Chapter Text
2007
Eddie
Eddie spent most afternoons down by the old oak tree speaking to Uncle Wayne.
Eddie had always been a bit of a talker; it didn’t really matter what the topic was. Uncle Wayne had once said that Eddie had the gumption to ‘talk the paint off the walls’, and even in his forties, this remained true. Eddie could easily spend hours yarning about anything and everything - from the way that he’d fixed the perimeter fencing, to the latest fantasy books that he’d nabbed from the Hawkin’s library during his last scouting trip to town.
He only wished that Uncle Wayne were still alive, so that he could talk back.
Even after three years, the loss of his uncle still felt like a bandaid over a third degree burn. And so most afternoons, Eddie lay on his back in the damp grass, staring up at the foliage of the oak tree where his uncle’s ashes had been scattered, and pretended, at least for a while, that the old man could hear him.
Sometimes it worked. Other times, like today, Eddie felt like he’d been chewing on broken glass.
“I dunno what I’m doing here anymore, old man,” he murmured, watching the afternoon wind ripple across the branches of the oak. “What’s even the point of it all?”
He paused, as though waiting for a response.
When none came, he raked a tired hand across his face, digging his thumbs into his temples in an attempt to alleviate the headache that had been brewing for the better part of the day.
Trouble was, he could barely imagine what Wayne would have said to him these days. Ever the pragmatist, Uncle Wayne had been a man of meaningful gestures and few words. Hell, he probably would have told Eddie to drink some concrete and groused at him to help prune the garden. Only, after the job was done, Wayne would send him off to have a shower while he baked Eddie’s favorite – homemade apple crisp – and cracked open a bottle of last season’s liquor. Together, they’d sit out on the porch and watch the dusk bleed to darkness, Eddie’s fingers idly plucking at the strings of his old acoustic while Wayne hummed along.
When the liquor was down to the dregs and Eddie’s fingers were stiff from the cold, his uncle would clasp Eddie firmly on the shoulder and tell him, ‘time to hit the hay, son.’ The words probably seemed curt to anyone else, but Eddie heard the underlying tone of affection and knew that he was loved.
What he wouldn’t give to hear the old man’s voice, just one more time.
Fuck.
It's just that Eddie hadn’t thought that the Apocalypse would be so. Damn. Lonely.
Eddie hadn’t seen a single soul in almost 3 years. A few months after Wayne’s funeral, when murmurs of an Outbreak had turned to screams about a Global Pandemic, Eddie had fought his way through swarms of infected back across the MidWest to Forest Hills. He hadn’t known what to do with Wayne’s estate when he’d died, couldn’t bear to sell it, but hated the thought of it sitting empty, dust gathering in Wayne’s study and the neatly tended gardens running rampant. Yet when the world had turned to shit, Eddie knew he would be safe there. He’d had a vague plan to get back to Hawkins, hopefully finding Gareth and Jeff along the way, or at least running into Henderson or hell, even Mike, and encouraging everyone to crash at Wayne’s so they could all recalibrate and keep one another safe.
Only, Eddie’s half assed plan had gone balls up as soon as he’d left Indy – despite his best attempts. Jeff and Gareth’s had been ransacked and left abandoned by the time he’d gotten there, no note in sight and a bloody handprint left on the apartment wall. Even more worryingly, he’d never been able to reach the Party on the two-way, the dead air mocking him as he became increasingly frantic while the battery steadily drained. His cell phone reception had been fucked from the beginning, no doubt some well-meaning suit had jammed the frequencies in an attempt to suppress local panic.
Fat load of good that had done.
By the time he’d arrived in Hawkins, Eddie had been half starved, seriously sleep deprived and delirious with worry. He’d managed to avoid the military and government types along the way – fuck knows he wasn’t going to trust those bastards with saving his sorry ass – but as a result, he’d been bashing his way through the undergrowth and off the beaten tracks for the better part of two weeks, his supplies running dangerously low.
He'd hoped that there would be a few secured areas – after all, although Hawkins was full of townies, Forest Hills had become a close knit community over the years, the people mostly salt-of-the-earth kind of folk who knew how to live off the land and look after themselves. Yet the closer he got to town, Eddie felt the knot of anxiety and dread lodge firmly in his guts. Eddie tried to tamp down on the sense that something was catastrophically wrong, and that something very bad – even worse than the Outbreak – had happened there.
Hindsight was a bitch in that way; he really should have known better.
Eddie smelled the carnage before he saw it.
He didn’t need to approach the mass grave to know what it meant; that the government had royally fucked everyone over yet again and that everyone he had grown up with who had stayed in Hawkins was likely dead. And not because they were infected with the cordyceps virus. No – that would have made sense, and been an easier weight for Eddie to bear. No - everyone in town was gone, because the government had slaughtered innocent people as a means of containment.
Eddie didn’t know how long he spent hiding in the underbrush near that grave, yacking his guts up and holding in his screams. The walk from the town to Forest Hills was equally a blur, with Eddie somehow becoming cognisant again as he approached Wayne’s – becoming aware enough for the need to scope out the area, and make sure that he was truly alone.
In some ways, those first few weeks had been the hardest. Eddie had been exhausted, alone and terrified – with no real idea of what he should do next.
Sure, he’d prepared for a lot of scenarios - Uncle Wayne had seen to that – but despite his Uncle’s best efforts, Eddie had never actually thought that there would be an Outbreak on this scale. He’d loved Uncle Wayne, but had always retained a healthy dose of skepticism about the man’s constant need to be prepared for all sorts of catastrophic events. Ever the survivalist, from the moment Eddie had shown up on his doorstep, escorted by CPS holding a torn trash bag containing his meager possessions and a chip on his shoulder that rivaled the Grand Canyon, Uncle Wayne hadn’t wasted a moment showing him how to look after himself.
“You’ve survived this far,” he’d said, eying Eddie’s gangly thirteen year old frame, eyes lingering on his black eye and the scuffed toes of his Reeboks, one size too small now. “You got some grit, kid, to live with my son of a bitch brother for so long. But you ain’t gonna get anywhere without a plan.”
Planning had seemed like a foreign concept to Eddie at the time. Until that point, his life had been a merry-go-round of avoiding his drunken father’s backhand until the old man inevitably landed his sorry ass back in prison, followed by games of hide and seek with CPS and the cops for being an unattended minor. It usually didn’t take too long to get caught before he was tossed into another group home or foisted on some burnt out foster family who couldn’t be assed with the drama but really needed the extra money, for one reason or another.
The last time, Eddie managed to avoid detection for a solid month – hiding in plain sight on the streets of Indy until he’d had the bad luck of getting caught lifting from the 7-Eleven (he’d been starving, ok – so sue him). Only that last time, they’d managed to track down his one remaining relative who wasn’t in prison or six feet under. Staying with Uncle Wayne hadn’t been an option until then – the man had been largely off the grid since returning from ‘Nam in the 70’s. Eddie still didn’t know how they’d tracked him down in the end – or if Uncle Wayne, on hearing the news that his piece of shit brother would be getting 10 years minimum in the slammer for grand theft auto – had put the feelers out to ask after the welfare of his only nephew.
To say that the first few weeks had been an adjustment for them both would be significantly understating it. Eddie had only ever known the chaos that came from the bottom of a bottle or the threat of a closed fist, neighbours screaming at each other in the early hours of the morning after their high had worn off was par for the course. The stillness of Forest Hills made him chafe; Uncle Wayne’s routine of rising early, trapping and tending to the land itched like a too small, coarse wool sweater.
And Eddie didn’t know how to be around Uncle Wayne. Eddie was constantly in motion, picking at the holes in his jeans, chewing the ends of his hair, pacing during the small hours of the night. Irritatingly, his Walkman had died not long after he’d arrived at Forest Hills, and although Eddie was good at taking things apart, fixing things was a whole other skill set that he had yet to master. Without the distraction of Judas Priest or Dio, the tick of the hall clock and the hum of the fridge cutting through the house was driving Eddie slowly mad. On top of that, he’d been bracing himself, waiting for the older man to inevitably lose his shit at Eddie for some arbitrary rule that made no sense to him and send him packing. Foster families never kept him – Eddie had spent the majority of his childhood with his back to the wall and one foot out the door, ready to bolt at a moment’s notice.
Only, Uncle Wayne never got the memo.
“Got some parts that might fix that,” he’d said to Eddie, nodding at the vivisected bits of Eddie’s Walkman splayed across the coffee table. “Come on.” He’d spent the better part of the afternoon in his workshop patiently showing Eddie how to replace the belt and clean the rollers, showing Eddie his extensive kit of supplies of mechanical parts and goods.
Eddie had been shocked at the sheer amount of shit Uncle Wayne had managed to tuck into the corners of his shed.
“Two is one, one is none,” Uncle Wayne explained to Eddie, noticing his surprise. “Doesn’t hurt to be prepared.”
“Prepared for what?” Eddie asked, curiosity overriding his skittishness at being in someone else’s space.
“Life,” Uncle Wayne had answered.
And Uncle Wayne had spent the remainder of Eddie’s teen years showing him how to fend for himself in a world that was hellbent on hurting him. Thanks to Wayne, Eddie knew how to track and hunt for game, how to live off the land and tend a garden in line with the seasons changing, how to look for clean water and fashion makeshift splints out of his t-shirt material and deadwood. Uncle Wayne taught him everything he knew about keeping himself alive, only he didn’t know how to soothe the existential dread.
Thinking about those early days with his uncle never ceased to make Eddie maudlin.
Sighing heavily, Eddie rummaged through his pockets for a cigarette. He’d been carefully rationing himself over the last few months – although he’d been able to harvest a decent amount of tobacco from the crop this summer, he’d still been having a bit of difficulty in curing it to his liking. He’d been making do with what he’d been able to scrounge from town over the last few years and was down to his last pouch.
Lighting the cigarette, Eddie took his longest, deepest inhalation of the day. He lazily exhaled smoke rings, watching the vapour fade into nothingness.
“You know Wayne, it’s kinda ironic that you taught me how to start a fire by hand, but you never mentioned anything about how to starve off the crushing weight of loneliness that comes with being on your own in this fucked up world.”
He inhaled another drag of his cigarette, disappointed that it was almost to the filter already.
“In the stories, there’s always a party, or a fellowship, or a band of people against the Big Bad.” He stubbed his cigarette on the heel of his boots, pocketing the filter. “Hell, at this stage, I’d even be happy with a fucking familiar.”
“So where is everyone, Wayne?” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand, taking into account Wayne’s old cabin with the adjoining shed, the sprawling gardens and the empty fields. The closest neighbouring property was a good five minute walk, but Eddie knew that they were all empty. He’d checked – for infected, and for anyone who might have escaped or sought refuge over the years.
He hadn’t even come across Max’s dog, Cujo – the large dog notably absent from the yard, house eerily dark and bereft of life.
Sighing, he heaved himself to his feet, brushing the undergrowth from his jeans.
Tonight, he’d crack open Wayne’s stash of vintage port. Wayne would scold the shit out of him for getting drunk in the event that there was a perimeter breach, but Eddie couldn’t bring himself to care anymore.
Taking one last moment with Wayne before heading back to the cabin, Eddie tilted his head back, eyes seeking the sun through the thick canopy of leaves.
“You need to give me a sign, old man. A sign that I need to keep going, or some shit. Cos I dunno what the actual fuck is the point of it all anymore.” Eddie swallowed, his throat constricting painfully around the lump in his throat. “What’s the point in surviving when there’s no one left to live for?”
Steve
Steve was going to die in this hole.
Probably.
Well, the odds of surviving sure as shit weren’t in his favour, given that he was sporting a broken arm and a mild concussion, the dregs of his remaining water mocking him from the bottom of the canteen.
Steve stumbled his way into Hawkins last night as the autumn sunlight had slowly bled into the muted hues of dusk. He had no idea how he was so stupid to have missed the giant fucking crater of a pit trap that he’d managed to fall into – personally, he blamed his past self for being so vain that he’d never invested in a pair of glasses – no matter how many times Robin had admonished him for being a total and utter Dingus, with a Capital D. In his defence, he’d also been a bit distracted last night – feverish from hunger after running out of food almost two days ago, he’d been eager to find shelter - and hopefully something to eat - before the light had faded.
Instead, Steve had royally fucked up.
Before his feet could register the lack of solid ground beneath him, Steve had been at the bottom of a surprisingly deep hole, his right arm splayed at an awkward angle with his body’s attempt to break the fall. Once the dizziness and nausea had subsided, Steve had tried his best to assess the situation and make a plan.
Even in the failing light, Steve knew that he was screwed. It hadn’t taken long to realise that without the use of both of his hands, any effort at climbing was going to be a tall order. Steve had spent most of the night curled protectively around his throbbing wrist, simultaneously willing himself to wake up from this nightmare and hoping that things looked better in the morning.
Spoiler – things did not, in fact, look any better in the glaring light of the morning.
Steve tried everything that he could think of to get himself out of the pit trap. The pit was wide enough that he was unable to chimney his way out – his legs being unable to reach the opposite wall for any purchase. Splinting his wrist with some twigs and strips torn from his spare shirt, he’d tried to scale the sides multiple times through sheer determination – yet every time he’d tried to use his broken arm, a sharp shock of pain lanced from his fingertips to his elbow, hitting him with a wave of nausea so intense that he’d immediately lose his grip and come crashing back down the wall.
At his latest attempt, Steve managed to make it halfway up the wall by using his knees as extra grip, before he’d accidentally knocked his arm so hard he’d seen stars on the way back down.
He paused at the bottom of the pit, cradling his arm protectively close to his body and trying not to retch.
Well, fuck.
The arm wasn’t the only problem. Trouble was, Steve was now on day three without food, with a cracker of a headache and rippling waves of hunger to boot. The nausea from jarring his arm was the cherry on top of a truly shitty cake.
In other words, Steve was cactus.
Exhausted, Steve sipped from his remaining water. He knew that he needed to gather his strength to try again; he had no other choice, really.
In this world, it was either keep trying or die.
***
It wasn’t until a few hours later, drenched in sweat and throat parched, the last of his water well and truly gone, that Steve came to terms with the fact that he was going to die down there.
***
“Need a hand, Big Boy?”
Steve thought the last stage before dying must be hallucinating. Didn’t he read that somewhere? Who was he kidding? It was probably something Henderson had told him.
Shielding his eyes with his good hand and peering up into the midday sun, Steve saw a figure standing at the edge of the pit, looking down at him. The figure was backlit; he couldn’t make out any of the person’s features aside from a tall, willowy frame and a mop of dark frizzy curls.
Huh, he didn’t think that the Grim Reaper would have such unruly hair. At least he was dressed all in black, as appropriate for the occasion.
“What?” Steve croaked, throat parched from dehydration.
The figure huffed, crouching and peering down at Steve.
Steve squinted, the ambiguous person-like silhouette transforming into the shape of a man with pale skin and dark eyes. So, not the Grim Reaper then.
“I said, do you need a hand? Get it? Because yours seems to be fucked,” the man gestured to Steve’s splinted wrist.
When Steve didn’t respond, the man continued.
“Humour? No? I guess you don’t know her,” the stranger asked, tutting to himself. “Probably that was in poor taste, my bad, sorry about that, dude. Been alone for waaayyy too long out here, forgotten my manners. Anyway - never mind about all that,” he peered closer at Steve, dark eyes taking in Steve’s dishevelled state, eyes lingering on his splinted hand. “You infected then?”
“Infected?” Steve rasped.
Infected with what? Did this guy think that he had a cold or something? Maybe he was worried about polio, no that seems unlikely - or – STD’s – even less likely – Steve mentally shook himself, his brain felt like he was trying to wade through quicksand – why would the stranger be asking about Steve’s sexual history? What -
The figure sighed, reaching to unclasp the handgun holstered on his hip.
“Damn shame,” the stranger said, shaking his head. “Of course, the only alive person I’ve come across in the last three years happens to be infected,” turning his eyes to the sky, he continued, “Wayne you’ve sure got a warped sense of humour, old man – ”
Steve’s brain suddenly came back online at the glint of the handgun – synapses firing wildly to make the connection from infected to – oh fuck he thinks I’m -
“NO – WAIT!” Steve leapt to his feet, the effort making him lightheaded and woozy. He tried desperately not to hurl.
“You think – I’m not – I didn’t get bit – “ Steve frantically grasped for something, anything that might make the man believe him. He started stripping the makeshift wrap off his arm, “look, I can prove it – I just – fell and – I swear I’m not – ”
“Wow, ok, calm down, man,” the stranger raised his hands placatingly, reassuringly, moving away from the holster of his gun.
Yes, Steve thought hysterically, because telling Steve to calm down when he’d just had the threat of being shot to death was sound advice. Good one. He tried desperately to get his heart rate back under control and felt the sweat prickling at his temple.
“Shit – it’s just – you can’t be too careful these days, I’m sure you understand,” the man sounded almost apologetic, raking a hand through his curls.
“You’re sure you’re not infected?” he repeated.
“I promise I’m not infected,” Steve looked at the stranger beseechingly, praying to a god that he didn’t really believe in that this stranger didn’t get trigger-happy. He raised his right hand, wincing with the effort. His wrist looked swollen and tender to the touch, but was sans bite.
“No bite, see? I swear. I just –” Steve took a deep, shuddering breath. “I was stupid, really. My eyesight is a bit shit, didn’t notice the pit trap until it was too late.”
He shakily exhaled.
“When I fell, I landed on my arm.” He cradled the arm protectively against his side, the dull throb of pain from the effort making beads of cold sweat trickle down his back. His shirt clung uncomfortably to clammy skin.
The man rocked back on his haunches, dark eyes assessing.
“You didn’t get bit anywhere else?” he asked.
Steve shook his head emphatically.
“No, I swear,” he repeated, swallowing thickly. “On Henderson’s mother’s life.” He smiled faintly at the joke from a lifetime ago - Claudia Henderson had been the only real mother that Steve had known.
“Henderson?” the man sounded incredulous. “Dustin Henderson?”
Steve blinked warily. He hadn’t thought that the man would know the boy he used to babysit, though he should have realised. Hawkins was a small town. What was the likelihood that this man had come across him at some stage? Was it too much to hope that Henderson had made it back here – that the party were all safe and ok –
“Wait – hold up a minute –” the man scrutinized him closely, no doubt trying to see through his age and the beard and the now crooked nose – it had been broken twice, over the years – past the dirty clothes and –
“Steve?” he asked in disbelief. “Steve Harrington?”
“Yeah?” Steve replied cautiously. His eyes swept over the man, all sharp angles, trying to place him. “Do I know you?”
The man smirked, standing to his full height, only to dip into a mocking bow.
“Oh no, royalty such as The King would never deign to lower himself to know his humble subjects of the Court.”
Amused in spite of himself, Steve huffed a laugh.
“Fuck you, man, King Steve died a long time ago,” Steve replied. Grimacing, he tried to get a better look at the man, only now the sun was all too bright, and everything had started to go all blurry around the edges – more so than usual. Steve swayed, feeling the trickle of sweat run down his face even as he started to feel cold and clammy. He hoped he didn’t yack – that would be the last thing he needed -
“I’m wounded you don’t recognise your Court Jester, Harrington,” the man continued, but Steve could hardly hear him now. There was a slight ringing in his ears as the man said, “It’s Edward Munson - Eddie – by the way – ”
Steve barely heard the man’s reply before everything went dark.
