okay I’ve got this THOUGHT in my head and I just had to share
okay so eddie doesn’t die but the reader doesn’t know it coz he’s been placed in something like witness protection coz of the strong hatred or whatever and the reader goes on to become a fantasy author and dedicated their book to him and they meet again at a book signing and they immediately recognise him (even though his hair is short now and dyed black and his dressing style is totally different and he gives his new name for the book signing)
shaking and screaming and crying and throwing up anon your BRAIN your BEAUTIFUL BEAUTIFUL BRAIN
you guys were friends forever, like, since middle school, when you were made to feel like a loser for reading fantasy and writing your own little stories. you were always made fun of for it, always had to eat by yourself, never invited to anybody’s birthday parties. and then one day eddie walked up to your seat in the cafeteria and read the word 'dragons' over your shoulder in whatever you were writing that day and freaked out and invited you to join hellfire. and you never looked back!!
you two were inseparable from that moment onward. every book your parents bought you would go to eddie after you finished it. you'd always discuss them in-depth, daydream about being whisked away together to a world where dragons and trolls and wizards really existed. everything you ever wrote, he was the first one to read it, and he never beat around the bush with you. he knew you were the real deal, and he told you that he thought so every single day. it made you blush and you always told him to knock it off, to stop lying, but his praise made you shine.
you always danced around your real feelings for one another, especially as you got older, never thought the other felt the way you did, until you finally finally get your shit together and kiss him one night after hellfire right before everything happens with the upside down (because of course you know about the upside down - eddie needed you, he always needed you, that wouldn't have changed just because things involved being suspected for murder and another dimension with an evil demon now) and you can’t get over how unfair it is that you’re finally together, but you can’t be together how you always should have been.
and then he dies, and he takes your heart with him, and you don't write for ages. the only person you ever wrote for is gone, so what’s the point now?
and maybe after eddie dies you start having dinner with his uncle wayne once a week, and one day while you're sitting on opposite ends of the couch, eating some kind of casserole and talking about one thing or another, shooting the shit about what eddie was like when you’d first met, wayne will look up at you and say, “hey, you still writin’ your stories, sweetheart?”
and you’ll get teary-eyed and you won’t be able to look him in the eye when you tell him no, you haven’t been able to write since eddie died. wayne will click his tongue at you, empathetic but sad, and he’ll say, “eddie wouldn’t have wanted you to stop on his account,” and that will make you cry hard. you feel bad - wayne’s never been good with tears - but he takes your plate from your hands, sets it down on the coffee table, and he lets you sob into his flannel until you nod and promise you’ll try again.
you sit down in front of an open notebook for the first time in months when you get home that night, and once you start to write, you can’t stop. soon you’ve got a fully-fledged premise built off of half-baked ideas you and eddie had come up with together over the years, and you decide you’ll do it. you’ll write the book.
so you write the book about a young knight who dies a martyr slaying a dragon and saving a kingdom, and you don’t let anybody read it except wayne. this is good, he tells you. not that i know much about this kind of stuff - was always yours and eddie’s thing - but it’s good, darling. it’s real good. he would have loved it.
so you decide to polish it up and send a sample into a few agencies. and you start to get responses, rejections, of course, at first, but then you get a few requests for the full manuscript. you try not to get your hopes up. and then your first offer for representation comes in the mail, and you work the hardest you ever have at anything to edit it down into a book you’ll be able to sell. it has to be perfect. for eddie.
the day you sell the book, you show up at wayne’s door with a cake and the check they faxed you. it’s eddie’s birthday, coincidentally - he would have been 25 - and you pull your personal checkbook out and write wayne a check for enough money to get himself out of hawkins, if he’d like. they think it’s gonna be huge, you tell him. they think it’s gonna make me rich and famous. wayne had always been your family as much as he was eddie’s, and you felt you owed it to him to take care of him now that eddie was gone, especially since he’s the only reason you started writing again in the first place. he accepts with teary eyes and the two of you eat eddie’s birthday cake at the kitchen counter.
when the book is edited and submitted and it comes time to pen the dedication, you know exactly what to say.
for eddie, who slayed demons for me, and who taught me how to face my own.
months go by and then suddenly one day you wake up and it’s publication day. your publicist set up a launch event for you at a small bookstore in indianapolis, and you get there early in the day, and your photo is everywhere, and the line is out the door, and you’re so overwhelmed that you have to excuse yourself to the restroom to let yourself break down and cry.
when it comes time to starting the signing, you settle into your chair and plaster on a grateful smile, thank everyone for coming, until you’ve gotten through most of the line. the afternoon has bled you dry. you're looking down at the most recent book to be set in front of you. it's one of the very last ones you have to sign, you've signed hundreds at this point in the night and you're exhausted and emotional and all you can think about is your hotel and the jacuzzi tub waiting for you and -
"for robert, please?"
that voice. you recognize that voice. you haven't heard it in years, but you know it immediately, and you look up, and it's -
your heart breaks. it looks a lot like him, but it can’t be. you know it can’t be him, because he’s gone, so you shake your head at yourself and smile up at him, and he smiles back down at you, and then you gasp, because it is him.
it's eddie. eddie, who died all those years ago and left you here by yourself. eddie, who never let you give up on writing, who knew it was what you were made for, even when you felt like you couldn't keep it up. eddie, who has always been your best friend, even in death. eddie, who saved your life. he's grinning down at you and you don't know how to react.
"you wrote a damn book, huh, baby?"
you jump up from your seat and rush around the table, throw your arms around him, your face in his neck. he groans at the impact and wraps his arms around you, too, and tight. he smells the same. how is it that he smells the same? you have to look at him again. at his eyes, his beautiful brown eyes, now hidden behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. at his hair, which he wears close-cropped, now, and dyed a darker color. the clothes that he’s wearing are nothing like what he used to, but you decide that they suit him. being alive suits him. you’ve easily forgotten by now that you’re not the only two people in the room.
eddie brushes your hair back from your eyes, wipes the tears from under them, the ones that mirror his own, and kisses you gently, and you hold his face with shaky hands as you murmur you're here? how are you here? you died, eddie, how are you here? against his mouth. he smiles and assures you that he’s real, he’s here, he’s got you. he’s not going anywhere.
and he promises to explain everything to you - he mentions something offhandedly about witness protection, it wasn’t safe for me in hawkins - but you realize that despite the fact that you can hardly believe it, you don’t actually care how he’s here, just that he is at all.
and then when you're over the initial shock of it all, you'll run one hand up into his hair and say this is different, and eddie will laugh, he’ll lean his forehead against yours, kiss you once more, his eyes bright as he says, “you think i’m a hero, hmm?”
