𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝𝐬 𝐀𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭

𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝𝐬 𝐀𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭 - 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟏𝟎

[Sunday, March 24th, 1986. NOW.]

"He got her. Vecna got her."

There was a heartbeat of shell-shocked silence, as frozen in time as the mirror realm he was standing in right now, while Eddie's whisper drifted through the air, floating there for a moment alongside the lazy swirl of tiny white particles.

As terror hacked its freezing claws into Eddie's chest, a terror he'd never felt in his life before.

Not when the cops had gotten him for the first time because one of the jocks from the basketball team had set him up on a drug deal.

Not when Jason Carver had gotten him at the boathouse, threatened to break every single bone in his body and his hands so he'd never be able to play his treasured guitar again.

Not even when Chrissy Cunningham had found her violent death on the ceiling of his trailer.

"WE NEED MUSIC!!!"

It took a second for Eddie to register that the frantic scream which tore through the silence like scissors through a piece of paper to snap them all out of their shaken daze had been his own.

Chaos broke lose.

"What's her favorite song?!"

"NANCY! ROBIN! WHAT'S HER FAVORITE SONG?!"

"I don't know!"

"You don't know?!", Dustin yelled, "You're her best friends, what kind of friends don't know each other's favorite songs?!"

"What do you even talk about when you're having girl's night or whatever?!", Steve hollered up at the gate from beside Eddie as he watched Max scramble to take off her Walkman, Erica Sinclair already racing away to search for tapes while Robin yelled back, "Not about music!"

The cacophony of voices blurred as a memory soared into Eddie's mind like a paper bird.

Of a beautiful late-autumn day in the woods behind the sports field, on the clearing with the picnic table. How, sunlight filtering through the crown of trees to make your eyes glitter in the golden beams, Eddie had placed his headphones over your ears, his mind racing, barely keeping his hands from trembling with nerves because yes, technically, the song wasn't exactly heavy metal but it didn't matter because you'd just agreed to dance with him and Eddie had known if he didn't shoot his shot now, he'd probably never find the guts – or the chance – to do so and he'd be damned if he didn't snatch up this chance and run with it.

And with the slow, soft tunes floating through the headphones over your ears, your eyes glittering in the sparse beams of sunlight falling through the leaves and your beautiful, beautiful face lighting up with another of those smiles that could have knocked Eddie to his knees with a clean blow, you'd placed your hands in his.

And Eddie had nearly fainted at the sensation of your skin against his, the electric currents zigzagging through him as if he'd turned into a human high-voltage line when he'd led you into the slow steps of a random dance while his goddamn brain was short-circuiting.

He'd started to hum along the tunes of the song he knew by heart because it remembered him of you, and he'd listened to it more times than he could count – or liked to admit and that's why when you'd asked, he'd told you he was practicing to play it with Corroded Coffin – even before he'd put it on your mixtape. He'd broken out in cold sweats in the middle of the night many times after giving you said mixtape because...had that been too obvious a choice to put on a mixtape? Had it been weird to make a mixtape in the first place?

And that day, he'd been close, so, so close to kissing you, his wildest dreams becoming reality as you'd inched closer, before that goddamn maple leaf had interfered and the moment had been broken.