Chapter Text
Steve walks through the ghost of his house and flicks the lights on, one by one. In the kitchen behind him there’s chips and dip, popcorn and Milk Duds and beer on the counter, and pop in the fridge, in case anyone wants. There’s nothing to clean—housekeeping came by early this week—but he picks up his running shoes and tosses them in the closet. Licks his thumb and smears a speck of dirt off the door handle. Rearranges a few of his mom’s baubles and trinkets on the foyer table.
Behind him, the pool wobbles threads of blue-white light over the living room walls, blotted through with the yellow-glow of one spider lamp. He’d spent all morning recalibrating, getting the temperature right, in case anyone ends up wanting to dive in. A few times, now, Eddie has joked about it—how refreshing it would be to finish off a long day of work at the garage followed up by their movie nights by stripping down to his skivvies and cannon-balling in so hard that the neighbors think it’s the flood that’s come for Hawkins, this time. Which’ll win, you think, my motor oil and grease or your chlorine?
If getting Eddie clean was the point, Steve would dump him in first, before letting him on the furniture.
Except Steve hates the pool. Hasn’t gone swimming since that night at Lover’s Lake, and not for years before that. But he’d sit out there with them, if they wanted. Nurse his wounded pride like his beer, remembering his golden years, when he’d clock two hours of laps before school and another few with a pretty girl wrapped around him in the shallow end, after.
At the front door Steve draws in a breath. His fingertips dust over the gilt edge of a picture frame, a kid posed with some trophy. Thirteen, maybe. Innocent, smiling wide and toothy.
“For chrissake, Harrington,” he huffs. “It’s just another movie night, not a damn party. Relax.”
If it was, he’d go through the same routine he had perfected a lifetime ago: tucking the frame with all the rest of them throughout the house into the china cabinet against the evening’s debauchery. The simple joy of a clean house would be less important than the keg in the back, the girls on their way.
Now his party years are behind him, like some place he’d left behind in his rearview, so far away he can’t even make out the foggy shape of them anymore. First Barb, then Nancy, then everything that came after. Now, he’s just some veteran watching from his stoop, flipping the switch to light the way for the van sputtering down the street. Like old Mr Sanderson, a few houses down, when he stands in his door and rails at the kids who dare step on his lawn.
Still. Steve reaches back behind him to flip the photo face-down.
The night breeze is warm when he opens the door, so Steve puts his shoulder to the jamb and leans there while headlights sweep over the hill. Even from here he can hear the thump of the bass rattling the side panels, though the closer it gets, the more that screeching guitar layers over top.
Out the open driver’s side window Eddie throws him the devil’s horns, tongue between his teeth, and squeals into the driveway. The engine cutting off pitches the stillness of the night into sharp relief: even the crickets pause for a second before picking up the tune again.
“Nope, no way, no how!” Robin keels out the passenger side. Her hair is as wild as her eyes, and there’s a nervous, excited flush over her cheeks, apparent even from the front door. Were they pregaming? For movie night? Steve has half a mind to ream them out about drunk driving, when Rob stumbles up and grabs at the railing. “There’s absolutely no way in everything good and right in this world that someone at the DMV signed off on your license!”
“Breakin’ the law, breakin’ the law,” Eddie counters, levering one foot up onto the edge of the doorframe. He’s grinning ear-to-ear like some kind of maniac, sure, but a sober one, at least, as he bangs his hand on the roof of the van. “You got a hot take of your own on my driving skills, little miss perfect?”
Steve opens his mouth to answer Eddie’s little jibe—little miss perfect is a new one in Munson’s repertoire, Steve hasn’t heard that one yet—when Robin lurches up the steps.
“Don’t be mad? Please?” she whispers loudly, eyes wide and beseeching. If the sudden tone switch wasn’t enough to confuse him, Eddie Munson reeling open the back door and offering a princely hand to Nancy Wheeler is enough to get Steve the rest of the way there.
M’lady, Munson says regally in the background as Robin drags Steve into the foyer, where it all comes out of her in one fast, panicky rush: “Look Steve, I’m really sorry, don’t hate me, I know things are still weird with,” and Robin gestures frantically in the air in some indecipherable way that Steve still somehow parses correctly as that time you thought you were back in love with her when the world was ending, and then Nancy and Jonathan broke up and you thought maybe you still had a shot, until she told you before she left for college that she wanted to be on her own for a while, figure out what it means to exist without a boyfriend and shit, wait, the goddamn pool… “And I know you know I’ve been talking with Nancy on the phone more, I mean a lot more since she left, and I know you know she was home for the summer, and I know, I know it’s weird, but Jonathan’s back in town too and she’s been so stressed out about running into him that she’s been stuck in her room at home with just her parents and Mike and—“
It’s true, all of it; Steve knows it because Nance said the same to him two nights ago, when she called his private line at a respectful post-dinner 7 pm, overly apologetic but out of options. Is it… alright that I called? It’s so crowded and noisy here, even though my dorm room is a quarter the size and I have to share it with someone. Is this how you feel, Steve? When your parents come home?
Yes, he’d told her; every single time. The part he’d left out was with that extra layer of loneliness that leaves you exhausted at the end of every day. Didn’t need to make himself sound more like some sad grandpa. It was Nance’s turn to bitch, anyway.
Robin’s still going a mile a minute when Steve takes her by the shoulder and guides her all the way inside. “Rob. It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. We’re fine.” Gives one quick squeeze before he turns back to the front door and says, a bit louder: “Nance knows she’s always welcome in the Harrington house.”
From the bottom of the steps, one delicate hand on the railing, Nancy ducks her head and smiles, tight and small but all the way into her eyes. Behind her Eddie Munson leers, eyebrows in his hairline.
“Hi, Steve,” Nance says, quietly. “You’re sure it’s okay if…?”
“Told you, Lady Wheeler, none of that. You really think King Harrington would turn away a beggar?” Offering her his arm, Eddie guides her up the steps. The chivalry while he uses his free hand to wag two VHS cassettes over his shoulder is incongruous. “He’s so upper crust, going against the rules of hospitality would probably tear all of reality apart.”
Again, Steve and Nancy quip, simultaneously, and get to hear how Eddie’s laugh echoes down the empty suburban streets.
Of course, once they’re inside with the door closed, Robin hooks a hand around Nancy’s elbow to lead her to the den, like she’s the one out of the two of them who knows this place best. Nance tosses a look back over her shoulder and Steve shrugs, like there’s no use fighting Buckley. Gratitude written plain across her face, Nancy turns her full focus back onto whatever Robin’s saying.
Which is when Steve realizes he’s smiling, a bit dopily, with Munson leaning into his personal space.
Eddie bumps their hips together the second Steve wipes the look from his face. “Don’t look so happy to see me, big boy.” With a shake of his head Steve follows the girls, but takes a left into the living room. “Guess it’s been a while since you had two pretty faces in your castle, hey?”
“Don’t let Buckley hear you talk about her that way.”
Eddie’s big laugh is closer, more intimate indoors. Or maybe it’s the way he’s sneaking up against Steve’s back to whisper in his ear. Steve twitches his head into his shoulders on instinct.
“Three pretty faces, then.”
Eddie must find the confused look on Steve’s face absolutely delightful, considering his own gleeful expression as Steve twists back to scowl. “I—what?” The patio door rolls under his hands, that smell of the night and chlorine on the air ruffling Eddie’s hair. “What do you mean, three? Who else is comi…”
Two steps onto the pool deck is when Steve realizes Eddie’s talking about himself. And not because of his own brain power—mostly because Eddie’s leaned himself seductively against the door frame, to twirl a stray curl around his finger, like some pinup girl.
“Oh, fuck off,” Steve manages, and ignores the humiliated buzz of blood in his ears in favor of listening to Eddie’s unhinged cackle and then the pool pump hum into silence. Next up are the lights, pitching the place into the dark, just the stars sprinkled overhead. It makes the sudden leaden weight in Steve’s chest ease a bit to have the water-glow stop ringing Eddie’s silhouette, still lit incandescent from behind with the lamplight.
“Aw, what? Does this mean no skinny dipping?” Those big brown eyes glint. “You know your reputation precedes you, Stevie.”
“A bit late on the news, Munson? Haven’t done that here for years,” Steve mutters as he slides past him to get back inside. As he tugs Eddie after him with a light touch on his wrist. “They should just get rid of the thing. Nobody uses it, anymore.”
Steve sees Eddie open his mouth, like he’s prepping another joke; but as the patio door glides shut, so it does, too.
He’s surprisingly perceptive, this one. Just like Nance. Hopefully, she was too distracted by Robin to notice.
By the voices coming from the kitchen, there’s no need to worry.
He’s on his way there when Eddie says, “Hey. Wait,” and hooks a fingertip under the loop of Steve’s watch. Those big silver rings sit heavy against the knob of his wrist, and cold, from hanging out the window of the car.
The look on Eddie’s face makes Steve remember, sharp and hard, that long, elastic moment in front of his blue and red and gray bizarro-world trailer. The strange dance Eddie’s expression does, swinging between cock-sure and chaotic when eyes are on him, to skittish and uneasy when they’re not.
Eddie snaps his hand back when Steve stops dead, hit with a sudden suckerpunch of an urge to grab Eddie’s shoulder, keep him here. It twists in Steve’s guts like the vines, like Eddie rubbing at his knuckles, like the touch has burned. “I just… wanna make sure. You’re really okay with this? I don’t know all the history between you and Wheeler, and I’m, uh, let’s say painfully aware that my read on the situation might’ve been a bit off. But…”
Over the last few years Steve’s learned to listen better, so he waits. Watches the lean shapes Eddie’s mouth makes, the way he sways his body in and out of the conversation with his fists shoved under his pits, like he’s not quite sure where he belongs—in the middle of the fray with them, or on the outskirts.
Maybe it was the latter, years ago, when they circled each other on the peripheries. When Munson thought Steve was still king of Hawkins High, and Steve thought Munson was a two-bit small-town drug dealer capable of cheerleader murder.
But now? Now it’s been two years. Two years of Eddie nipping at their heels like a dog, joining Steve and Rob on the couch for movie nights, bringing music and light and more laughter into their lives. Eddie’s been one of his—Steve’s—since he saw the panicked look in those big brown eyes over the sharp, shaking edge of a broken beer bottle.
It hurts Steve’s heart. Especially when Eddie swallows, shrugs one shoulder and then grabs a lock of hair to pull over his face so it muffles what he says next: “Rob’s been a rough go of it, and her and Wheeler… just, they seem to have really hit it off after everything, right? Outta the park. Rob seems better, when Wheeler’s around. I know you had your sights set on winning her back, and believe me, I don’t wanna intrude or, like, step in it somewhere I don’t belong, but… I know how much you care about Buckley? Honestly, man, when she told me Wheeler’s been having a rough time too, hand to God, I thought to myself, What would King Steve do? and before I knew it we were on our way there to pick her up, and—uh, whoa—”
Eddie’s voice breaks into a little squeak when Steve grabs and pulls him into a hug. Nothing more than that, but still, Eddie goes still as a statue, like he hasn’t been on the receiving end of one in years.
Why’s he always gotta be such a sucker for broken things?
“… um?” Eddie says.
“It’s okay, Eds. You did good.” Steve says it quietly enough that even if Rob and Nancy suddenly walked in on them, they wouldn’t be able to hear. “Nance and me, we worked our shit out a long time ago. If her being here helps Rob, that’s all that matters. Seriously. I trust your instincts, bud. So stop worrying about it.”
Whatever thread of nerves Eddie’s twisted himself up into this time loosens. Still, it’s another moment before Eddie lets out one soft rush of breath and properly relaxes, hands settling onto Steve’s shoulders.
“Fuck, man,” Eddie mumbles. “Why you gotta be so good at hugs, Harrington?”
“I don’t know, I guess crying it out after the bi-annual apocalypse has become sort of a tradition around here. Also, all those winning games.” Steve pats once, before pushing back. Eddie cocks his head like a dog. “You know… sportsmanship? Good game, good game?”
“In… swim meets?” Eddie’s eyes go wide. “Like—in those little bathing suits? When you’re all still wet and—“
Steve laughs, and shoves Eddie off proper this time right as the kitchen timer dings. “Mind outta the gutter, Munson.”
They find Rob swinging her legs on the island while Nancy, predictably, is already elbow-deep in his mother’s oven mitts.
“What took you dinguses so long? We thought we were going to have to start without you…” But Eddie’s focus shifts her way, and Rob leans into his space when he whispers something in her ear.
“Sorry,” Nancy says to Steve, like she shouldn’t be pulling the oven-ready pizza out from the stove. Not that he can trust either of the others to it—Rob and Eddie are in some existential debate under their breath, though Eddie does pause for a moment to whistle appreciatively at the spread and shovel a pile of chip-dip into his maw.
“Nah, it’s fine. Here, let me.” They’re sliding the pizza onto a cutting board when Steve asks to the room at large: “So, double feature. What else did you bring?”
Even if he’s digging around for the pizza cutter, Steve still notices how Rob abruptly coughs on a Milk Dud. Nancy pats her knee, Eddie slaps her back, and it’s like Steve’s the only one who notices the panicked look Rob bounces at Eddie, to Nancy and Steve, then back again.
“We… don’t have to watch two?“ Rob starts, when Eddie booms over top of her:
“Oh, trust us, Harrington, what we got planned for round two will be a perfect palate cleanser!” He does a dramatic and complex twist of his face. “Considering what Wheeler picked.”
“It’s supposed to be good.” Nance leans against the counter atop folded hands.
“Wait, so it’s not Heathers again?” Steve heaves a sigh of relief, while Robin squawks. “Thank God.”
“What do you mean, thank God?! It’s an incredible film that hits all the genre—”
Steve curls his nose and shunts their dinner onto the island between them. “Every time we watch it, Veronica just makes me think of Mrs Byers.”
Nance lets out a quiet oh my God, that’s who she looks like. Eddie cackles, then chokes on the half-slice he’s folded into his mouth. Robin’s gone nuclear red after whispering you too, Nancy?!
“Really?! You’re both telling me,” and Rob looks wide-eyed between Steve and Nancy, “that when you look at Winona Ryder in the shower, you see Jonathan Byers’ mom?”
This time the noise Nancy makes into the back of her hand is a barely-dignified squeak. Steve passes her a paper plate to hide behind.
“I dunno, I think Joyce could get it,” Eddie offers, conversationally, and then they’re all laughing. “Though there’s only one of us here who knows. What say you, eldest of the Wheels,” and Eddie leans over to ogle Nancy as he spins with one ringed finger the plate that Steve’s frisbee’d across the counter to him, “like mother like—?”
Robin gets him in the ribs at the same time Steve steps on his toes. Nancy tucks her hair behind one red-tipped ear, but she’s smiling. In on the joke.
“So what,” Steve repeats, louder this time, and cracks open a beer, “exactly are we watching, then?”