Eddie saves a smol pixie and gets his fey mark. Carver gets stuck babysitting again. Unfortunately, Eddie smells like a vampire happy meal on legs
now.
⚠Language.
It was a bad week to be without running water. Not just for the inconvenience of it. Having to figure out a system for making sure the group had clean water seemed like something the group was working on, at least to get them through the week.
No, Eddie just had shit for luck, it seemed.
Once the initial shock and fear of their surroundings had worn off-- it was too much like the Upside Down for his taste, particularly with that sky-- scouting seemed like a natural fit for the aging high schooler. Mostly it meant wandering around, if he were honest, because he didn’t quite know how to make himself useful. He was learning that when it came to life or death adventures, that he wasn’t all that brave. Not like Steve or Nancy or Robin. He’d just followed them, really. Not even because he really wanted to, either, more like he didn’t have a choice.
So scouting seemed like something he could do to maybe prove he wasn’t completely worthless. Only, he couldn’t help but hope that nothing really came of it. What was he going to do if there were monsters or bandits? Die first?
No, instead, he found a tiny pixie that had fallen into some kind of snare in the middle of a muddy swamp. And Eddie had to walk waist deep in the murk to get to the trap, praying he wasn’t being an idiot, that he wasn’t falling for some kind of trap, that there were leeches or alligators in the water or worse.
It really wasn’t all that heroic. At least Eddie didn’t think so. He fell once, ended up about chest deep covered in mud, but eventually reached the snare and released the pixie. Maybe the pixie felt differently, but all she did-- he assumed she but honestly couldn’t tell-- gave him a soft smooch on the nose before zooming off.
Eddie looked down at himself and scowled. “Thanks. You couldn’t take care of this?”
Little did he know, the pixie had.
Eddie began the wet, heavy uncomfortable trudge back to the ruins of the campus and it was around that time he realized they didn’t have running water that week.
His once white sneakers, an 80s staple, came took effort to get off due to his muddy, slippery hands and the suction that kept them on his feet, followed by his socks. Eddie peeled off his jacket and his Hellfire Club t-shirt which was unreadable at that point and tried looking for a place to hang them.
At least nothing had tried to eat him.
Carver had lived rough several times in his life, even long before he ended up in the unpredictable clutches of Derleth. Hell, he'd lived in a cave for a while. A spot he was still quite fond of in fact. He wasn't scouting per se, he'd let everyone else band together and do their survivalist thing, and he'd help keep anything at bay that threatened the group.
What he did now was just wander, get a lay of the land. He wasn't shocked to find the campus buildings in ruin and the Green overgrowing the whole thing. It was just another week at Derleth. The one thing surprised him as that he was pretty sure this was still the Void. The pattern was one week (or longer in one instance) in some bizarro world followed by one week in the Void, so it stood to reason this was the Void. It wasn't what he was used to, but the Void wasn't always stagnant. Not since he'd been here. But this was the Void trying to build itself a world of its own. At least he was pretty sure that was a possibility some of the science dorks had mentioned.
Because this world, this version of the Void, was so unexpected, Carver opened up his senses to their fullest extent. Sight, hearing, smell, were all heightened on the regular for Carver, but when he focused, he could learn a lot about his surroundings. He listened for heartbeats, breaths, movement in the underbrush and he smelled for fear and desperation and hunger.
What he smelled was something cloying, something unexpected. Who know what flora grew in this world that could smell like that? But it was a scent that was alluring to the Beast within and he followed it until he came upon the source.
He came upon a half-naked person and the scent was unbearably strong. He watched the person for a moment and then asked, "Who the fuck are you? Some kind of fairy?"
Fairy meant something different in small town 1986 than it did to a group of multidimensional prisoners. So when Eddie heard the word from Derleth’s resident punk, he took them for fighting words.
Shit.
“Well hello to you, too.” Eddie retorted back, giving his best wild Jack Nicholson energy. Most adults saw through it, some didn’t. Really it was Eddie’s more theatrical way of puffing up his chest and pretending he was up for the challenge. Maybe if he had shoes on, he might have considered running. But then what?
Oh sure, Robin thought Carver was nice, but Eddie knew better. Most people? Had not been kind to Eddie. He saw this fight coming from the beginning.
“I’d ask if you were enjoying the view but,” Eddie gestured to himself, “clearly you are…”
And that was the moment Eddie assumed he was about to get the shit kicked out of him. Why not. This day was already shaping up to be a bad one. Nothing pissed off a person slinging fairy as an insult than to have the insinuation tossed right back at them.
He probably wouldn’t have been grinning like a mad man if he knew Carver was a vampire.
It didn't take long for Carver to gauge that this was a human (he could just vaguely smell human underneath that sweet smell), and probably one of the new arrivals at Derleth. Under the layers of muck were probably sneakers and some kind of t-shirt.
"You're a little scrawny for my tastes, but," and Carver rolled his shoulders in a shrug, leaving it open-ended about whether or not he enjoyed the view.
"Put your fucking hackles down. I can tell when someone's trying to pump themselves up and you really don't want to pick a fight with me." Maybe it was an automatic defense, a young man looking to protect himself from whatever weird dangers might linger around this place. Carver just waved a hand dismissively at this guy's attempts to be, he assumed, scary or intimidating.
Eddie watched him for a moment, confused. He picked up his t-shirt and tried to ring the muck out of it, while replaying the conversation between them.
So Carver wasn’t going to beat the shit out of him?
“So what? You were just in the neighborhood?” Eddie asked. Eddie picked up his sneakers and gave them a good whack against a nearby tree trunk. He was never going to get his clothes clean.
His hackles, as it were, weren’t completely down, but Eddie went from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to distrusting youth. It was a mild improvement, at least when it came to conversation.
“Carver, right?”
"Well I wasn't stalking you. I don't even know who the fuck you are." Carver found a sizeable, moss-covered rock and sat on it while he watched this guy attempt to beat the mud off his clothes. He wasn't going to get far doing that, but Carver would be mildly amused in the meantime.
"Although I see you know who I am. My reputation usually does precede me." He propped his elbow on his thigh and his chin on his fist while he watched whoever this guy was.
"You realize that no running water doesn't mean no water at all, right?" Clearly he wasn't the sharpest tool. "I'm sure there's a brook or something around here somewhere." Carver gave a cursory glance to his immediate surroundings, not that he would glean much. He lived rough, he had superhuman senses, but he wasn't much of a survivalist.
He sniffed the air again while he watched Eddie. Normally, he could smell the blood flowing through the veins of a human, but this sweet smell obscured that. And yet it was just as tantalizing as the smell of blood and Carver's head tilted to the side just slightly as he watched with a slowly growing hunger.
“You were talking to Robin on the phone-thing,” Eddie said. It was then Eddie realized said phone-thing had been in the pocket of his leather jacket during his ill advised rescue attempt of said pixie.
Being new and from another time, Eddie hadn’t quite developed an addiction to his smart phone yet. Not when he could comfortably go for lengths of time without checking in and was more used to communicating in person or by voice rather than text.
He pulled the phone out of his similarly coated jacket to see if he’d destroyed it yet. It didn’t turn on.
“Shit.” He frowned. Even if he wasn’t addicted to it, the device was still useful and this world was creepy. He tried smacking the phone like it was an old tv connected to a rabbit wire antenna, but his attempt to revive the device predictably failed.
"Jesus, don't hit the phone," Carver said with a perturbed expression on his face. He got off the rock and approached Eddie, grabbing the phone out of his hands. "You look like everyone's granddad doing that." Carver wiped some of the mud off on the thigh of his black jeans and looked at the phone. He wasn't a tech-expert by any means, but he knew a few things.
"Maybe you can try drying it out, but I'm pretty sure it's fucked." With that decided, he tossed the phone back to Eddie without any further concern for it or whether or not Eddie could catch it.
"I'm assuming you're that metalhead Robin mentioned. Is that her name? Robin? And you're…Teddy? Freddy? Uhh, Eddie?" There was a sudden influx of teenagers recently and it seemed this guy was among them.
The phone bounced in Eddie’s hands a couple times before his fingers successfully latched onto it. “Eddie,” he answered, wondering where he’d find a place he could reasonably dry anything out.
Without looking up at Carver, he made the sign of the devil with one hand while sticking out his tongue, long enough to touch his own chin. If he thought Carver would have been scandalized, he might have put more effort into it instead of merely performing a perfunctory gesture. Metalhead? Sure, present.
"Yeah, whatever. If you don't want my help finding water, I'm going to fuck off back to whatever is left of the campus. This is extremely boring." Carver turned with every intention of walking away but that smell. It made the Beast claw at the back of his mind. Carver groaned and turned back around to look at Eddie.
"Alright. Why the fuck do you smell like that? I can barely smell your blood. Just…sickly sweetness." If Carver could salivate, he would've been doing so by now.
Eddie snapped out of it, looking at Carver with a confused frown. “Smell like what?” He grabbed a lock of his hair, a sometimes nervous gesture, and gave it a sniff. Then in a very high school moment, raised one arm and gave himself another sniff.
It didn’t fill Eddie’s nose or anything, but when forced to pay attention, he noticed.
“I don’t know. There was a marsh and this pixie was caught in a snare. I had to half swim through it to get to her. Maybe she thought I needed it?”
Eddie picked up his clothes.
“So do you know where I can find somewhere to clean up that isn’t going to enchant me into some forest creature?”
It didn't matter that Carver regularly did the same sniff test for himself, he still rolled his eyes. "How the hell do I always end up playing babysitter?" And clearly Eddie needed it, covered in mud and smelling of the boon of a pixie as he was.
"I can't promise water won't enchant you, but it could only be an improvement." And Carver walked off, ducking under low-hanging branches, stepping carefully over rocks and tangled undergrowth. The only upside to being this deep into nature was that bugs had no interest in a glorified walking corpse.
As he traipsed through the overgrown green in search of a stream or river, Carver didn't even bother to look back to see if Eddie was actually following him.
Eddie’s feet were bare and he had to hop carefully whenever he stepped on something prickly beneath him, but at least he seemed comfortable keeping up.
“Babysitter? How old do you think I am?” Eddie tried to sound insulted but he wasn’t above realizing when he was over his head. Which recently was most days, and that was before ending up here.
Anyway. Carver was obviously older and if he didn’t know what he was doing, he was good at pretending like it. That was good enough for Eddie.
He wasn’t Dustin after all.
"I have no idea. I don't know how to tell the age of humans anymore." Carver stopped abruptly and closed his eyes. He tried to hone in on his hearing, listening for the sounds of moving water.
"You know it would've been a lot smarter to put the shoes back on, muddy or not." His eyes stayed closed and he still had never actually looked back at Eddie as they'd walked through this forest. He could tell by Eddie's footsteps that he'd remained barefoot. "You don't know what kind of plants or creatures live here and what they could do to you." Following a mildly hungry vampire was probably the least of Eddie's problems.
Carver opened his eyes and veered off to the left. The honey smell of his companion was distracting and Carver contemplated hunting something just to put the Beast at ease. Instead, he followed what he hoped was the sound of a brook or small river.
“Wait, what?”
Too much information at once. The comment about smelling Eddie’s blood sailed right on over his head. He was distracted, trying to weigh if Carver was right about wearing the shoes versus going barefoot and if Carver would slow down long enough for him to put them back on.
“Are you saying you’re an alien or something?” Eddie half smiled to himself, hoping he said something funny over something true.
Eddie looked at the sneakers in one hand and still weighed whether to put them on or not. A latchkey kid, he was used to doing stupid shit and exploring the woods outside of Hawkins in all manner of ill advised conditions.
“Werewolf?” Eddie guessed again. Mostly because of the scent thing. “Wolf-man? Frankenstein? Dracula? Creature from the Black Lagoon?”
Carver glanced over his shoulder just briefly at Eddie, just long enough that Eddie could catch him rolling his eyes. Then he turned his attention back to the overgrown Green ahead of them.
"I'm a vampire." And it's said in such a matter-of-fact way, like it's the most ordinary thing in the world. And it is for Carver. He's been a vampire for so long, he doesn't think anything of it. He broke the masquerade almost immediately upon arrival at Derleth. There's a freedom in not having to hide and he will revel in it every chance he can get.
“Oh, yeah, sure, that makes perfect sense. Of course vampires are real,” Eddie admonished mostly himself, in a fake grown up voice, the kind he used to make fun of authority figures giving him a hard time. But the more he thought about it, the more absurd this entire situation was. “I mean, cartoons are apparently real, so vampires… I mean…”
If Robin were there, she’d probably know what to say. Something that sounded kind of calm or nice? If Steve were there, then the two of them could share a look. If his lunchbox full of weed he sold were there, Eddie could have at least smoked and enjoyed having his entire perception of what was possible repeatedly called into question.
Instead he just sort of cracked. It came out in a giggle.
On a good day Eddie felt like he was losing his mind, and Eddie Munson had not had a good day going on for over a solid week, and that was before he ended up in Derleth.