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Eddie is better at acting than he thought.
Case in point: he's acting like he isn't actively falling apart at every moment. He is. He's also acting like his emotions aren't constantly all over the place, dragging him from one place to the next so quickly that he can hardly keep up. Sometimes he feels like he's back where he was, especially when he's left alone all day to stew in his own thoughts, and he'll find himself laying on the floor and staring at nothing, listening to songs for the newest mix he's working on, his "Breakdown Mix", which is mostly just songs about the sky raining blood and losing your mind and other fun things that reflect how he's doing. He's also working on another Steve mix because it's hard not to when every song reminds him of him, but he keeps getting frustrated with it, feeling like it isn't saying quite what he wants it to, like he can't strike the delicate balance between lyrics about love, sex, and everything else that he wants to.
Some moments he feels something close to normal, getting lost in a book or in a dumb movie or in Steve's eyes (cheesy, yes, but that's part of it), and he'll almost feel hope, like he can have this and it isn't bullshit. There are people who he cares about who care about him in turn, people who aren't going anywhere. Then his brain will remind him that they aren't going anywhere because they can't go anywhere, they've shackled themselves to this place, to him, for better or for worse, and one day it's going to bleed a little too much and suddenly they'll all be drowning in it.
Eddie thinks about going back to see Wayne, about taking that drive and seeing that trailer and walking through a second time, trying to tell him the truth, but then he thinks that maybe Wayne's the luckiest of everyone who's ever known him, that Wayne got out, that he escaped the burden of Eddie weighing him down, spending his money, keeping him shackled to his father, to the crumbling remains of the Munson name. He thinks about going to see Jeff or Gareth or the rest of the old Hellfire club, of Corroded Coffin, then he thinks that they're lucky to have any kind of shot at making it out of this place before it eats them alive, that they don't need somebody dead trying to crawl his way back to the land of the living (though, he does admit, he could write some killer song lyrics about all of this shit).
Eddie just feels keyed up all the time, the way he gets when he smokes too much sativa and it swirls with his vampire hypersenses and makes him freak out, everything way too much, every sound or feeling rippling its way through him like he's a plucked string . Now he gets to feel that for free! All the time! He doesn't need sharper senses, actually, he doesn't know how Max does it with her superior senses all of the time. What was the word Vecna used? Attuned? Eddie doesn't need to be more attuned, thanks.
The others do know, sort of. He knows that's good, that given certain...tendencies of his that it's definitely for the best for him to be more communicative about what he's experiencing, but he wishes that Vecna would just pick one goddamn way to mess with him for once, not whatever he's doing now, which is making Eddie less broody but more...itchy, like he's shedding his skin. He almost thinks he'd rather have the nightmares than whatever this is. He thinks of when he'd first woken up, when he'd made Steve watch The Fly with him and told him he was afraid that was happening to him.
It had partially been a joke, back then.
Now, though...
Sometimes when he looks in the mirror his eyes seem redder than usual, gleaming colder or maybe crueler. His fangs look longer, the tips of his ears sharper, his skin pallid enough to be see-through, then he'll blink and look normal again (or as normal as he can look). He wonders if maybe he's just a vampiric hypochondriac, assuming that nothing is something and something is everything. Sometimes, when he's looking at Max, he thinks she looks the same way, her teeth glinting sharp and her grey eyes flashing red. He knows that she knows how he feels, but they don't talk about it. They're both afraid.
