"there must be some kind of way out of here"

[satanicpanics]

Who: Eddie & others
When: Post-event
Where: Solvunn, Horizon, Nocwich
What: Catch-all nonsense
Warnings: Will add if needed!

ꜱᴀɪᴅ ᴛʜᴇ ᴊᴏᴋᴇʀ ᴛᴏ ᴛʜᴇ ᴛʜɪᴇꜰ
"ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ'ꜱ ᴛᴏᴏ ᴍᴜᴄʜ ᴄᴏɴꜰᴜꜱɪᴏɴ
ɪ ᴄᴀɴ'ᴛ ɢᴇᴛ ɴᴏ ʀᴇʟɪᴇꜰ"

{Open and closed starters to follow! If you want something specific, find me at muttonchops or poultrylegs @ discord}

Comments

cw: small reference to animal torture / ted bundy

[sscuriosity]

[Good? If Dustin didn't know Eddie as well as he did that'd be insulting. None of them were just gonna pick up and hit the ground running after what they went through but they had to keep moving forward, they didn't know anything else. Chaos was second nature to them growing up in a place like Hawkins, right on top of a transdimensional shit hole.

Dustin's brows hike high into his hairline as Eddie tries, and fails, to gently explain what he already knows.]

Dude. I was the herald of the story.

[There's that familiar "tone," that Eddie spoke of, he's crossed himself not just because the conversation is uncomfortable but because bearing his soul despite being the heart of his party has never been easy for him. Growth came with growing pains.]

Henry Creel? Yeah, doesn't matter, he was doing the serial killing thing before he was Vecna too. Torturing small animals. He makes Ted Bundy look bush league.

But we're stuck with him, so now we have to figure out how to co-exist.

[satanicpanics]

Jesus Christ—yeah, I know, okay? But Harrington didn’t remember so excuse me for assuming I was the only one who did.

[ He roll his eyes and throws up his hands in frustration, but it really has nothing to do with Dustin. It’s just…everything that this situation involves. Henry being Vecna and Eddie’s ability to figure out how he’s supposed to feel about that when he’s not Vecna yet, the fact that he’s not angry despite knowing he should be, the fact that he’d considered Henry a friend for quite awhile and now there’s no way that’s going back to the way it was.

He didn’t really know much about the pre-Vecna serial killing, though. The things you miss when you’re pulled into the plot late, and the things you learn when you’re sorting out eight centuries of didn’t-really-happen memories. Somehow he isn’t terribly surprised, but he is sort of surprised that Dustin is firmly in the middle of this entire ordeal—clearly upset, but looking at the whole thing objectively.

They are stuck with him. There would be nothing particularly satisfying about taking him out here, but if Dustin had been nothing but angry too, just blindly angry like Steve, maybe Eddie could be convinced to slip into anger as well. It would be better than this weird disconnect he’s feeling. It’s just too much, and it’s the only coping mechanism he has. ]

I mean, we’ve been co-existing.

[ For two years without asking for a surname… ]

But how do you propose we continue to do that? Because I'm cool, but Steve? Yeah, I’m pretty Steve is literally this close to clobbering him.

[sscuriosity]

I remember.

[He was reluctant at first and there was a certain level of disorientation and second-guessing that went along with it but he put together a table to help him with that and it's in a thick notebook on the little desk he's claimed back where they stay.

Losing three hundred years or gaining it while asleep didn't do much to assuage his concerns over their current situation, where they were, and what could or couldn't be trusted but one thing he knew for sure was that Henry should be kept on watch and at an arm's length.]

Max is barely hanging on. It was his bats doing his bidding that came after us and killed you.

I don't blame him.

[Not that any of them would be able to clobber him from what he knew about Henry, aptly named Vecna. It all played into the fact that the dude was a powerhouse and training up those talents from a very young age.]

Not sure there's anything we can do here about it. Not without serious repercussions, anyway.

[satanicpanics]

I mean, the last person who fucked up in Solvunn got horrifically executed, so I would really like for all of us to avoid that as much as possible, thanks. If that means just trying to avoid him, then whatever, man.

[ Granted, Josselyn Creed’s fuck-up involved a lot more than killing one person, but Eddie isn’t really sure he wants any of them to risk it. They know now through Nero that the Summoned can die and have died here, but what happens if one Summoned kills another? How would the commune view something like that?

They probably shouldn’t be the ones to figure it out. ]

Wait, wait, wait, wait—

[ He swings out an arm, to put a pause both to Dustin and to the conversation, and turns toward him with suspicious, narrowed eyes. ]

What do you mean Max is barely hanging on?

[ That is brand new information, and if he’d learned it in those eight hundred years, it hasn’t carried over. Eddie died long before the aftermath of Vecna and the Upside Down, and Steve—Steve never mentioned anything about Max. He said the last memory he had was climbing out of the gate, before regrouping with the others. Neither one of them could have known what happened to Max. ]

Jesus Christ, you guys don’t tell me shit. Is she alright?

[sscuriosity]

You can't drop that kind of knowledge bomb and leave it there. Horrifically executed how? And what did they do to deserve execution?

[There's no way Dustin will leave it there, even the herald of the story didn't get all the information, and maybe he knew before but after waking up sorting through the memories and what he kept and lost had his head spinning.

What he remembered about Henry Creel had everything to do with what he lived through because of him and what he lost, what all of them lost.

Dustin's surprised when Eddie stops the conversation to get more information. He typically flies by the seat of his pants, hits the ground running, and moves from topic to topic just like he does.]

Yeah, we didn't, we stopped it but not before he did a number on her. She's in the hospital, intubated, in bad shape.

[None of them knew if she would be alright, it looked bad. Dustin didn't get any resolution to that before he showed up here. So, he didn't have the answers for Eddie on any of that yet.]

Steve didn't tell you?

[satanicpanics]

Oh, shit, I guess you weren’t there for that, huh?

[ Which is probably for the best, but it kind of makes him feel a little bad for accusing Dustin of never telling him anything. But when Abraxas is Eddie’s new normal, and when he’s been here with Steve the whole time, it’s easy to forget that Dustin hasn’t always been here alongside them. ]

Uh, well, it was a Council member named Josselyn Creed. About a year ago she was at the center of…a whole lot of shit, basically? It was bad, and that’s an understatement. People got kidnapped, people died, there was…a lot going on, dude. I don’t think anyone’s fully recovered from it.

[ He would tell him to go ask Steve, because Steve was one of the Summoned who were taken and actually saw the worst of it all first hand, but he’s not going to do that. Because he tried to breach the subject recently and it didn’t go well, and he’s not going to send Dustin into that lion’s den. ]

They decided the gods should be the ones to judge her, so…execution. As for the how, that’s probably gonna have to come from someone else. I don’t really make it a habit to attend public executions, you know? Her remains were, like…fully displayed for months, though. It was pretty gnarly.

[ He’s glad those have finally been moved away. But Max—Jesus Christ, he just assumed everyone else made it out okay. He assumed that he was the only casualty, and that would have been alright. ]

Okay, but she’s alive, right? She’s still got a chance to just…pull through?

[ Not that her being alive makes it any better. She’s still a victim, she still got hurt because of Henry, and Eddie feels like even more of an asshole for not being enraged. ]

Shit. No, no, he didn’t. Chances are he doesn’t know either. We’re playing this whole thing by Back to the Future rules—not everyone’s from the exactly same point in the timeline. Hence why we're here with Henry and not quite Vecna.