#eddies eldritch powers or something and he hides at steve's while they fall in love

[patchworkgargoyle]

Wanted to try my hand at the Upside Down either being or containing some kind of eldritch entity that brings Eddie back to life for its own goals, so here's about 600 words of that!

Content warnings: graphic descriptions of dying, character begging to die, typical eldritch mindfuckery.

🦇

Eddie doesn't know how he feels it, but he does. Something- some thing of the Upside Down, wriggling its way into his mind as the last words he says sigh from his lips, the last breaths of ashen, toxic air shaken from his lungs by the agonised contractions of his chewed-up torso before going still. He feels it even as his heart slows without enough blood to pump and the red lightning in the sky and Dustin's tear stained face above him go dim, grey, fading into darkness.

It is… whispering. The susurrations of windswept sand, fresh snow across ice, long grasses and the waves of the sea. Melodic and patternless to him. He thinks - or he thinks he thinks, can he think if he's dying, a microscopic sliver away from outright brain death? - that if this is how Vecna slinks his way into his victim's minds, it's not the worst thing in the world. At least he'll be dead before he can start seeing visions, and hopefully the bastard can't use his body once Eddie's been forcibly evicted from it. Maybe he should die faster to make sure-

The thing in his mind had been listening. It latches onto the word Vecna and teases it out of the sentence he'd thought, a trail of memories like bright, colourful ribbons flowing in the word's wake and how Eddie even sees this he would never know, can't even stop it from happening. The thing sifts through the memories, sorting the ribbons with curiosity. He sees it consider and discard the Hellfire campaign, the flash of his friends' joyful and enraged faces around the table and his long hours of planning set aside to drift in the blackness. Then it follows the winding, tangled trail of the last week, from the first instance of hearing what the kids decided to name their enemy to learning exactly who it was. It pauses, the memory stalled in its grasp, replayed like a rewound tape, and Eddie begins to feel something again.

Rage. The thing writhes, twisting the memory in an invisible grasp and he gets no warning before he's fucking assaulted-

Bright bursts of images fly by - craggy plateaus rolling desolate hills mountains suspended midair by nothing a fine black sand weaving like murmurations of starlings between every rock every thing under the slick skins of petal-faced creatures in every molecule - struggling against the limits of Eddie's suddenly miniscule mind - a new creature unknown burnt burning shoved through a tear exploring learning changing in ways it cannot should not - he feels like he's hurtling towards something, then smeared against glass like an insect and wiped away but not before he sees too much - the creature heals keeps burning finds it finds us and bends us warps us dominates us like no thing before no more harmony or cycle just use practice revenge - he's screaming, maybe, if he can scream in his own skull because fuck does it burn, searing his dying brain matter - it will find that tear or make more find The Girl rend her apart bring the worlds together no matter if it can't it will it rules us so it will rule them as it pleases it must endendend - please let him die please please please it fucking hurts-

NO.

GET.

UP.

A raw animal scream rips through the quiet landscape of the Upside Down, wrenched out of Eddie's empty lungs as he shudders to life alone in the twisted version of the trailer park, sobbing and unhinged from reality as he curls in on his ruined body amongst the dirt and corpses of the demobats.

The thing's barely comprehensible command echoes, gong-like, through his skull.

GET UP.

Eddie lurches to his feet.