Sleep Comes Down

Only In My Dreams

When she awakens, Janet is in Eddie's bed while Nik and Eddie are passed out on the floor. She rubs the sleep from her eyes and looks around the room. It's quite different from the confines of her room at Hawkins Lab. There's actually things on the walls like posters, and stains. There's carpet, and furniture and clothes.

Janet quietly gets up and stumbles over her sleeping brother and his gracious host of a friend. She looks through the dresser drawer that's been left open and looks through Eddie's t-shirts, questioning why they had such weird words on them like SLAYER and EXODUS. 

Nik lays there, his body relaxed and the voices still quiet for now. And though he's tired, now he finds himself unable to sleep, watching Janet as she goes through Eddie's clothes, pulling out t-shirts and feeling the textures with her hands.

When he feels awake enough to speak, he begins to whisper, "You ok?"

She jumps a bit, startled slightly and rushing to stuff the shirts back in the drawer. She looks embarrassed for being so nosey and snooping through someone's things.

"I was just looking," she whispers back.

He grins, and seeing her embarrassment makes it all the funnier. "It's fine, I'm sure," he says, sitting up and stretching. "A lot of what you'll see here will probably be new to you... different from what you're used to."

"Right," she says with a small thankful smile.

Eddie begins to stir, clearly hungover since there is an empty bottle next to him. It was nice of him to let her sleep in his bed while he laid on the floor with not even a blanket, by the looks of it. Nik notices that Eddie's eyes are beginning to open and that he's rubbing his head with a groaning kind of sound. He sighs pleasantly with a smile and sits up to reveal he is wearing a Black Sabbath t-shirt. He's all showered and wearing new clothes. He starts to roll up a joint.

"Hey you're clean," Janet says when she notices Nikolai is in a lot less scrubby state than her.

"You were sleeping," Nik replies with a shrug as he crumbles some weed into a rolling paper.

"Can I shower too?" she asks.

"Hold up..." Eddie gurgles, peeling himself up off the floor and stumbling out of his room and into the bathroom.

Janet watches Nikolai roll up his joint while Eddie vomits. It's perfectly audible through the thin walls of the trailer. Nik grimaces, hearing his good friend and ally retching.

He looks over at Janet and smiles before speaking to her in a slightly hushed tone, "He sure knows how to party."

"Does it always make you sick to drink?" she asks, any silence between their dialogue filled with more distant puking sounds.

Nik looks at her and then towards the bathroom where Eddie has fallen silent.

"No," he answers, shaking his head as he finishes rolling. "Eddie's just... he's pretty much an alcoholic, not gonna lie about it. But hey, at least he's able to function and he doesn't black out that often."

"Blackout?" Janet asks, raising a brow. The thought of blacking out was terrifying and now knowing that drinking caused it, she never wanted to drink in her life.

"When you drink so much that you lose all sense of what you're doing and who you're with," he answers with a sigh. "It's an awful feeling to wake up the next day with your memories scrambled and a whole day lost because you got so drunk."

"That sounds scary. I hate not remembering things. I sleepwalk... oh...this is my first time sleeping in a real bed too!" she realizes out loud as she continues to look around at Eddie's belongings.

She picks up a figurine of some green, skull-faced guy with ripped muscles. He is wearing a blue, form fitting suit with a purple cloak. 

"That's Skeletor. He's a dick," Nik informs her, but turns his attention back to the information she has just revealed, "You sleepwalk?"

She shakes her head, going to sit in front of him. "They put me in the deprivation chamber every night there," she says.

The joint is waiting in Nikolai's hand, finished now, but unlit.

"A deprivation chamber? Every night?" he repeats, his breath catching in his throat. "And it's supposed to what? To make you sleep well? That sounds more like a form of torture than anything else."