A/N [from August 2025] As promised, the original ending of Part IV is still here in case you want to reminisce about a happier Eddie ending.
❤️

A/N [from 2022] You know how I said part 4 was going to get scary then sad then weird and fun? Welcome to the weird and fun!

{The Piggyback, Part III}

Alice regained consciousness when she heard the familiar chords of Lance's favorite song:

"Wasting away again in Margaritaville..."

Eyes still closed, she stirred. It felt like she was lying in her bed. Was she in bed?

"...searching for my lost shaker of salt."

She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms. What happened? Wasn't she just in the Upside Down with Steve?

"Some people claim that there's a woman to blame, but I know it's my own damn fault."

What sounded like a chainsaw revving up drowned out the song's outro. Alice snapped her eyes open and bolted to a sitting position.

She was in bed, but it wasn't her own. It was a California-King-size waterbed with a fluffy white duvet cover.

The bed was in the middle of a modest one-room apartment. Across from the bed was a set of French doors leading to a sandy beach. Glistening blue waves lapped the shore in the distance.

To the right of the bed was a small living space: a sofa, TV, and shelf of board games.

To the left, a kitchenette. Alice blinked a couple times to ensure she was actually seeing what she thought: Clive Cottontail dumping tequila into a blender (the "chainsaw" she heard) while humming the Jimmy Buffett song.

"What the fuck?!" Alice said.

Clive turned and beamed.

"Alice!" he said. "Oh, I missed you!"

He hopped off the counter and across the room, jumping onto the bed with a soft thud.

"Did you hear the song?" he said urgently.

Alice rubbed her forehead.

"Wait a minute," she said. "My Walkman fucking up and playing Jimmy Buffett—that was you?!"

"Yes!" Clive said. "Vecna tried to sever our connection when he took your powers. Thankfully, that brute didn't realize just how strong such a connection is! Even with your weakened powers, I could reach out in my own way. I couldn't become corporeal, so I went with the next best thing."

"This song was the next best thing?" Alice deadpanned, nodding in the direction of the boombox on the counter playing "Margaritaville" on a loop.

"My original plan was to play a bunch of different songs," Clive said sheepishly, crossing his paws behind his back. "And mash them together, to make messages! But it turns out paws are not great for changing cassettes."

"But they are great for making margaritas!" a scratchy voice said from the sofa. "Hop to it!"

Alice whipped her head toward the right, eyes bugging out when she noticed: "Mews?!"

Sure enough, the Henderson's late cat sat atop a pile of pillows, looking regal.

"That's Cheshire Mews to you," she purred.

Alice let out a laugh of disbelief.

"Oh, shit," Alice said. "This dream...this one takes the cake as weirdest one ever."

"You're not dreaming, Alice," Clive said quietly.

"No, I am," Alice said. She pushed back the comforter and stood from the bed. "I passed out in the Upside Down, and I'm probably in the back of an ambulance, and they gave me morphine or something, and now I'm having insane dreams where my imaginary friend and my dead cat get drunk and listen to beach music."

"Clive's right!" Mews said. "This isn't a dream. This is your new reality."

Alice frowned.

"No. This isn't...no. This isn't funny, okay?"

She looked up at the sky.

"I want to wake up now!" she screeched.

"Alice," Clive said, "please take a seat. What I'm about to tell you is quite shocking."

Alice didn't like the sound of that. Didn't like the way he looked at her, either. But she sat on a barstool, prepared to listen. Clive hopped back onto the counter, and Mews lazily sauntered to a cat tree by the refrigerator.

Clive cleared his throat and dropped the bombshell: "You are not dead, but you are not alive."

The second half of his sentence rattled around in Alice's skull: you are not alive. You are not alive. You are not alive.

"What do you mean?" she said, struggling to keep her voice steady. "I can't be both!"

"Of course you can!" Clive said. "Remember what Robin told you about? Schrödinger's Cat? The cat in the box with poison?"

"How horrible," Mews said with a huff. "Who would lock a sweet cat in a death trap like that?"

"The cat is dead and alive!" Clive continued, ignoring Mews. "You are now that cat! Schrödinger's Cat."

"Schrödinger's Alice," Mews corrected.

Alice's brain short-circuited. This was too weird for her.

"If I'm dead and alive," Alice snapped, "what does that make this place, huh?" She gestured around the apartment. "Is this heaven, or the afterlife, or whatever?"

"This is a liminal space," Clive said. "An in-between. The next few hours are crucial for you. The small sliver of powers you have left after Vecna's latest attack will either bring you back to your life and your friends, or..."

"Or you've got a one way ticket to those pearly gates," Mews said. "Unless you were bad. Then you're on the escalator to hell."

Alice glowered at the cat.

"Gee, Cheshire Mews," she quipped. "Thanks for that vote of confidence!"

"Anytime," Mews said, before settling on the top of her cat tree.

"Do you have any questions?" Clive asked.

"Do I have questions? Do I have questions? Of course I fucking have questions! You just told me that I'm pretty much dead!"

"Not dead, not alive. There's a difference."

"I have to try something!" Alice said, standing from the barstool. "I can fight my way back, right?"

"Unfortunately not," Clive said grimly. "All you can do is wait."

Alice let out a strangled cry and kicked the barstool.

"Look on the bright side!" Mews said. "You can drink with us in the interim. Clive, pour the lady a margarita. God knows she needs one after the day she's had."

"One margarita, coming right up!" Clive said, way too cheery given the circumstances.

Alice sank into the barstool and dropped her head in her hands. Clive poured her drink into a salt-rimmed glass and slid it over to her.

"Drink up, Alice! And welcome to Margaritaville!"

🌊 🌊 🌊

A little while later, Alice, Mews, and Clive sat in beach chairs just outside the apartment's doors. Clive and Mews sipped their margaritas out of crazy straws, looking like the pinnacle of vacation bliss. Alice scowled at the beautiful waves, chewing on the straw of her now-empty glass.

"This blows," she said. "I hate waiting! You're sure I can't do anything to re-alive myself fully?"

"For the hundredth time," Mews drawled, "that's a no."

Alice groaned and tossed an arm over her eyes.

"I've already been here for, what? Seventeen hours?"

"It's been 35 minutes!" Mews said with a laugh.

Alice groaned louder.

"Maybe we should find a fun way to pass the time," Clive said. "What about a board game? We could play Cluedo? I bloody love Cluedo."

"A murder-mystery game?" Alice said with narrowed eyes. "After I just got murdered by Vecna? Too soon, Clive."

"Technically you haven't been murdered," Clive explained, "because you aren't fully dead."

"You were, like, two-thirds murdered," Mews said. "Or seven-eighths."

"Whatever the fraction is," Alice said through clenched teeth, "I don't want to play Clue."

"If someone teaches me how to spell," Mews said, "I'd be a beast at Scrabble."

"What about Twister?" Clive offered. "We could get up, stretch our legs."

"I don't want to play games!" Alice said. The corners of her eyes prickled with hot tears. "I want to go home! I want my mom!"

"That traitor," Mews hissed—literally. "She replaced me less than two weeks after my untimely death with that jerk Tews. What a stupid name for a cat."

"I want Tews!" Alice lamented. "I want to pet my cat and eat ice cream and drive Dustin to the arcade and kiss Steve and do living people stuff!"

"How about another drink?" Clive said, hopping off his beach chair.

He pranced into the kitchen and hopped to the counter. Alice heard him start to hum Jimmy Buffett. She got hit with a realization and shot to her feet, racing inside after him.

"Wait up!" Mews called, leaping onto all fours and stretching before following.

"Clive!" Alice said. "You said you were going to use a bunch of cassettes to string together sentences and messages for me, right?"

"Indeed I was!" Clive said, salting the rim of a new glass.

"So you have more tapes, and you can, like, project the music into the real world? Like what Will did with his favorite song when he was stuck in the Upside Down?"

"I bloody well can! The other tapes are in the nightstand—"

Alice fully yanked the drawer out of the nightstand and slammed it onto the counter. She dug through the plethora of cassettes, looking for a select few.

"What the heck are you doing?" Mews asked.

"What does it look like? I'm sending my friends a message!"

"What good would that do?" Mews huffed.

"I don't know!" Alice said, a frantic edge to her voice as she started stacking the tapes she needed on the countertop nearby. "But I need Steve and Dustin and them to know I'm okay—sort of—so they don't bury me alive or something! Now, you two get your paws over here and help me find Jefferson Airplane."

🎵🎵🎵

Steve didn't remember how he and Alice got to the Winnebago.

After CPR, he scooped her up in his arms and sprinted back to the trailer park, tears blurring his vision. He remembered seeing Kali, Robin, and Nancy running to meet him halfway, and then...nothing, until this moment now, where he sat in the RV with bloodstained hands—Alice's blood—and tried to drown out Robin and Nancy's panicked whispers.

"Harrington?"

Steve held Alice's Walkman tightly, gripping it like a lifeline. He sat at the table, his back to where Robin and Nancy tried to rebandage the unconscious, barely alive Alice's wounds on the couch. A horrendous cycle occurred, where every time her ribs seeped blood, she started to heal them, but then the healing abruptly stopped and the bleeding got worse.

"Hey, Harrington?"

It was his nightmare come true. Vecna showed visions of Alice dying in his arms, and when it actually happened, it was even worse than Steve could have imagined. It was touch and go, and Steve feared that any minute she'd stop breathing again—

"Steve!"

He snapped his head up and made eye contact with Eddie, who sat across from him.

"You doing okay, man?" Eddie asked, voice low.

Steve swallowed a snarky comment about how he was very obviously not okay, and instead said, "Shouldn't I be asking you that?"

"Oh, this?" Eddie said. He gestured to his bandaged neck and stomach and shot Steve a sarcastic grin. "You should see the other guys."

Steve noticed Dustin stand from the passenger seat.

"Henderson!" Steve barked. "Stay off that leg!"

"I want to check on Alice!" Dustin said, hobbling toward the back.

"Hey, buddy," Robin said, meeting Dustin halfway and steering him back toward the front so he wouldn't see the bloodied mess that was his sister. "You've got to stay up here and give Kali directions to the hospital."

Dustin craned his neck to look around Robin and frowned.

"She's really pale," Dustin said, brow furrowed. "She's going to be okay, right?"

"Of course!" Robin said, shooting Dustin the fakest smile this side of the Mississippi.

Dustin's expression contorted to a scowl.

"Don't bullshit me!" Dustin snapped. "Let me see—"

The Winnebago careened to the left, everyone struggling to regain balance.

"Steady on the road, please!" Nancy shouted, eyes wide and frazzled.

"Is now a good time to admit I do not have a driver's license?" Kali called from behind the wheel.

Before the group could panic about that new development, Alice's Walkman crackled and began to play a song:

"Go ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall."

Steve blinked a couple times, wondering if he had hallucinated that. Did he press play by accident? Was "White Rabbit" even on this mixtape?

He held the headphones up to his ear and listened intently as another lyric played:

"Go ask Alice, I think she'll know."

Steve turned in his seat so fast, he probably gave himself whiplash. He looked between Alice and the Walkman, forehead creased with concentration. He tuned out Robin and Dustin's bickering and focused on the next line, from a different song:

"And Betty, when you call me, you can call me Al!"

"Shut up!" Steve shouted, snapping his fingers to get Robin, Eddie, and Dustin's attention. "Something's happening with Alice's Walkman!"

He turned up the volume and held out the headphones so the others could hear:

"And Betty, when you call me, you can call me Al!"

"I'm confused," Robin said. "What's happening exactly?"

"Her Walkman just started playing," Steve said. "And it's, like, playing songs that aren't on the tape."

"Alice said it was doing that all week," Dustin said. "Kept playing 'Margaritaville.'"

"And now it's playing Paul Simon!" Steve said. "And Jefferson Airplane!"

"Harrington," Eddie said cautiously, with a raised eyebrow. "What are you implying?"

Steve swallowed, fully aware of how idiotic and crazy he was about to sound.

"Listen to the words, okay?" Steve said. "I think it's a message. A message...from Alice."

Steve, Robin, Dustin, and Eddie turned to where the girl in question was laying. Nancy continuously tried to stop the bleeding.

"Robin!" Nancy said. Her voice was an octave higher than normal. "Some help over here, please?"

Robin jumped into action, leaving the boys to huddle around the Walkman and try to make sense of its messages.

🎼 🎼 🎼

Back in Margaritaville, Alice fumbled to load a new cassette into the boombox and fast forwarded to the right line.

"God, I hope this is working," she muttered. "Okay, hit it!"

Clive pressed play.

"If we took a holiday, took some time to celebrate, just one day out of life it would be—it would be so nice!"

"Ah, clever!" Clive said. "'Just one day out of life.' A double meaning!"

"It probably won't make any sense to them," Alice said. She popped a new tape into the boombox. "But worth a shot, right?"

Clive pressed play once more.

"Don't you know I'm still standing better than I ever did? Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid. I'm still standing after all this time, picking up the pieces of my life without you on my mind. I'm still standing, yeah, yeah, yeah..."

🎶 🎶 🎶

"...I'm still standing, yeah, yeah, yeah!"

Steve's heart thudded in his chest. This had to be Alice—it just had to be!

"How is this possible?" Dustin marveled. He poked the Walkman. "Must be some kind of psychic connection. Maybe she's more like El than we thought."

"Don't you forget about me!"

"We never could, Elder Henderson!" Eddie said, speaking loudly into the Walkman as if it was a microphone.

"As you walk on by, will you call my name?"

Steve rushed to the back of the RV and stood with Nancy and Robin.

"Do you think she can hear us right now?" Steve said urgently.

Nancy's look of concentration twisted to something curious.

"Hear us?" she said. "Well, maybe. When she was in her coma, the doctors said she could."

"We've got the bleeding stopped, mostly," Robin said. She gave Steve a hopeful smile, eyes still a bit watery. "I think she's going to be okay."

Nancy covered Alice with Steve's jacket once more. Steve knelt by Alice and gently held one of her hands. He ran his thumb across her knuckles.

"Al, can you hear me?" he whispered.

A pause. For a moment, it seemed like the music was done. That is, until—

"You think I'd lay down and die? Oh no, not I! I will survive!"

Steve laughed, tears of joy falling onto his camouflage shirt.

"Even now," he mumbled, "you find a way to make me laugh. How do you do that?"

The Walkman "responded" with: "Oh, as long as I know how to love, I know I'll stay alive. I've got all my life to live, and I've got all my love to give, and I'll survive. I will survive! Hey, hey!"

Steve kissed Alice's forehead, the relief flowing through him almost palpable. They weren't out of the woods yet, but he had hope.

Dustin limped to the back and sat next to Alice on the couch. He moved her head into his lap and brushed her hair with his hand. No one had told him the full truth of what happened to Alice in the Upside Down, but at that moment, he didn't care that he was out of the loop. He was just happy that she was going to be okay.

"We are almost to the hospital," Kali called. "Do we have our cover story in tact?"

"We were on a camping trip," Nancy said, "and we got attacked by a wild animal."

"And then the earthquake happened," Robin said.

"And then we went to the hospital," Eddie said, eyes downcast, "and I got arrested for murders I didn't do."

"You do not have to worry about that," Kali said as she pulled into the hospital parking lot. "I will use my powers to disguise you. You will be unrecognizable."

Eddie perked up in his seat.

"Really? You can make me look like anyone?"

"Yes."

"What about Ozzy Osbourne?"

"I will make you look like Ozzy Osbourne's lame nephew."

"...I'll take it."

🐇 🐱 🐇

"Right paw, red!"

Although Alice had no clue if her messages actually made it to her friends, she felt a bit more optimistic and had given in to Clive's request to play games.

She sat on the edge of the waterbed with the Twister spinner and watched Mews and Clive fail miserably. After the stress of the past week (hell, the past three years), it was delightful fun.

"Front or back paw?" Clive asked.

"Whichever is harder for you to reach," Alice said, grinning mischievously.

Mews grumbled a few choice curse words and struggled, barely touching a red circle with one single claw.

"That doesn't count," Alice said.

"Shut up, yes it does!"

Alice started to retort, but suddenly felt a sharp pain across her ribs. She winced and dropped the spinner.

"Ah, shit!" Alice said. "God, that hurts."

"Oh, that's bloody brilliant!" Clive said, standing on his back paws and thumping them on the floor excitedly.

"Doesn't feel so brilliant!" Alice said. She screwed her eyes shut, trying to ride out the wave of pain cresting across her abdomen.

"Don't you get it?!" Mews said. "If you're feeling the pain again, you're probably not going to die!"

"Wait, really?"

"I'd bet you'll wake up back in your world any second now!" Clive said. "Maybe we have time for one more drink, to celebrate!"

He and Mews started toward the blender to pour one last margarita. Alice stood to follow them, but all the lights in this weird, strange beach world brightened until she couldn't see anything but brilliant light.

The light dimmed, only slightly. Alice could see ceiling tiles and fluorescent bulbs zipping past above her—wait, no! She was laying flat on her back, moving impossibly fast.

She blinked wearily and heard muffled chatter on all sides.

"What's her name?"

"Alice, her name is Alice Henderson."

"Alice, can you hear me?"

Alice tried to speak, but her throat was too scratchy. It felt like tiny needles were stabbing her from head to toe. The dull ache in her ribs caused her to groan in pain.

"Page Dr. Clovers and prep an OR. She's going to need stitches and a blood transfusion."

Alice lolled her head to the side and tried to focus on one of the many faces around her. They were all strangers in scrubs.

They tossed around a few more words she'd heard on General Hospital—"Push 20 CCs of" some drug she couldn't pronounce.

Alice, with much effort, lifted her head. Off in the distance at the end of this long hallway, she saw her brother, her boyfriend, and her friends standing by some double doors. She swore she could've cried tears of joy.

However, there was one stranger amongst them.

"Is that Ozzy Osbourne?" she croaked, before passing out.

{Posted October 21st, 2022; Republished March 27th, 2025}

A/N [from 2022] The songs referenced in this chapter are:

White Rabbit - Jefferson Airplane

You Can Call Me Al - Paul Simon (technically didn't come out until September 1986 but this is fanfic so it's fine)

Holiday - Madonna

I'm Still Standing - Elton John

Don't You Forget About Me - Simple Minds

I Will Survive - Gloria Gaynor

QOTD: You're not dead/not alive in Margaritaville. Which game are you playing with Clive and Mews?

A: MarioKart OR Mario Super Strikers (I think that's the name of the soccer one I like)