Rat

Lately, it feels like something has gotten under Eddie’s skin.

He doesn’t know what it is, if it’s the fact that he’s stuck here, they all are, and he’d wanted to do so much more with his life. Or the reality that his life is as dead end here as it had been in Hawkins, a job at a record shop and a life he likes, he really does, but still doesn’t feel like it’s building to something bigger. He’d used to joke he’d rather die than be one of those assholes who peaked in high school and now he’s done both, sort of. At least he’s forever twenty-two and not forever seventeen.

And maybe it’s that. Maybe it’s the vampirism, being this age forever, not getting to see the sun, and the… the arrogance that’s come with it. Eddie’s always had something of an ego; he’s good at things, he’s an incredible guitarist and he’s a hell of a story teller, and he knows it. Becoming kind of invincible hasn’t done anything to temper that part of him.

Lestat had said it once, he thinks. They’re still the people they were, only more.

Tonight he’s high. Accidentally high, since he can’t just smoke a joint anymore and he didn’t realize the guy he was feeding on was high until it was too late. Not that he minds. It actually feels pretty fucking great after months and months of sobriety and he’s wandering along a sidewalk near the park, trying not to dwell, trying to just enjoy the high instead of wondering what the hell he’s even been doing with all of this.

Somewhere far off, somewhere up the mountain, he hears the screech of a demobat and Eddie whips toward the sound. They don’t scare him like they used to and he suddenly feels a wild need to prove it to them. To prove they didn’t get him, they didn’t stop him.

He’s on the bridge that goes over the river and through the park and some incredibly stoned part of his mind tells him to get higher. Get closer to the bats. Then he can tell them off.

“Hey!” he shouts, climbing up onto the edge of the bridge with ease. Almost as if he floats up. “Assholes! I’m still here, you didn’t get me!”

He doesn’t realize he’s stepped off the bridge and into the air, not at first, he’s too wrapped up in telling off the stupid bats that followed him here and still make their presence known with their shrieks and their screams and occasionally coming into Darrow itself. He wants to kill all the ones that are left and maybe he can. Maybe he can fly all the way up there.

“Oh, shit,” he says when he realizes he’s standing on nothing but air.