Eddie thinks he might've actually missed being hungover.
Obviously the whole vomiting-hurting-feeling-like-shit part isn't optimal, but he's just excited to feel it for non-vampire related reasons, for once. Normally any attempts at drinking or eating are met with vague nausea and mostly unsatisfied hunger, which Nancy described as being like "the Upside Down's version of celiac disease". He thinks that maybe his dietary needs are a bit more pressing than just not being able to eat bread, but he gets what she means. She's the one who's invested in viewing his condition as more of a virus than anything else, as something that happened because of, like, weird Upside Down Bat bacteria, not because of some grander or darker narrative.
Personally, Eddie prefers to view it as an incredibly badass resurrection that has since shackled him in life and in death to living as an accursed Creature of Darkness and Bloodlust. Mostly because it's cooler. Also, the primary victims of his bloodlust are rodents and the meat section of the local deli, where the Irish guy who runs it is tasked with providing him (and Max) enough blood sausage and black pudding to live off of so that their guilt is slightly easier to deal with. God, he misses not eating meat.
There's also his boyfriend, who helps him out every week or two so that Eddie can get a little bit of human blood without having to hurt anyone. It's become a bit of a thing, actually, despite Eddie's best efforts to avoid it, at first.
They kept doing it because it does really help keep Eddie from sleeping for nineteen hours a day and wilting like a dead fern in the sunlight and from going off the deep end every time his freaky sixth-sense gets twinged by something (or someone) in the Upside Down. It doesn't hurt that they both, you know...enjoy it. Kind of a lot.
Speaking of his boyfriend (and their little arrangement), that's why he's currently hungover to begin with. It's a luxury, honestly, waking up with a mouth drier than ash and a head that pounds at the sun behind the curtains (moreso than it already does) and a stomach that grumbles at him like it's asking why on Earth he'd willingly subject his body to this kind of treatment. To be fair, he hadn't known it would happen. He'd just been hoping it would.
The thing about birthdays is that he's never much liked having them. In the old days he would've just used it as an excuse to get loaded with his dumbass friends to make it slightly more bearable to endure his uncle giving him a crumpled cookie from the supermarket with a candle stuck in the top. Otherwise they were kind of negligible; he didn't need reminders of getting older, not when his status as Hawkin High's oldest senior did a sufficient job doing that on its own.
This birthday, though, is different. Steve had come over close to midnight last night to ring in the day with him, silencing his protests with a cocked eyebrow and a held-up bag from the liquor store. "You know how you always complain about missing alcohol?"
Eddie had been suspicious, at first. "Yeah? What, are you gonna drink in front of me on my birthday to really rub it in?"
"No, actually," Steve had said, a gleam in his eye. "...I have a theory I want to test."
That's how he'd ended up with his fangs in Steve's neck after watching him crush three beers in a row (shotgunning the third one like an absolute legend), feeling the strange, fuzzy feeling of the alcohol in Steve's bloodstream entering his. Things had pretty rapidly become hazy after that, especially since they were both so excited that it actually worked that Steve had then proceeded to pull out four tequila shooters with an expectant look on his face that had made them both collapse into laughter. The rest of the night had followed a similar trajectory, and Eddie mostly remembers snatches more than actual images: them guffawing on the floor over stupid jokes, Steve rambling about why he'd been called 'The King' in high school, which involved a lot of definitely-exaggerated party stories about keg stands and backflips and cop-interruptions, Eddie teasing him mercilessly and calling him The King until he'd gotten so fed up that he'd pushed him over onto the floor, breaking a record in the process and making Eddie panic until he realized it was just one of old Betsy's gospel records. Then he thinks they'd taken the rest of her abandoned gospel records outside and played frisbee with them for a while before stumbling inside to make out. All in all, definitely worth the hangover. Definitely.
