#currently experiencing this violent restlessness but unlike the party mine isn't coming from anywhere

[psychotic-nonsense]

It's happening again.

With Max, it's attempting new tricks on her skateboard. With Dustin, he takes apart and reassembles basic little trinkets. With Nancy, she rewrites old news articles. With Mike, he reorganizes the D&D dice box he's been carrying everywhere since Will left (and even after he came back). With the Sinclairs, it's spinning something - a basketball or pen or keychain or hair tie.

The loud music isn't uncommon, nor where it's coming from. But where the source is, and what kind of music it is, feels like something reserved for times like this.

Steve wasn't supposed to be out here, technically. He's on his lunch break, and he wanted a change of pace from the Family Video parking lot. He drove out to the edge of town - Keith doesn't give much of a damn how long their breaks are anymore - to find that cliff only he really knows how to get to. Helps that his Beemer is like a second heartbeat.

But on his way out, he hears the music.

How the hell Eddie got his van out this far into the woods, Steve's never gonna figure out. But there's loud ass music coming from it that's different to Eddie's usual type. More replicable, mainly, something that sounds like an actual song yet still has Eddie's whole screamy vibe. As Steve gets closer - having parked by the road just outside the woods - he can hear another voice singing along with their full chest.

That's when he realized what it is.

It's that violent restlessness. The buzzing feeling in, under, becoming every inch of your skin. Paralyzes you from doing anything substantial, yet everything else you try to do doesn't make the feeling fade. So you're stuck in a repetitive motion while stuck in place and it feels like exploding from the inside with nothing bursting out.

Most of The Party gets it bad nowadays, since the Upside Down was sealed away. Years of living on the brink of death to suddenly being plopped back into the mundane. Steve especially got it from the lack of sports, which worsened the Upside Down buzz.

Steve knocks on the van's back door, hoping it drowns out the music to not startle his friend too badly. He tries the door, which opens easily, and floods the woods with guitars and drums and voices.

Eddie doesn't startle, but neither does he move. He's laying down on the floor of the back, the precautionary blankets there all twisted up and scattered about in evidence of motion. One hand is tugging hard at the roots of his hair, the other snapping hard along with the music. One leg is bent up and bouncing, and his chest heaves in an attempt to keep up with Eddie's shout-along singing.

It irks Steve in just the wrong way, seeing Eddie frozen like this. Gets him to leave the door open, walk around to the stereo sitting in the passenger seat, and hit the thing silent.

"What?" Eddie snaps immediately. The van rocks as he sits up.

Steve ignores him, just walking back around to the back to smack the side of the van. Noise will keep Eddie stable in this state. Eddie, who's staring at Steve with that adrenaline-fueled glare, jaw tense, sharp where he doesn't mean to be. Steve makes his words stern, to cut through the buzz no doubt rushing through Eddie's ears. "Up. I'm getting you out of here."

"'M fine," Eddie bites back, flopping straight back down with a bang he doesn't feel. One of his hands goes back to his hair.

Steve just reaches down to grab the end of one of those blankets, tugging hard. Eddie just moves an inch, but he flails like the bat tails are back around his ankle. He sits back up, eyeing Steve with a malice he can't mean. It's Eddie and he never does, not even when he's high on fight or flight.

Steve just nods to the outside world, repeating, "I mean it. Come on."

Eddie's jaw tenses just a bit more, before he rolls his eyes and scoots to hop out. Steve backs up, lets Eddie jump out of the van with too much motion, slam the doors shut and pat them in a goodbye both too hard, lets Eddie grip his leather jacket too tightly as he leads the two of them back to the Beemer. The snapping comes back a few minutes in, but Steve leaves it be.

Doesn't pick on Eddie not wiping his shoes, nor for slamming these doors shut or not buckling. The police has had more to worry about them than some unsafe driving. Steve just turns the radio up a bit too loud, leaves the snapping alone, and drives them along the edge of town.

He stops when they get to the junkyard. Doesn't say anything, just gets out and goes straight to the trunk. He hears Eddie follow him outside as Steve gets the not-nailed bat from the back, then slamming the trunk shut to keep Eddie's attention (no matter how much it and the slam prior hurt his soul).

Steve walks past Eddie into the heart of the junkyard. He spins the bat, scanning the ground, and finding an old can-looking thing. He picks it up, tossing it into the air a few times.

Then he tosses it once more, rears back, and hits the shit out of it.

The loud crinkling of metal and crack of wood creates an echo that slices through the residual buzz forming in Steve. He watches it fly haphazardly in the air, spinning randomly before landing on an old car, another echo to cut the buzz.

Eddie doesn't react verbally, but that's fine. Steve just finds something else - a piece of tire - and hits it too. Does the same to a crumpled sheet of metal, then another can-shaped thing. Feels the buzz get torn to pieces with every satisfying echo and vibration of conflicting action coursing through his veins on each hit.

When Steve finally turns to see Eddie's reaction, it's just the snapping fingers to really get his attention. Everything else about Eddie's body language says confused, curious, hungry.

His body still screams, and here it sees something that will listen.

So Steve holds the bat out by the barrel, handle to Eddie, and waves it at the junkyard around them. "Go ahead," he urges.

Eddie eyes it confused for a moment, but he eventually pushes off the side of the Beemer he was leaning against. Makes it to Steve with steps that still feel too hard, but takes the bat. Stares at it, spins it once to get the feel, but still hesitant.

Steve walks past him to retake that place on the Beemer. Eddie watches him go, still confused.

As Steve settles in, he motions again to the open empty junkyard. "Who's going to hear you?" he says.

'Only who you want to hear you,' goes unsaid.

Eddie blinks at Steve a few times more, then down at the bat. Spins it again, looks around. He spots something, stomps over to it, picks it up. A can. Tosses it up once, nearly doesn't catch it.

He looks around again, goes to a car beside him. Sits the can on the hood, steps back. Gets into a stance that feels at once natural and amateur, but Steve doesn't dare.

Because Eddie hits the can and it goes flying, with a crunch that gets Eddie to laugh a little.

Now he's really moving, looking around for something more. More metal, plastic, rubber, anything he can feasibly hit and some things he can't. It gets heavier, harder, doesn't go as far but that means the impact is in rather than out. Cuts through the buzz like nothing.

Soon Eddie takes off his leather jacket and really gets going. He's looking for glass and throwing it far and hard, feeling every shatter in his own insides. Grabs the bat again, starts hitting the vehicles, smashing the windows in further. Drops the bat again, finding unbreakable things and throwing them on the ground, on cars, against other smaller things. Looks like he's going ballistic but it's just the energy finally finding freedom and release in something.

Steve watches it all with prideful satisfaction.

Eddie digs through a pile of rubble, grabbing something evidently interesting. It's stuck, it's difficult, but that manic energy is nothing but insistent. Eddie eventually pulls it out, a rusted old metal chair far heavier than it seems. But Eddie just laughs at the challenge.

He picks up one end, and starts fucking spinning. One heel barely keeping him balanced, he spins and spins and spins. The chair gets lighter, his arms rise with the momentum. And finally, with a growl as cathartic as the destruction, Eddie throws the chair into a car, watching it shatter the glass and dent the metal in a loud bash of sound and noise and release.

This, it seems, is what finally curbs the buzzing. Eddie slumps over with the action, panting and laughing a little. He stumbles to the side, barely losing his footing in time to catch the side of that infamous bus and flop to the dirt beside it. He's panting and breathless and red in the face, but ultimately... satisfied.

Steve resigns himself to the bucket beside Eddie. Leans back against the rusted metal that saved his kids' lives, handing Eddie a water bottle from the storage in his trunk. Eddie takes it with an especially rough huff. Steve takes it as the thank you he knows it is.

Eddie gulps down a quarter of the bottle, spills another quarter on himself on accident. He leans his head back to stare at the sky, panting in relief.

"How... the hell did you know...?" he eventually gets out, still not looking at Steve.

Steve just stares at the patch of grass in the center of their little courtyard, forever greener from the cutlets that rotted there. Shrugs. "Just a hunch."