Chapter Text
"When Eddie said, 'He didn’t like his teddy,'
You knew he was a no-good kid."
–Rocky Horror Picture Show, Eddie’s Teddy
***
Good things did not happen to Eddie Munson. It wasn’t as if that was some kind of rule or anything, wasn’t as if good things couldn’t happen to him… it was only that, more often than not, they just… didn’t.
Eddie wasn’t some kind of sad, oh-woe-is-me-everything-is-terrible asshole type. He knew good things had happened to him. He had people in his life who loved him; his uncle, his friends. His band.
Even if he saw all his friends less and less, and they were all way too busy to get together and play much anymore… they were still there for him. And he’d be there for them.
But that was the exception, really. It always had been. The few good things sprinkled throughout his otherwise crap-ass existence didn’t change the fact that bad shit was drawn to him like he was some kind of bad-shit-attracting magnet.
He'd begun to suspect that life was not really gonna go his way by the time he’d turned 10.
Most people in Hawkins would be surprised to hear it, but Eddie had been a friendly kid. A cheerful kid with bundles of energy, excited to make friends with everyone and anyone.
The trouble was that everyone and anyone did not feel the same about him. He never knew what it was that did it, but for some reason, the other kids at school fucking hated him.
Maybe he’d tried too hard, had too much energy. Talked too much and too loud about shit none of the other kids cared about (dragons, mostly—but in his defense, dragons were fucking sick. Who wouldn’t want to hear about them?)
(Everyone, apparently).
It wasn’t so bad at first. He was lonely and friendless, sure. It sucked, but he managed.
Still, it was a particular kind of torture, being the kid in class no one liked. Having to stand at the back of the classroom when the teacher declared some assignment or activity would be done in groups, watching everyone else pair up.
Trying and failing to catch anyone’s eye, wringing his hands and hoping desperately that this time would be different. That this time someone would choose him, would want him.
It never was. No one ever did.
It was always the same… until it wasn’t. Until it suddenly changed, and not for the better. He still never knew why.
One day, it was business as usual; everyone avoided him, ignored him, groaned when a teacher forced him to pair up with them for schoolwork.
One day, he was disdained. The next? He was despised. Almost overnight, everyone decided he wasn’t only annoying or weird. Decided they didn’t simply dislike him, but in fact, they hated him. They hated him a lot.
It started with taunting. Jeering, cruel jokes, and stupid pranks meant to embarrass him. They’d ask him about the shit he liked, fantasy games, books and comics and playing make-believe. They’d let him start talking about it.
Feign enough interest to give a glimmer of hope, even when he knew he was being stupid. But maybe this time, it was different…
It never was. Because in the end, there were always the other kids. The kids waiting for whatever hilarious prank this was part of.
In the end, they’d laugh at him, drop something down his back, tie his shoes together, steal his lunch or whatever the plan was that time. They’d call him a freak, a weirdo. A waste of space.
That was all pretty bad. But Eddie had always been a fast learner. Not in shit like math or science, but for the real stuff. Life stuff.
Kids like him couldn’t afford to be slow on the uptake.
Eddie wasn’t particularly tall or strong as a kid, but he had a few advantages over his would-be bullies; parents that wouldn’t give a shit no matter how many calls they got from the school and absolutely nothing to lose.
The kids learned pretty fast not to fuck with him. And Eddie learned something else, too.
If you can’t join ‘em, you’d better be prepared to beat the absolute hell out of them.
By the time he moved to Hawkins when he was 11, he’d begun to hone don’t fuck with me down to an art form. He was pretty amused to discover the trick of it boiled down to some cookie-cutter bullshit advice he’d gotten from a teacher years before. Back when he’d still wanted to make friends.
Just have fun and be yourself!
Absolute shit advice for getting people to like him. But for making them fear him? Not bad.
That’s what he did. If the other kids hated him for being loud and weird, for being too much, being a freak… then he would double right the hell down.
That was the trick.
All in all, being 11 wasn’t a great experience. His dad got locked up (again, on charges that were probably gonna stick this time), and his mom decided she’d finally had enough.
She ditched Eddie with Wayne, leaving him with nothing but a suitcase full of shabby clothes and a chip on his shoulder the size of which could rival the Grand Canyon.
So even when he started at Hawkins Middle School, and things got better… well, he still didn’t trust it. After only 11 years, life had set a pretty strong precedent for sucking massive donkey balls.
It wasn’t a rule, but going through the world expecting the worst had become a habit. Maybe he wasn’t meant for good things. Even when he made friends with a few older kids, started getting into metal in a pretty serious way… formed Corroded Coffin with Mark Bettany, then kept it going with Jeff and Joe, and eventually Gareth.
Good things happened, sure. But they were tiny little specks in an ocean of crap. For every friend he made, for every gig that ended with applause (instead of someone puking on their gear), for every break he caught… there was always the other shoe, waiting to drop.
Always the other kids, waiting for their friend to distract Eddie long enough to put spray cheese on his seat, or to stick their leg out and trip him.
These days, Eddie had been looking for that other shoe a lot. Waiting for the group of laughing little shitstains to knock him on his ass.
Things had been going way too well. And that wasn’t how it worked for Eddie. Not for anyone in his family, really. His mom was a drunk, a grifter. His dad was a criminal and not a very good one. If he’d been better at it, maybe he wouldn’t have gotten caught.
Aunts, uncles and cousins were all circling the same shitty drain. Addiction, debt, assault charges, cults (cousin Patricia could keep insisting that she was only an Avon Sales Representative, but he knew a cult when he saw one—no other organization operated mainly on getting others to join).
So what the hell made Eddie so goddamned special? Why was he, out of everyone, the first Munson to actually go to fucking college?
Not as though that had merely happened. He’d busted his ass to make it happen, taking night classes in Highfield to get his grades up, working all day and saving every penny he earned to afford the tuition. He'd made it happen with blood and sweat and tears, quitting nearly a hundred times and then forcing himself to keep going.
And despite all that, despite knowing he’d earned his spot at school, he was halfway through his first year, and he still didn’t trust it.
School had always been a fraught area of Eddie’s life. Middle school more so than high school, but still. Even with his friends and Hellfire Club at Hawkins High, it still hadn’t been a fantastic experience. The student body at large was content to detest him, and a few particularly brave assholes still found ways to fuck with him. Starting fights, trashing his stuff, breaking into his locker and so on. Always the same shit.
On top of that, the classes sucked, and even the teachers hated him now, too.
Wayne had gotten a lot of calls starting in ninth grade. Eddie was “disruptive” in class, too wild and obnoxious in the cafeteria. He riled up the other students, got into fights (never mind that he usually didn't start them).
They also complained that he was “frequently absent,” which Eddie found hilarious. They weren’t happy when he was there or when he cut class; he really couldn’t win.
One phone call in particular stuck with Eddie. He’d been in the kitchen when Wayne had gotten the call and stood next to the phone to listen in, even as Wayne tried to shoo him away.
“He simply doesn’t care, Mr. Munson,” the teacher, Mrs. O’Donnell, had complained. Poor O’Donnell, he’d be giving her hell for years. “I’ve tried everything to get through to him, but he doesn’t pay attention, he distracts the other students, he challenges my lessons—”
“Only when the lessons are bullshit,” Eddie hissed. Wayne waved him away.
“I really have tried, because there are some insightful thoughts in the work he bothers to hand in, but his attitude and general demeanour are—” she broke off here with a frustrated sigh. “I hate to say it, but I’m starting to think your nephew is just a bad sort, Mr. Munson.”
A bad sort. Eddie had been called worse before, but something about that stayed with him. It wasn’t the usual kind of criticism he got from teachers, who complained about the way he acted and the shit he said and his work ethic (or lack thereof).
It was a general pronouncement about his character. It took stock of all his various parts and concluded that the sum of them, the totality of his existence, was bad.
He, Eddie Munson, was a bad sort.
Part of him found it funny. But only part. For being such a tepid thing to say, it sure as hell stuck with him.
Maybe it was the way he’d known, deep down, that it was true. He was a Munson, after all. And the Munsons were a bad sort.
Everyone knew it.
At the end of the day, whatever good or bad luck he had, it didn’t really matter. Even if things went right for a while, he knew the truth. He was bad, and that’s what he deserved.
But now? Now, he was enrolled at the very fancy, annoyingly pretentious Purdue University. He had a part-time job at a book and record shop near the school. He lived off campus with a crappy roommate he’d met through a personal ad and attended classes with names like “Intro to Fantasy Literature” and “Deconstructing the Story.”
What the fuck he was going to do with an English Major, he didn’t know.
The truth was… Eddie loved it. He loved all of it; loved his classes, his crummy little apartment (the roommate less so) and he loved his job.
Most of his classmates were surprisingly cool, and he’d started talking to a few guys from the record store about playing with their band sometime.
It was great. Who knew shit like learning could actually not suck? Apparently, school was a whole different beast when you gave a shit about what you were being taught.
Sometimes, Eddie felt like a different person. As if he’d left some part of himself at the Hawkins town line and the person who walked around campus each day was a newer, happier Eddie Munson. An Eddie Munson who didn’t pick fights or try and get under everyone’s skin, revel in derision and dissension.
Not a bad sort. Maybe someone who could even be good.
This new Eddie was the kind of person who grabbed coffee at a little cart by the library each morning, trading wry banter with the pink-haired girl who served it to him. Who looked forward to going to class every day, even the ones at annoying times.
On the last day of his Fantasy 101 class, the professor caught his eye as he headed out. The man smiled warmly and said, “Great discussion as always today, Eddie.”
Eddie had booked it out of there fast and hoped no one else had seen the stupid fucking huge smile he’d had on his face as he left.
Despite it all, he still hadn’t managed to shuck that chip on his shoulder. Maybe it was smaller now, more a crater than the Grand Canyon, but it was still there. Still reminding him about all the Eddies he’d been before.
That scared, desperate kid trying to talk about dragons. That wild, furious teenager everyone had called the freak.
The bad sort.
It was stupid, how he couldn’t get rid of all that. How sometimes, when he was chatting with people in class (people he considered his friends), he’d get that sickly, empty feeling down in his gut and find himself glancing around.
As if he was looking for the other kids, waiting for the prank. The foot stuck out to trip him, the hands that would shove him back. The laughter, the taunts.
Stupid that he couldn’t forget that shit. Move on. That was a fucking lifetime ago! Two towns ago, two schools back. Ancient history. No one at college knew about any of that. No one even knew that he’d ever been Eddie “the freak” Munson.
Well, almost no one.
There were a few kids he’d gone to high school with at Purdue. Not in any of his classes, but he’d seen them around campus. Some girl who’d been on the cheer squad back in Hawkins, with bouncy strawberry blond hair. A girl he’d been in band with, who’d graduated the same year as him... and a few others, people Eddie cared to notice even less.
It wasn’t too surprising. As far as colleges went, Purdue was a great school for which they didn’t need to leave the state. And it wasn’t like any of them bothered him, if they’d even noticed he went there.
Everyone was trying to do the same thing as him, he thought. Move on, leave Hawkins behind. Be a new person.
Usually, that was easy. It was easy to ignore his former classmates and leave Hawkins in his past.
Not today. Today, it was impossible for two reasons; the first, he was on a train headed back to Hawkins, where he’d be spending his winter break. The second? Two Hawkins High alumni were on the train home with him.
Because of-fucking-course they were.