!Springandastorm's fic on ao3!
Eddie Munson is no stranger to hangovers.
He's practically perfected them, honestly: the ritual of drinking half his weight in water, popping whatever drugstore painkillers he can find in the cupboard, spending the day sleeping it off and becoming particularly well acquainted with the cool edge of the toilet bowl. It's not a big deal, really, and he's used to it: the mouth that tastes like the floor of a public restroom, the acid burning his throat and making his stomach roil all day, the inability to sleep through the pounding in his head. It's just something you have to muscle your way through, the consequences of a fun (or sometimes not-so-fun, depending on whatever dumb shit he got up to) night. Just a fact of life and of inhabiting a body, like getting hungry and needing sleep and having poorly-timed boners.
Of late, he's been discovering all sorts of fun new things about having a body, like the fact that it's far more fallible than he thought, actually, that it's something that can be lifted into the air and cracked to pieces like dry pasta, like dead twigs, easier than snapping a pencil in half. That it's something that can have weird, heart-fluttery reactions to being near that annoying guy from school with The Hair who he thought he'd never see again after he graduated. That it's something that can feel unfathomable fear and dread and the all-encompassing getoutgetoutgetout of being somewhere wrong, somewhere where particles of whatever the fuck that is get stuck in his lungs and in his eyes, thick and sticky like he's breathing in poisonous spores, a colony of fungi growing in his chest and stomach until he's eaten from the inside out. That it's something that can feel death itself, blood thick in his throat as he chokes it up, his organs failing, his vision swimming, his ears ringing, the fucking kid clutching onto him and crying as he tries to make him feel better, to tell him to take care of the others. He's dizzy with the feeling, almost like being drunk, the knowledge that he didn't run, the fuzzy adrenaline tingling through his extremities and taking the pain away. The sky is vast and black and the world is so far away, too far away to hold onto, everything dim and unreal and honestly kind of funny in a what'd you get yourself into this time, Eddie? kind of way.
Then, there's nothing at all. For a long time.
Nothing until the hangover of his life, that is.
Eddie thought he knew everything there is to know about hangovers, he really did. This, though, is something else, a whole other beast, something that feels less like a hangover and more like a flu-slash-infection-slash-zombie-awakening. He's confused, at first, thinks he's at home in bed, which he is, technically. It's all wrong, though, everything quiet and heavy and strange , the air thick as he struggles to breathe it in, everything in the trailer broken and sticky and rotten as he slowly blinks his eyes open enough to look around. For a brief moment he wonders what the hell he had to drink the night before until he tries to sit up, the violent twinge in his stomach reminding him of everything all at once: the murders, the Upside Down, the feeling of teeth burrowing into his stomach. When he reaches a hand down to touch his stomach, though, it's smoothed over in freshly pink scars, no more open wounds that he remembers spitting blood all over the ground. He's also not on the ground, which means that he got here, somehow, back into his trailer. He realizes that Dustin probably dragged him here, tried to give him the closest thing he could to a final resting place. "That's fucking heavy." He says aloud, his voice a feeble scratch, his throat thick and dry like he'd swallowed super glue. Just the act of trying to speak is too much, and he rolls over to spend a good ten minutes vomiting bile into an old Upside Down-ified cereal box. This is the part of a hangover he's more familiar with, though he doesn't have any water or food to settle his aching stomach.
When he can finally stand he stumbles his way to the bathroom, everything around him sharp and tingly, like he can feel it against his skin, every noise amplified. He can feel the Upside Down everywhere, the creeping vines and the dying bats and the feeling of something torn open, like he can feel this world bleeding out into the one above, jagged and kind of suffocating. He realizes with a muted kind of anxiety that he feels connected to it all, like this world really has started to coat every inch of him in weird inter-dimensional death-mold from the inside out. Only, he's not dead despite remembering the feeling of dying, of knowing without a doubt that that's what was happening.
