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vintagehellfire · 2 months

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Life Eternal | E.M

summary: You'd promised each other your souls forever, that you'd be with each other forever...

warnings: angst, hurt/no comfort, grief, major character death, graves, death, no seriously there is no comfort... okay maybe mayyyyyybe if you squint, but tbh just pure hurt, based on Life Eternal by Ghost

18+ MDNI

There was no denying the pain that came with having someone ripped from you far too soon, but what was worse was being unable even to have one last goodbye, being unable to see their face one last time before their soul departed from their body and before the rot settled in. There was something akin to a knife being driven through one's chest repeatedly when the devastating news of a loved one taking their last breath was delivered, and it was made much worse when the two parties touched each other’s souls in a way that no other had been able to.

Tears fell onto the dampened earth, the lot still fresh, disturbed. The cold granite of the headstone felt glacial and yet unreal. It was a physical manifestation of devastation and yet its existence felt completely ersatz. Not only because the stone was clean for the most part - barring the red spray paint that refused to be removed, another permanent mark on the memories of that which is lost - but also because stuck out like a sore thumb in the old and run-down cemetery, a symbol of the young loss.

Sobs wracked your body and your breathing uneven, but how could it ever be even again? It wouldn’t be, not as you sat at your kitchen table to receive the news, not as you received the devastating emotional blow of finding out that there wasn’t a body to be recovered, and not when you were in front of his grave, knowing that he wasn’t even beneath the earth below your feet. How nobody was able to find him left your mouth drier than the Sahara - you weren’t able to hold his hand one last time, no matter how cold they would be, unable to see his button nose or hug his dying body to you as you lost him for what felt like the second time in the span of a week. You choked on your breath for what was probably the hundredth time, the hundredth time you breathed your soul out through earth-shattering devastation.

With nobody but the sodden cemetery ground to turn to, you fisted the earth and let out a heart-shattering sob into the open air, nobody to hear you or to console you through the pain. The one person you wanted most was the one person you would never see again. The lump in your throat silenced your voice, vocal cords worn thin from the sleepless nights that you sobbed into the infamous Hellfire shirt he wore. His scent was quickly fading from it and once you had realised that you were left an even bigger wreck than you could have imagined - the last tether to him slowly fraying, the last little fibres unravelling themselves in tune to your own emotional demise.

Your whole body shook with anger and heartbreak - you wanted to get out of this god-forsaken town, but he haunted you and this cursed place was the only thing keeping him alive. You could swear that you’d feel his hands on your shoulders while you tried to cook - the first time it happened, you called his name before the sensation disappeared into thin air, leaving you heaving for oxygen. Your food was forgotten and left to burn while your wails carried through your apartment and your eyes stung from the tears. That night you sobbed until there was no longer any breath left in your lungs, until the walls of your home felt cold and unwelcoming.

The second time it happened, you were walking past the arcade and you could have sworn you felt his hands on your hips and a laughter-filled call of your name. That time you spun around so quickly you nearly lost your balance, head whipping around to see who it was behind you, but his voice haunted you and so you pushed past everyone in your way, trying to hold yourself together enough to break down the moment you reached your car. You didn’t make it and instead, you found yourself sitting by your car’s front tire as you bawled, your body wracked with tremors. They felt never-ending – the tremors – terrorising you when you would least expect them. You longed for his arms around you again, to hear his laugh, to dance with him in your little kitchen as you did on the first night you had moved into your place. The memory only served as a painful reminder of that which you no longer had. Your body had memorised the way he held you to him, his quivering voice that told you that you’d touched his soul forever before leaning in for the most gentle kiss. The way his kiss seared into your skin was like a burn that would flare up when you least expected it, and it was clear that he too had touched your soul in a more permanent way than you had ever expected him to.

“Eddie…” You sniffled, managing to find the capacity to croak out his name for the first time in months but the assault of tears that came immediately after you breathed life back into his name was too painful, your chest seizing, lungs collapsing on themselves as if you’d just been plummeted a thousand leagues under the dark ocean. Your life certainly felt much darker with him gone. You longed for him, even while he was around, you longed to spend time in his arms, to hear him ramble about his campaigns, about his little sheep, but now that he was gone you couldn’t help but yearn for all that you used to have with him.

It had been months of this, of showing up to his gravestone and having to clean it from the obscenities that adorned it, a painful reminder of how little love he received for how much of it he had in his heart. You spent agonising hours scrubbing the red paint off with cleaning products and salty tears, leaving flowers and letters to him in hopes that they would somehow reach him on the other side, and yet with each passing day, the fire that lit your soul grew darker, and the yearning only grew stronger. Your jaw was in a state of constant pain from how much you were trying to hold yourself together, clenching it in both your waking hours and the moment sleep consumed you, trying to keep your very being from shattering.

“Can you hear me say your name? Can you see me longing for you?” Your voice was hoarse, unused for far too long. You barely recognised it yourself, as if it was a third party speaking for you, projecting your thoughts for you. The moment you realised you had spoken, another wave hit you, knocking you down further than you had been before. You dug your hands into the graveyard dirt and let out a shaky breath, unable to fathom the reality that wrapped itself like a noose around your neck, slowly suffocating you. You wanted nothing more than to scream but the cry never came - your last breath was spent, it seemed, and all you could muster was a weak whimper. How could he be gone? You wondered to yourself, unable to come to terms with the devastating passing of your boyfriend. You refused to believe it, the lack of a body, he couldn’t be gone, could he? But as the days passed, your hope dwindled, and you had to resign yourself to the reality that he was gone. You had to just let go… Or so everyone seemed to preach.

The promises you both whispered to each other in the dead of night, when the witching hour struck, and you had nothing but each other, haunted you. Sometimes you swore that you could hear whispers of his voice when you couldn’t fall asleep but ultimately it was most likely your delirious conscience that plagued you, making you hear things in the dead of night.

“You promised…” Your sobs wracked your body, shuddering the more you tried to contain your tears, your voice completely breaking as you let go of the last ounce of strength that held you together. Your mind wandered to the sweet nothings that Eddie would shower you with, and that is what they amounted to in the end, wasn’t it? Nothing. With him gone, you didn’t have any options but to let go of those feelings, those sweet words, those promises of being yours forever. His romantic monologues and ramblings of being yours forever, and if death chose to do you part, how he’d find your soul once again from the afterlife, you had to let them go for they found themselves amounting to nothing. Death did you part, except it didn’t take you as well.

You danced slowly in the candlelight, your hand on his shoulder, his on your waist, and his soft lips right beside your ear. He pulled you close to his body and while he was warm, his hands were cold against yours, as if he’d just come in from a cold winter’s night, but all he had done was share a joint with you, something that loosened you both up after your long day. His wild curls tickled your soft face and you giggled at some ridiculous line he was feeding you but soon the suave facade fell and his voice dropped to a low murmur.

“Sweetheart, I love you.” His voice rattled, rattled like old windows in a summer storm, sturdy, protective, and yet stable, protecting that on the inside. “I would rip the heavens apart to find you again. I’d search for you in the afterlife if it meant I could be with you in lifetimes to come.” And while this sounded like standard Munson drivel, there was a certain intonation that inclined you to believe him.

“I don’t think God would be too happy with you, Munson, nor the devil himself for that matter.” You tried to joke with him but it fell on deaf ears. Eddie was unrelenting with his honesty. His voice was earnest and thick with emotion when he answered you, a conviction you’d never heard before lacing itself into every word.

“I don’t care, sweetheart, I’d fight Gods and devils alike… I’d fight Satan himself for you if it meant getting to be with you in the next life.” You couldn’t do anything but hold him closer in this moment, your words dying on your tongue. How were you to answer him when his emotions were so raw? How could you even muster up something as eloquent to say to him when he opened his heart up to you in such a vulnerable way?

“I’d raise armies to rip hell apart to find you, Eddie. I’d be longing for you forever…” You whispered to him as you both slowly danced together, the candles flickering softly, illuminating both your features in a warm glow - there was nothing more beautiful than the love you both shared, nothing more pure.

Your forehead fell to the dank earth, lungs set ablaze by your dry heaving. You couldn’t find it in you to make this the moment you just let it go. Your soul called out for him as you longed painfully for his touch, his soft words of reassurance, but you wouldn’t get them, never again. The most you had was the little love notes he left you, his DnD notebooks… There wasn’t all too much that was left of your boyfriend, and you cherished every last thing that you had in your possession. He had touched your soul forever, whether he knew it or not.

Your eyes burned painfully as sobs tore through your raw throat, your fingers digging further into the fresh dirt of the uprooted grave. The further you stuck your hands in, the more you prayed you’d hit something, anything, but you never would. Your hands would grow cold, and there would be a story in your heart - yours and Eddie’s - but your hands would never again find his body, never again hold him to you. They would never run through his tangled curls, or feel the plush of his lips, no, instead they’d feel the humidity seep into their bones and devour them from the inside out the longer you kept them buried, and the dirt would surely cake your fingernails to the point you wouldn’t be able to get it out from underneath them. The scent of petrichor would overtake the smell of weed, cigarettes, and his cheap musky cologne. You’d never feel his callouses graze across your soft skin again, and that small detail, the one that made Eddie so… so him, would in a year escape you, fading into nothingness as you were forced to let go of him.

You wanted to dance with him once again, to feel the chill of his long fingers against yours but that was something that wouldn’t ever come back. Not even in the ghostings of touches, the whispers and bumps that came in the night. No matter how much those moments shattered you, no matter how much pain they brought on, the most painful would be the moment you forget the feeling of his lips or the way his hands splayed across the small of your back - those moments would disappear one day… or one day until someone came along that made you remember it, and that day would be one that would make every other touch but Eddie’s feel wrong. Nobody would have the honour to touch you in the same ways as he did.

As you bawled into the graveyard dirt, you could have sworn there was a weight on your upper back and while it wasn’t pushing you into the dirt itself, it might as well have been. Part of you hoped it would be Eddie’s arm around you but when you turned, your body was violently assaulted by an onslaught of sobs at the realisation that your boyfriend wasn’t there to hold you while you cried. You were choking on each short breath, unable to calm yourself down. The one time you needed him more than anyone, he wasn’t present.

I’m here. Just breathe, sweetheart, thassit, I’ve got you.

There was something so off about the whole situation, about how clinically everything was treated, about how none of his “friends” seemed to show up. The funeral was quick and dirty, arranged by Wayne and yourself in the best way you both knew and after everything was said and done, you hid away, isolating yourself from the world itself. You barely left the house. The only time you breathed the fresh Hawkins air was when you went to visit his grave or the once-a-month trip to get groceries. You should have gone to see Wayne but he reminded you too much of everything that was ripped away from you and while you yearned to visit the man and sit down with him, to speak Eddie back into existence through memories and laughter, you couldn’t bring yourself to do so. You couldn’t bring yourself to break your heart over and over again even though you knew that in some capacity you both needed each other in order to sew together your broken hearts.

“P-please Eds…” You choked out, your emotions were getting away from you, the more you thought about it, about him, the more you felt like you lost your family. He was your rock, the love of your life, in your own ways you’d sworn yourselves over to each other, sworn yourselves to life eternal with one another, and so having him ripped from you so suddenly left a dark pit in your chest, deeper than the ninth circle of hell would ever reach. You didn’t think it would have been possible for

I’m right here with you, sweetheart.

The wind blew colder and you shivered, but you didn’t dare move, not an inch, because it meant moving from the grave you’d come to memorise - your muscles, your fingers, your heart, even your nose, all of you had come to memorise his grave - it was ingrained in you, and the epitaph was one that burned across your vision every single time your eyes closed – another ghost haunting you as you tried desperately to soothe your aching heart. People who say breakups would be easier are liars, you decided in this moment.

They’re not… I promise you they’re not easy. At least nobody can compete with the dead.

They’d be easier because maybe on the off chance you’d get to have the person in your life, in your heart, you wouldn’t lose all the meaningful quirks the person had, you wouldn’t forget them in due time. You wouldn’t have a dead-end trail left of them, and yet… and yet it wouldn’t be easy either. Part of you wished you could have been the one to see the light disappear from his eyes, to have this confirmation of his departure from the mortal realm, another part of you didn’t even want to think of the darkness taking over his eyes, the reflection of the light fading to nothing, his breath stopping, and his brain giving out. You simultaneously wanted and did not want to be the one to witness his last breath, you did and didn’t want to be the one to watch the light behind his eyes disappear as he croaked, you did and did not want him gone because you weren’t sure which would wind up being easier to deal with.

Neither would be easy, sweetheart.

“I wish you were here, Eds.” You sniffled the moment your sobs slowed, your body taking too much stock into keeping you alive and warm. You had exhausted yourself and cried every last tear you had in you for today, leaving a dry husk - a shell of a human – until tomorrow when you’d replenished your tear ducks.

I’m right here with you always. I’m not going anywhere, I promised you that not even death could do us part.A cold gust of air pushed your hair from your face and you couldn’t contain your shiver, the cold was becoming as unbearable as your boyfriend’s passing, every waking hour haunted by memories of him, every corner of Hawkins harbouring his ghost, and every unconscious moment plagued by nightmares of his last moments, twisting memories, contorting them into grotesque scenes of abject horror. With a deep breath, you pushed yourself up to your knees and swallowed down any emotions you had, bringing your soiled sleeve to your face and wiping away the tears that threatened to spill. You were sure you looked like you had just crawled out of the grave due to the amount of dirt that caked your body and yet you couldn’t bring yourself to care, not when he was gone.

With a shaky breath, you leaned over and kissed his gravestone, your eyes fluttering shut, and at that moment you swore you heard his voice calling to you, you swore you felt the warmth of his hand on your puffy cheek, his thumb brushing across the damp valley of your eye. You kept your eyes shut for just a moment longer, longing to feel this small moment of reprieve despite the fact that it probably did far more harm than it did good.

“I’m with you always, sweetheart.” Your eyes snapped open and your head dropped against the headstone, lip trembling as you tried to bite into it from the inside of your mouth - you couldn’t stop the heavy squeezing around your heart nor the feeling of a dark pit opening itself up in your stomach. When you lost your boyfriend a chasm had ripped itself through your chest, leaving you empty and numb to everything but the onslaught of pain that each waking moment brought you. Each waking moment was plagued with the knowledge that Eddie was gone before you were even aware of it. You hadn’t even been in town when the manhunt had begun, having been away to visit your mother’s side of the family, only to come home to find out he was in hiding - ripped away from you once, then twice.

The fresh torrential downpour of tears was unexpected but they kept you at his grave, they kept you closer to him, they kept him alive even by some fucked up means. If crying for him meant that his memory was kept alive then you’d cry for him into the next lifetime, and while you thought you’d cried them all away, it seemed that neither love nor grief had limits.