#eshic

“Seriously, man, what made you decide to…” he trailed off, trying to find a nice way to say ‘stop being an asshole’.

Harrington seemed to get the idea anyway. He answered with a surprising combination of swiftness and barely concealed grief. “Barbara Holland died in the woods behind my house.”

Eddie was stunned for a moment before he chanced a glance over to the other occupant of his van. Harrington's eyes were locked somewhere in the middle distance, a deep regret swimming in them.

“She came to one of my parties with Nancy, even though she didn’t want to.” His voice sounded hollow, “She left by herself when Nance and I hooked up and she died alone thinking her best friend ditched her for a stupid boy.”

Eddie was working his way to some way of acknowledging how much that must have sucked for everyone involved, but Harrington went on before he could find a way to do it without sounding like an idiot. “No one believed Nancy when she said something bad had happened. Before we actually knew Barb was… dead,” He swallowed thickly. “I didn’t believe her. I didn’t care.”

He shook his head, as if in disgust. “Nance went to the only person who would believe her, Johnathan Byers, and they looked for their missing people together.”

Eddie watched him bite his cheek out of the corner of his eye. “I saw them together, and I thought-“ he scoffed, “I made a stupid assumption and my dumbass friends helped me spread nasty shit about Nance, tried to start a fight with Byers to... prove something, I guess.”

They sat in the rattling silence of the van for a minute, Eddie wondering what he could even say to that, before Harrington interrupted his thoughts again.

“Johnathan knocked some sense into me.” He said with a shrug, “I went to apologize to him, and he and Nancy were-“

And there it was again, that recalibration. Eddie almost couldn’t believe he was still trying to hide something, with all the other stuff he had just told him.

“They were in trouble. They told me to leave, and I did.” He clicked his tongue in thought. “But I knew they needed help, so I went back to give it to them. I didn’t want to be the guy that stood back while other people got hurt anymore.”

He turned his gaze from where it had been fixed, unfocused, out the windshield and looked at Eddie. Luckily, the late hour meant they were the only car on the suburban roads, giving Eddie the chance to linger at a stop sign and meet Harrington's gaze. “I don’t know what would have happened if I had actually run when they told me to, but I don’t think it would have been good.”

He sighed and broke their eye contact, looking out the windshield into the darkness again, and leaving Eddie feeling more than a little unmoored in sea of information he found himself slowly sinking into.

“That’s what made me… get my shit together… or whatever you were gonna ask.” He pressed his lips into a sad half-smile.

Eddie blinked at him a couple times. Belatedly, he laid on the gas, just to have something to fill the tense silence he had created. Failing to come up with a better response, he said “That’s some heavy shit, man.”

Harrington breathed out a half hearted laugh. A long moment passed, and Eddie started to think that was going to be the end of the whole conversation. Then, quietly, Harrington murmured, “That’s one way to put it.”

With that, Eddie rolled to a stop in front of the Harrington house. He watched the other teen’s reflection in the window, saw him chew his cheek briefly before sighing and turning back to Eddie, a resigned look on his face.

“Thanks again for the ride,” he unbuckled his seatbelt and grabbed his freaky bat from the floor, “sorry for crashing your smoke session.”

Eddie waved a dismissive hand. “It’s all good, man.” Harrington popped the door open, but before he could get out, Eddie's mouth moved before he could stop it, "Hey, Steve?"

The warm glow of the interior lights had clicked on with the open door, and a slight breeze of brisk November air rushed in, rustling the hair at the back of Harrington's head as he turned back to meet Eddie's gaze. His eyebrows were raised slightly in mild confusion. "Yeah?" He asked, voice low.

"Uhm-" Now that he had the other's attention, he wasn't entirely sure what to do with it. For a moment that was probably no more than a couple seconds, but seemed to stretch for eternity, Eddie searched his eyes, lit up a soft golden caramel color, for something to say that wouldn't leave the night in such a somber mood. For reasons he was unwilling to explore in the moment, Eddie was determined to leave their first real one-on-one encounter in higher spirits than being haunted by the mistakes of a selfish teenager.

"I just, ah," Eddie fumbled in the dark for the right words. "It might have been a ridiculously rough road to get there but, I like the guy you're turning out to be. And..." something inside him still resisted the end of this thought, but he pushed on, "I'm glad I get to meet him."

Harrington looked at him, dumbfounded for a moment, lips slightly parted in surprise. Eventually, he gathered himself, clearing his throat, and quickly pinching his nose before nodding and looking away.

"Uh, thanks, man." He chewed his cheek, seemingly trying to think of something else to say, but instead he just repeated, "Thanks."

Eddie offered him a smile that was halfheartedly returned, as the other teen slid out of the van. He watched as Harrington disappeared up the driveway and into a house that Eddie found noticing, for the second time in recent history, was suspiciously empty looking, despite the late hour. Eddie only lingered for a moment more before he drove off.

When he returned home, he found himself unable to fall asleep, the new information he had gained rattling around his brain until the first rays of dawn peeked into his room.

Which lead him to now. Awake and chewing his lips nearly raw, notebook with haphazard notes scribbled next to him, when Wayne pushed his way tiredly through the trailer door.

"You're up." His uncle commented, gruff voice only slightly tinged with surprise.

Eddie sipped his coffee. "Good to know your eyes still work, old man."

Wayne huffed as he kicked off his boots and hung up his jacket. "Any particular reason?"

Eddie tapped the side of his mug with a soft ting ting. "Thinking of heading to the library when it opens."

At this, Wayne raised an eyebrow. "If I didn't know any better, I'd say you got body swapped with some imposter." He shuffled over to the table and held the back of his hand up to Eddie's forehead, "You feelin' alright, son?"

Eddie smacked his hand away playfully. "Maybe I want to work on homework for a change!" He said, indignantly.

"Do ya, now?" Wayne said, pouring himself a mug of coffee and taking a seat next to his nephew.

"And maybe," Eddie said, downing the rest of his own mug in one go, "I have some research to do."

Eddie scowled at him. It was the Monday after he had spent an uncharacteristic amount of time in the Hawkins Library's collection of newspaper records, and he was ready to get a few more sets of eyes on the evidence he had collected.

"No, Gary, I'm not kicking them out, and if you keep up this attitude, the next wizard you fight will spend all his spell slots polymorphing you into a sheep forever." Eddie didn't add that he was slightly afraid that Harrington might come after him with a horror movie weapon if he wronged said freshmen. He took a centering huff of breath before continuing, "But this meeting is about them."

"You're still fixated on figuring out their big secret, huh?" Jeff said, sounding almost bored.

"There's something weird going on!" Eddie shouted, jabbing a finger at his notebook. "I ran into Harrington at the junkyard on Friday and he-"

"What were you doing at the junkyard?" Brian asked at the same time Jeff asked "Why was Harrington at the junkyard?"

Eddie huffed in annoyance. "Can I finish?" Gareth rolled his eyes, but otherwise the boys refrained from interrupting again. "I went to the junkyard on Friday to smoke and plan the next campaign, and Harrington was there, making sure there were no rabid dogs or something."

"Why-" Jeff started, but Eddie shot him a warning glare.

"I convinced him to tell me part of the story with him and the freshies, he acted like he didn't give me many details because he's 'not very good at explaining things' but I knew he was just hiding the juiciest parts."

Eddie chewed his thumb nail and looked away from his friends, still thinking. He didn't realize how long he had been silent until Brian piped up. "...And? What did he tell you?" He prompted.

Eddie looked back up, then flipped open his notebook. "He listed off all these recent incidents in town." He pointed to each one in his notebook as he spoke, circled and connected to each other like some kind of spiderweb. "Will Byers disappearance/death/reappearance. The first suicide in Hawkins in 20 years, which-" at this his finger hovered over a scribbled note that read Benny Hammond, Nov 7th, 1983 "happened the day after the Will Byers thing, by the way."

"Weird coincidence." Jeff offered.

"But is it a coincidence?" Eddie leaned in and he realized, vaguely, that he was starting to sound like some kind of paranoid conspiracy theorist. He cleared his throat and relaxed his tense posture. "The next day, Barbara Holland goes missing from Harrington's party and is deemed a runaway until a year later, when it's revealed she was actually killed by some kind of chemical leak from Hawkins Lab."

Jeff tilted his head, brows pinched. "I thought the chemical leak was last year? Weren't all the farms with rotting crops because of that?"

"Exactly!" Eddie nearly pounced at him out of his chair. "Two separate chemical leaks from the same place almost exactly a year apart? It's fishy, don't you think?"

Brian squinted at him, unimpressed, "So, what? You think they weren't chemical leaks?"

Eddie tilted his head in assent. "That's one theory, or..." he pointed to another note scribbled on the page, "the lab isn't really doing 'Department of Energy' experiments, they're doing other shady stuff."

Brian eyed the notebook and said. "So, what's up with the rabid and/or wild dogs?"

Eddie huffed in annoyance. "I don't know! Maybe they're like, genetically engineering weird animals to unleash on the Soviets or something." He rolled his eyes. "How am I supposed to know the details of a secret government experiment, genius?"

Eddie sighed in frustration. He glanced over his notebook again. After his post-junkyard chats with Harrington, he had hastily jotted down all of the details he could remember and circled them in bubbles, connecting them with lines and arrows through is haphazard research at the library, like some kind of demented flow-chart. Skimming over the page now, he tried to organize his thoughts, but was interrupted when Gareth jabbed a finger at the bubble labelled 'Starcourt'.

"What does the mall have to do with anything?" He asked, almost petulantly.

"Other than the fact that it burned down just a few months after it opened?" Jeff adds thoughtfully.

Eddie groaned and pressed his knuckles into his eyes. "Ugh, I don't know! It was one of the things Harrington mentioned, but when I tried to dig into it more, all I could find was about its opening, or the heroes, Chief Hopper and Harrington himself, of its demise."

Gareth quirked an unimpressed eyebrow. "Its heroes?"

"Hopper, who died in there, and Harrington who got brutally maimed, apparently in order to help other people escape." Eddie crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. "Which fits with what Wheeler was saying a while ago."

Eddie could feel another detail trying to come to the surface of his mind. Something else related that he definitely was told by someone, but can't quite grasp the what or the who. He chewed the inside of his cheek and rummaged through his brain to figure out what it was as the conversation carried on around him.

"Heroes." Gareth scoffed. "Based on whose account? Those kids that practically worship him?" He rolled his eyes. "So he got a little banged up. A lot of other people just died."

A somber silence settled over the table for a moment as everyone seemed to think back to the tragedy that had consumed the town for the remainder of the summer. Eventually, they all seemed to snap back to themselves as if nothing had happened.

"You know, now that you mention it, I think I remember seeing Harrington at Melvald's a couple days after the fire," Brian mused, "looked like he'd lost another fight with Hargrove."

Hargrove. Eddie's brain snapped to attention. Max's haunted eyes as she recounted her nightmares. 'Or, it’s the mall. And Billy doesn’t- he lets Jane die.' Eddie furrowed his brow in thought. Seemed like Harrington and the Chief weren't the only ones doing some life saving that night.

He sunk lower in his chair, unnoticed by his friends. It seemed like every new clue he got only lead to more questions.

Who is Jane? What were they all doing at the mall that night, instead of going to the fair like literally every other person between the ages of 10 and 18? Why would saving people from a fire lead to injuries similar to losing a fist fight? How is any of this connected to anything else?

Eddie covered his face with his hands. He had to be missing something. Something big.

He sprung back into the conversation, sitting up and leaning back onto the table with a swiftness that made his friends start.

"What are we missing?" He asked, searching each of their faces for any semblance of an idea. When all he got in response was varying levels of blankness and confusion, he sighed and looked back to his notebook, as if something new might have appeared in the 5 minutes he looked away from it.

He blinked at it a few times. While there was nothing new on the page, he seemed to notice a pattern that he hadn't before. All of the bubbles and arrows... in some way or another they all seemed to circle back to-

"The lab!" Eddie exclaimed, which earned him curious looks from the others.

When Eddie didn't elaborate, Jeff probed, "What about the lab?"

Eddie's brain was flying a mile a minute. Scheming. Plotting. He grinned mischievously. "It's completely abandoned now, right?"

Jeff shrugged. Brian and Gareth exchanged a glance that was unreadable to Eddie, but he didn't care. He steepled his fingers together in a fashion similar to when he was setting up a particularly tricky puzzle during one of their campaigns.