. He vaguely remembered the heft of the Magic 8 Ball in his hand and talking to the boys about the rules of asking him questions. Then, like a dam bursting in his mind, his visions of the future started to come back to him. Most of what he remembered didn’t have enough context to make sense of them. A few barely needed context at all, like one of Eleven coming out of a gate. “Oh, god, Eleven.” He struggled to turn his focus back to the trio in his living room. “Eleven, she’s gonna be back.” The rest came pouring back into his head, including the last vision he had seen.
The one of his own death.
“Fuck.” He said as he looked back up to Jonathan who looked at him with soft concern. “There’s more. We’re not done with the Upside Down.”
The other three in the room were silent for a moment, obviously trying to understand what the hell he was talking about. “What do you mean, Eddie?” It was Nancy who finally asked.
“How? Why aren’t we done?” Jonathan asked, fear and worry twisting his mouth and furrowing his brow.
“Right now we are, yeah. In the future, it looks like we aren’t.” A bone deep sense of weariness pressed down on him, he just wanted to go back to bed. “I need some time for this aspirin to kick in ‘cause my head is killing me. So, why don’t you guys skedaddle or whatever so I can go back to bed,” Eddie said. He didn’t have the energy to think let alone talk about anything right now.
“You want more sleep? How is that possible?” Steve asked. “Dude, you’ve been out for like almost two days.”
“What?” Eddie kept himself from screaming it but just barely and it still came out screechy and rough.
“It’s Wednesday evening - we’ve all been taking turns watching you for the last few days. My Mom and I called Wayne when he got off work on Monday and I helped you get back here.” Jonathan added. Eddie felt his skin crawl thinking about being so deeply unconscious that two grown men had moved him around and he’d had no idea.
“I guess that explains why I feel like I could drink all the water in Lover’s Lake right now.” Speaking of, he downed the rest of the water in his glass and moved back to the sink to get another refill. He still felt exhausted but sleeping more was starting to look like a bad idea. He sighed and said, “I’ve got to eat, and shower, and just generally not be passed out. So, why don’t you all go back to whatever you’d be doing normally right now.”
“You saw things about the Upside Down, Eddie.” Nancy interrupted. “We should know what they are.”
Eddie winced as he tried to run his hand through his hair and it got caught on snarls and tangles. “I’m too exhausted to talk right now.”
Both Jonathan and Nancy looked like they were going to argue again with him, but Steve had been watching both groups of people and before anyone could say anything else he stepped in and said, “Nance, just let the guy get a shower and wake up. We can bother him when he’s a bit more recovered. Right?”
She looked over at Steve, pursing her lips. She didn’t want to let it go, Eddie could see that much, but Jonathan’s support waned at Steve’s words and Nancy finally decided to let it go. Eddie could feel the “for now” lingering in the air around her.
+++
Soon enough they were out the door and Eddie had the place to himself. A shower did sound wonderful and he started there first. Unsurprisingly, when he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror he saw his face was covered in blood. It dripped down his nose, from his eyes and ears too, covering his face and clotting in his hair.
He managed to shower, make himself some coffee, drink a shit ton more water, and eat some leftover chili before he let himself think back to the visions which had been hovering at the edge of his consciousness, waiting to be addressed.
He grabbed his DnD notebook and a sketch pad he had and opened them both to the first blank page and began letting the information flow through him.
Eddie spent the rest of the evening before Wayne got home from work writing out everything he remembered from the visions. Even after a few days unconscious, they were as crisp as they’d been when he first saw them, forever burned into his mind’s eye.
He tried his best to sketch out what he saw: the new people, the monsters, the key events as far as he could tell. For the events, he made cartoony stick figure sketches, it seemed more important to get the layout and the event right than every detail he saw. He spent more time sketching the portraits of the people he’d seen that were important but unknown at the moment. Max, Robin, Murray, Billy, even Erica although most of the people here probably already knew what she looked like since she was, apparently, Lucas’ little sister.
He spent the same amount of time on the sketch of the weird shadow monster in the shape of a giant spider and he left a mostly blank paper for whatever Nancy had been firing at in one of his last visions. He labeled each image with his impressions of the people he got from the visions including any seasonal elements that helped narrow down dates. It helped that Halloween and the Fourth of July loomed in many of them.
Finally, Eddie sketched the last event: his own death.
It felt like purging the images from his mind as best he could. If they were out in the world then his mind could let them go.
He hoped.
He didn’t want to keep seeing his death in Cinemascope.
+++
Wayne came home and the first thing he said when he walked in the door was, “I’m glad you're finally up, boy.” Like Eddie had just overslept.
“Yeah, well, I can’t sleep the whole week away.”
“You’d try.” Wayne said, putting his hat and coat on the hook by the door and his lunch box on the counter.
“I would, I would try if I could.” Eddie said and stepped up to give his uncle a hug. “I’m sorry I worried you.”
Wayne wrapped his arms around Eddie and squeezed. “Don’t you ever pass out like that again. You hear?” Wayne said, though his voice was soft and watery.
“Gross, are you crying old man? Over me?” Eddie held on tighter.
“Someone’s gotta.” Wayne said and gave Eddie one last squeeze before he stepped back. “I’m gonna take a shower and make us some sandwiches. Then we’re gonna talk.”
Wayne had a beer while Eddie stuck with water. Eddie explained the DnD one shot leading into messing around with the Magic 8 Ball.
“You were just fooling around, predicting the future?” He asked and Eddie could see the point he was trying to make. Maybe that wasn’t the kind of thing you did if you wanted to just mess around.
“Uh, yeah?” He said with a grimace.
“And then you passed out?”
“Yeah, I overdid it. Or they over asked.” He stood up and grabbed his notes from his room and laid them out on the dining room table. “I saw a bunch of stuff related to the Upside Down for the next few years.”
Wayne kept looking at the pictures as he laid them out one by one. “I thought we were done with that place?”
“Me too.”
Finally, he laid out the last one. “Eddie.” Wayne said. “Eddie, is this?”
“Yeah.” He said. “That’s me, dying.”
“Fuck, kid.” He grabbed at Eddie’s hand that had been pointing to the prone figure of himself he’d drawn. “We’re going to fix this.”
“How? I don’t even know if I can fix this. Everything I’ve ever seen before has come true.” He said.
“You got all those monster fighting kids. And these first couple pictures say that your little sister is coming back. You got help. You got me too.” His grip on Eddie’s hand tightened. “We’re not losing you.”
“You think I should tell the others?”
“You weren’t going to?” Wayne asked, his eyes wide with incredulity.
“I dunno. I haven’t really thought that far ahead yet. I had to get this all out of my head first.”
“There’s still some break left. Maybe we can get together. Share this stuff? Everything you told me about November means these are some resourceful friends you’ve made. People who can help figure this stuff out.”
“Plus, they’re all in these visions. Even the kids.” Eddie pointed to the kids in the scenes.
“I noticed. Especially that poor Byers’ kid.”
“You’d think he could catch a break.” Eddie said and a horrible idea popped into his head.
Why would the Upside Down be so obsessed with Will? The spider-shadow thing seemed extra focused on him and El in his visions even if everyone else was fighting it. El, he understood. She had powers. But Will was just some kid. Unless he wasn’t.
Eddie knew there had been two types of kids in the Lab. Lab grown ones like him, who’d lived there since they were babies, maybe even born in that place, and the ones Papa and his people found as kids. Kids who had seen the outside world and were taken from their families. Like Eight, who came to the lab as a kid of five or six. For months she refused to respond to the designation Eight and tried to make the kids call her Kali. She said it was her name. At the time Eddie didn’t understand. What Papa called you was your name. Now, though, he got it. She’d had a family and a name, not a designation given to her by psychopathic scientists.
“Eddie, you’ve got a thought, I can tell. Your face is never that quiet.” Wayne said softly.
“I dunno, bringing up Will made me think, why him?”
“Alright.” Wayne said, letting Eddie speak through his idea.
“But maybe Will is a target for a reason? Like Eleven is a target in the visions too.”
“You saying you think Will’s from the lab like you and Eleven?” Wayne mused. “You’d think Joyce would notice something like that.”
“Not from the lab, but maybe he could have been? If they’d found him as a baby?” Eddie said. He’d always avoided talking about the lab with Wayne, but did he ever mention that some of the kids had been kidnapped? That a kid like Will might have just been lucky and slipped under the notice of the Lab?
“Okay, let’s say he has powers like you or El, why would that make him a target?”
“I don’t know. It’s just a feeling.” He sighed and slumped down on the table, pushing the sketches and papers all over the floor. “I don’t know, Wayne. But I also don’t think I’m wrong.”
“Alright, I believe you. Now get off the table and pick those up.” He said, swatting at Eddie. “I’ll call Joyce, maybe we can come over tomorrow, see if you’re right?”
Eddie sat up sharply and the motion caused whatever papers of his that were left on the table to float off. “I can test him. I totally can do it.”
“And we can share the rest of this with the people it affects?”
“Yeah, sure. But I’m not looking forward to sharing this information with Hopper.”
“I get you. I don’t like anyone in a position of authority knowing about you, but Hopper at least seems decent.” He pointed to the paper he’d just picked up off the floor of Hopper swinging a sword at a Demogorgon.
Right, if these were true then Hopper was on their side. And everyone from November was in this together. For years.
“Maybe, if we all start working now, we can change the future and none of this has to happen?” Wayne said.
He wasn’t so sure himself if they could, but he also knew that he couldn’t not try to prevent all the horrible shit he’d seen, including his own death. And to do that he had to prove that he could change the future.