To Heal All Wounds

Prologue: The Return

When Eddie came to, he was no longer laying on the ground, bleeding in his friend's arms in the Upside Down. Quite the opposite. He was standing. Whole. In the real world. It was a disorienting feeling, like realizing that you overslept and you go from asleep to awake in an instant.

It took him a moment to remember how to move his arms and his legs. They felt tingly and numb as he flexed circulation back into them. He shook out his hands to stop the ache as sensation returned and rotated his ankles to make sure he was standing correctly. When he regained control of his limbs, he touched his neck where the Demobat had bitten him and felt nothing. Only soft flesh. The rest of his body was the same. Untouched. Uninjured. Whole.

Even scars he'd had before he... died... were gone.

The scar on his middle finger from a mishap with a knife while cooking as a kid. The blotch on the rise of his palm from falling off of his bike. Even the nick on his jaw from a particularly bad cut while shaving in his early teens. They were all just... gone.

His clothes, however, were a different story. They were ripped and tattered and stained with blood that was no longer gushing from his body. They were the only physical confirmation that what he'd just experienced had actually happened.

He could still hear the bats around him. His ears were still ringing from the thunder and the shrieking and his own war cries. His hand still ached from the sharp edges of the handle to his makeshift shield. Looking down, the patches of raw and bruised skin from his white-knuckle grip on the handle had also vanished.

The only thing lingering was the sensation of pain, and even that was swiftly becoming a fuzzy memory.

He was sweating.

He reached up to pull his bandana off and wipe his face, but it was gone. He cussed. It had been his favorite.

"What happened," came a voice he struggled to recognize as his own. No one answered, though there was quite the crowd around him he was beginning to notice. As he continued to "wake up" as it were, he noticed people next to him. And then beyond them were more people. And more after that. A crowd had... gathered? Been deposited? Arrived? Some people he recognized, some he didn't. Well, most he didn't, to be perfectly honest. But they all looked as confused as he was, which was comforting. Occasionally someone would ask "what happened" or "what's going on?" but no one ever had the answer.

One thing was very clear, however.

Everyone in the field at that moment had vanished from Hawkins under mysterious circumstances.

"I remember a figure... tall and pale with no face..." someone next to Eddie mused, their hand over their mouth as they spoke.

"That's right, it had like... petals..." someone else confirmed.

"It walked on all fours." A third speaker Eddie still didn't recognize entered the conversation.

"It walked on two legs, are you insane," interjected a fourth. The first speaker nodded, but the second shook their head vigorously.

"I fell into the abyss during the earthquake," said a fifth.

"Earthquake," Eddie parrotted, his voice sounding more and more like his own with each passing second.

The third speaker sneered, something Eddie was used to, but they were quickly elbowed by the second.

"Mark, you went missing before we found out..."

They trailed off, their gaze lingering on Eddie for an uncomfortable amount of time before Eddie finally turned away. It didn't matter what they found out in the end. Probably nothing good, given the way the other person had regarded him. With a mixture of fear and... something else. Regret? Or perhaps sadness? Eddie never had been good at reading other people.